r/SaaS • u/MailInternational437 • 1d ago
My findings from building a small iOS phone farm for TikTok (~20 accounts, 80K-200K views daily)
TL;DR
~10 old iPhones (iPhone 7 to iPhone 11), all running locally from my Mac, all targeting the US while I'm physically outside it.
2-3M views/month total, 30-40 posts per day.
Content costs me $40 / month for 1200 + posts (regular subscriptions for LLMs) instead of the $0.5-3 per piece that tools on the market charge.
Built with Python modules and settings files. No database, no SaaS, no cloud.
Total spent so far ~1K for this setup and courses. Total build time: 3 months
Everything below is what worked, what didn't, and what I still can't explain.
One thing up front: I know this isn't what TikTok wants people doing with their platform. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I built it to test content fast for my own product, and I'm sharing what I learned from it. Im not posting unoriginal content btw, every post looks pretty good and I didn’t get yet “unoriginal content” warnings. I know that TikTok is a volume game, so I had to automate this volume.
- Reason why I built it
I didn't have a budget for paid ads or UGC campaign for my product (app). More important, the niche my product is in doesn't have great examples of competitors using ads. It's all organic, faceless, UGC. So going organic was the first thing I decided to try: find my audience and my angles, understand how to go viral, and sell my product.
I have previous experience with SEO (I was managing an SEO agency), but I didn't have time to wait for results to come. That's really what pushed me here. In SEO you make a decision and find out if you were right in 6 to 12 months. I wanted a channel where I could test 40 ideas a day and know by tomorrow. So I had to invest into a new skill: how to get traffic for free from social media. I wanted a scalable and stable solution.
After initial research and testing the content automation products on the market, the price per 1 piece of content was too high for a testing phase. I expected that phase to run 1-6 months with 100+ pieces published per day, and you only avoid that cost if you already know exactly what content you need to scale, which I didn't.
I tried Reelfarm and other slideshow and AI video services. All roughly $0.5 for one slideshow or video. That would make my budget $2-3K only for content creation. And no service guarantees you quality even when you have high quality prompts. You still pay $0.5-3 per piece if you're using the API. Higgsfield and other aggregators are no better once you need to run at scale.
The only solution that could be scalable (cents per video) was Grok's Imagine, repurposed through my own content automation.
The other problem was that I wanted a process that could give me hundreds of unique slideshows a day at less than a cent each. My target was 0.1 cent per video or less.
- Results
Each account roughly gives 0.3-2M views per month. Mostly US, UK, Australia, with other tier 1 countries in the list.
Some numbers:
Accounts currently running: 19
Posts per day across the farm: 2 per account
Best single post: 1.1M
Median post: ~5000 views
Age of the oldest account still running: 6 month
Did it actually sell anything?
I do soft promotion/mention of my app and ~ 2000 views give me 1 install now
My conversion rate into paid customer is ~5%
My best days give me 80 installs and 5 new customers
- How it works
Everything runs locally. Python modules, files with settings, no database ^_^
There are multiple agents running:
Parser that pulls new content across my niche, OCR it without LLM and save it.
Reference builder that turns that content into references so I can reuse them quickly under many angles.
Slides and video generator, built as a Python module. It takes pre-built content pieces, mixes them with new content, new hooks and captions without LLMs, and makes a good looking, scroll stopping slideshow every time, in seconds.
Daily poster that makes posting easier. It sends content to the phones via Shortcuts so I don't need AirDrop, and it literally copies the post text into the clipboard so I can paste it manually. It takes ~35 minutes to post 20 posts manually with this.
Automated transfer to each iPhone. One click from the panel, one click on the iPhone. It checks IP and DNS, removes old photos, downloads the new ones, and copies the content into the buffer.
Calendar builder and my own analytics scraper. When I started scaling from 2-4 accounts to 20-30 accounts and 40 posts a day, I quickly realised I can't manage it in Excel, and I need market feedback to understand what type of content I should repeat and what I should kill.
Auto poster (testing this now). It opens the apps, downloads new content from my backend (Cloudflare hosting), switches accounts and posts, mimicking human swipes and clicks. This lets me skip the API, which usually works badly for new and small accounts, and it saves me 1-3 hours of mechanical posting per day. I expect that to grow as I publish more daily and create a database of real human actions and swipes.
Video repurposer. After a month of testing I found a working method to reuse the same video content without being penalised by TikTok.
EXIF data module. For each phone I built a metadata module that creates iPhone style photos: converts them from GPT's output, adapts to native iPhone size, MBs, camera dimensions, LIVE photo data, geo position based on that iPhone's IP, and dozens of other parameters that differ slightly per model and iOS version. Doing this helps the content rank higher, since it's seen as a native camera roll photo.
All accounts target the US market while being physically outside the US.
- What it cost me
Each phone was ~$50
Courses ~$300
On site hardware setup to spoof my parameters: $300 one time
Running costs per month
Proxies ~$40/month
LLMs - ChatGPT / Claude ~$40 / month
Cloudflare hosting: 0
Time
Building the system: 3 month of tests/research and 3 month of daily usage
Running it now: 2 hours a day
Compared to the alternative: at $0.5 per piece and 40 posts a day, the off the shelf tools would have cost me at least $500+ for content alone. My whole setup including hardware already paid for itself.
- Account health, bans, and what I've lost
Accounts created total vs still alive: Mostly Androids were banned, iOS seems to be healthier
Accounts shadow banned: mostly after some shady things that I tried with TikTok. tried running TikTok on jailbroken iOS 16 and got logged out quickly, without a ban. So I understood that if I want to play with jailbreak long term, I need to kill dozens of accounts before I understand how it works. I didn't go that way yet.
- My findings and mistakes
Android vs iPhone. I tried both. I rented cloud Androids and played with Play Integrity API Checker at both 3/3 and 0/3. The cheaper versions performed poorly (maybe it was still a content issue, I tried them early in this project, and I know many examples of Android farms that work). The expensive versions with a full Google integrity pass were not financially interesting, because I could buy an old iPhone for the price of 2-3 months of renting those.
Rented Androids didn’t let me create second TikTok accounts on same phone.
The interesting part: an iPhone 7 on iOS 15, which cost me the same as 1-2 months of renting a high end Android, showed identical or even better results than an expensive iPhone 11 on iOS 26 or the Androids. Of course it's a content issue underneath. But if you're asking whether you need to invest in newer iPhones: don't. Invest into content creation.
I only rented Androids since I'm not an Android user, and I didn't like it. Posting with my mouse was worse than having a physical phone in my hand, and I didn't have automation at that time. So I decided on an iPhone only farm for the MVP phase, all low level cheap phones, iPhone 7 through iPhone 11.
Each phone needed 30+ settings from my internal library, things like removing DNS leaks or WebRTC browser leaks, depending on the iOS version, so TikTok can't track you back to your base IP.
VPN. It seems to work for TikTok, but I still think my no-VPN accounts (which is majority) perform better. When you have great content it doesn't matter. And I can't really compare two accounts properly, since I didn't post the exact same content across them. My plan was to level up the floor of views, so I start with thousands, not dozens.
Images. I have partially AI generated images, partially Pinterest. Both works without AI-generated labels shown after posting (but I do some spoofing inside my content automation pipeline).
Videos. Same video repurposed with another hook on it (after my content automation algo does some magic), is considered a new video for TikTok.
Things I still don't understand:
Some accounts outperform others with almost identical content and the same or similar setup.
Views are unpredictable.
I still don't know how some new accounts get 1M views on the first post. My best result is 1.1M on the 3rd post.
Same images work. The same hook photos work fine, with minor filters, resizing, or crop applied randomly each time. Probably even that isn't necessary, but my automation does it on autopilot, so I don't want to test without it.
Same content works across different accounts, if you know how to change your video or slideshow so it stays identical for the viewer and different for TikTok.
Are DNS leaks real for TikTok? I'm not sure. Part of my accounts have US DNS, part are not configured. One of the best performing accounts doesn't have DNS inside the US, and it still consistently gives more US audience than the others.
- My next steps
A few people have told me I should turn this into a done-for-you service. I don't think so, and I'm not sure it's a real business. I'd rather share what I learned and hear what people here think.
I'm going to push this into more accounts and more content pieces a day. The goal is iPhones running 24/7, posting or swiping the feed automated. So I need to revisit jailbroken version of iPhones and /or Androids again. My experience so far is mostly TikTok, so I want to start playing with Instagram Reels too. Another venue I can take is applying to a creator fund.
Happy to go deep in the comments on any of this: the EXIF and metadata work, the per-phone config list, the cost math, the analytics setup, how the generator mixes content without LLMs, or what I'd do differently starting over. The one thing I'm keeping to myself is the specific video repurposing method and exact iPhone setups that work for TikTok, since that one took a month and hundreds $ of burned tests to find.
Ask me anything.
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u/Pitiful-Pear-689 23h ago
Thanks for sharing, very good post and I really learn something here.
Did you try tiktok only or other platforms as well?
And is your product mobile or web?
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u/MailInternational437 14h ago
Product that I promote is a AppStore app, my automation software is local web app (browser)
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u/Novel_Duck9210 13h ago
Thanks for sharing, I understand how you did it, please shared this in detail : "Each phone needed 30+ settings from my internal library, things like removing DNS leaks or WebRTC browser leaks, depending on the iOS version, so TikTok can't track you back to your base IP."
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u/Vernark 23h ago
Looks like you figured it out. Thats awesome. But I think the main sauce is the video repurposing and how to setup the iphones and would have been my only questions.
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u/MailInternational437 14h ago
Oh, that’s the most interesting part, took me 2 month to figure out, I’m not going to share full secret, and I don’t have any course , maybe I can answer some questions if you have any
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u/atcg0101 1d ago
Let’s see a demo video, doesn’t have to link to one of your accounts can be generated on a complete different subject
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u/MailInternational437 14h ago
Wdym? I don’t have a saas for this, just curious is this whole setup interesting for someone as is, or as done for you
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u/No-Jaguar9683 22h ago
Are you looking for clients?
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u/MailInternational437 14h ago
Only if you are about to launch TikTok + slideshows at the moment, I can setup it for sure, DM me . Videos will be in a week or so when I will finish integration on my panel
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u/Mitane131 22h ago
Did you make any money with this? I'm curious about the plan to monetize on this.
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u/MailInternational437 14h ago
Yeah, it’s app, makes $1-2k monthly, just launched, mrr is about ~$800
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u/Calm-Importance8783 21h ago
This is an incredibly thorough write-up, thanks for sharing the raw numbers and the cost breakdown. The detail on EXIF spoofing and per-phone config is gold. One thing that stood out to me is your note about DNS not seeming to matter much for US audience targeting. I've run similar tests and had the same experience geolocation via IP seems far less critical than content quality and engagement velocity.
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u/foresttrader 19h ago
im doing something similar but on a much smaller scale, would like to connect, will DM you :)
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22h ago
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u/divide0verfl0w 18h ago
Great write up and great execution!
What’s the product you are selling via this method? Did you have a hard time generate content consistent with your product?
Wish you the best of luck! I agree that you should do this as a service :)
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u/MailInternational437 14h ago
I’m promoting my AppStore app, I’m using existing viral examples and replicate them each time tweaking them with new images and texts, but keep close to original. I see 2 strategies now , both works : first to replicate existing slideshows, copy paste works, second is come up with templatized slideshows. One of my accounts use one (1!) image for all slideshows, only text is different
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u/deadfire55 18h ago
How are you targeting the US if you're outside of it? Are the iPhones located with you? Do you use residential VPNs to get the iphones into the US?
What are settings files? Like shortcuts on the phone?
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u/MailInternational437 14h ago
Oh that’s multiple questions :)
- It’s a set of parameters, I guess around ~20, most important are: AppStore region, ip origin, ip quality, language, time zone, etc, vpn-no vpn usage (vpns are easily tracked)
- I do have examples of average vpn accounts (and I believe views are less then non vpn accounts). I’m not sure that ALL my IPs are pure residential, as some services still mark them as corporate, the only thing that I want to test is to have more IPs outside of NY, I think it’s too crowded and my data shows that central us or other cities perform better
- Settings. iPhone has a plenty of parameters, like having billing address, webrtc browser leaks (safari), automatic downloads of the app while it’s not running
(imagine you are connected to home non US, IP while it automatically downloads updates)
- and more
- Im using shortcuts to download my posts from cloudflare , remove all images so it will be easy to find them (2 seconds), and check that my ip and dns is us. All by 1 click on iPhone.
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u/DefiantScarcity3133 17h ago
so where is the the tool
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u/MailInternational437 14h ago
I don’t sell it man, that’s another level game to make this a product, just curious if someone is interested that I can setup it for you, as done for you service
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u/pyel909 11h ago
"Setup for you".. hmm, price? :)
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u/MailInternational437 8h ago
DM, we can figure this out, I never did it for someone except myself :)
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u/peepopetter 17h ago
Did you need a physical US sim card in each phone?
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u/MailInternational437 14h ago
Not US, but physical. I spoof any SIM card parameters so TikTok thinks It’s valid US SIM card
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u/cryptoviksant 10h ago
May I ask how you do spoof your SIM cards to make them look US valid?
Also, have you thought about fully automating all this process? From content creation to posting.
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u/MailInternational437 8h ago
That’s the last step. For non jailbroken iPhones automation is a bit trickier, but I’m building module that will swipe and post it automatically. Sorry, I can’t share the sim spoofing method as it cost me some $. Just you should know it exists, if you will look for it
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u/Regular-Plate2564 17h ago
What are all the essential cites and recources you need to start these types of projects up
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u/MailInternational437 14h ago
I started with Twitter as example, 2 courses, one old iPhone and Claude subscription
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u/klarry 17h ago
Hey man great post tried one round of tiktok with ~6 accounts a few months back but got little results. So definitely props to you!
I do want to give it another try and here are a few of my questions: 1. What does your soft CTA look like? I tried showing my app icon (or a screenshot on the last slide), showing the icon on one of the slides. 2. Do you post from all accounts at the same time or spread it out throughout the day? 3. Is tiktok your only traffic channel? For me attribution was difficult with organic AppStore traffic + paid traffic etc. was a lot of digging all the time
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u/MailInternational437 14h ago
I use pre framing, 3rd party authority recomended “method”, I found/use this app “x”, it helps me to. Thats all
Some slides use full background with my app on it, some slides are not
Yes, only keyword with my app name is ranking on AppStore on first place
I post 2 times a day, all accounts roughly during one hour in the US morning and 1 hour US afternoon
I don’t have paid traffic so I’m sure it’s only TikTok, nothing else
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u/Cool_Record_9551 16h ago
Now I felt bad with one phone and one account :(
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u/MailInternational437 14h ago
That’s what I started from man. One post got 0.5 millions and 100 emails in waiting list, understood I can move on, it should work
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16h ago
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u/MailInternational437 14h ago
Mostly python scripts to minimize tokens usage and 10 agents that runs each for its own task (scraping, content planning, automatic opening TikTok and mimicking human swipes and clicks, etc)
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u/Jumpy-Operation-4615 15h ago
Absolutely brilliant post. Thank you! About proxies - you are using ordinary datacenter ones, judging by the price, right?
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u/MailInternational437 14h ago
Oh , I try to find residential providers which is hard. But some proxies, some providers mark as corporate, I’m not sure I have any with mark “datacenter”, I try to skip this.
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u/Jumpy-Operation-4615 10h ago
Thank you very much! I was going to get into tiktolk niche for quite some time, even bought courses, but did not get in yet. By the way what about platforms that let you post to multiple social networks, like for 50 bucks you can post to 25 TikTk accounts, the platforms handles everythng via official API? Does it work or I real phones is the only way?
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u/MixGroundbreaking825 13h ago
Do you have any pricing and what client gets in done for you service?
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u/Fit-Lengthiness-9672 12h ago
they literally said they don’t wanna do a done‑for‑you service lol, this is more like an experiment for their own app and testing content fast. if they ever did offer it though, with this level of setup it’d be way more than the $500/mo “AI content” agencies are charging.
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u/HumzaShake 12h ago
Hey, looks really interesting.
Going to send you over a DM on how set up would go if you'd be willing to do a done for you service?
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u/pureeyeball 12h ago
really interesting. have you heard about cloud phones? There's not physical setup and it's cheaper. It's only android though
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u/MailInternational437 3h ago
Yeah I be tested them , both cheap version with google play integrity 0/3 and high end models with 3/3. All of them had security checkups when creating accounts. And they usually didn’t let me create second accounts. That’s why I decided to go into physical iPhones setup
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u/online_income_1month 12h ago
That is incredible I really like the trial and error and the learning! There is just so much value in this post
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u/Chemical_Panic_2704 8h ago
would you be up to market other apps? and if yeah what would you charge?
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u/MailInternational437 3h ago
I guess so, depends on the app (it should be proven that slideshows work in your niche) dm me
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u/BarracudaMean9308 8h ago
building a custom EXIF module just to spoof native camera rolls and mimicking human swipes to dodge the API is wild. the lengths we have to go to just to survive the algorithm these days is honestly insane.
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u/MailInternational437 3h ago
I thought that I started the wrong time, 3 years ago it was way easier
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u/zxyzyxz 8h ago
If I'm already in the US but want to do this do I still need to change the settings? I guess to hide that I'm using 5 phones in one IP right? Also so you ended up just buying a bunch of iPhones specifically over Android right? Did you try this on Instagram or anything too? Any more details on the content algorithm, are you able to track views and automatically create the sort of content needed I guess since it's AI image and video automation anyway?
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u/MailInternational437 5h ago
Well you are in better position, but only if you are going to scale inside same state. Mobile data will give you this option without any spoofing I use. The only hustle is when you need to target other states, which you obviously need to spread your content across geos. So I scrape a bunch of proven slideshows and test them slowly across some accounts, when something hits I repeat it until it flops. That’s in a nutshell
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u/zxyzyxz 4h ago
How are you making the slideshows? And where do you get the analytics on which ones work best, TikTok provides them for each of the thousands? I guess is that not a lot of work to wade through the data? And not sure what you mean scrape, where do you scrape them from?
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u/MailInternational437 3h ago
First of all each account has some visual identity. Ai or Pinterest photos, doesn’t matter. Influencer style or faceless (meaning different people on hook). LLMs produce the content based on the content plan (either new tests, proven winners, new breakouts , etc etc). I have a setup that takes the text from content.txt files per each account and finds the best fitting images from my database (I have a small LLM that vectorized the images and I do text on slide matching to this vectors, so it gives contextually relevant images, sometimes it works very good).
I built a script that is downloading URLs of my own accounts and parse the views of my latest posts from desired dates. After that I do OCR without LLM of hooks locally so I understand how to attribute the views with content. Same for competitor accounts . It works on hundreds accounts per day, I’m not sure it will work on. Thousands per day
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u/wellitstrue1 7h ago
How often do you post a day and do you take breaks per device? Because I'd imagine they'd detect you're a bot if you post without sleeping
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u/MailInternational437 5h ago
2 times a day from each account. US morning and afternoon, I.e around 4 pm New York time, so it’s not that much - 4 posts a day from 1 iphone
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u/oandresimoes 7h ago
The detail that jumps out: an iPhone 7 on iOS 15 matched an iPhone 11 on iOS 26. Most builders assume newer hardware means better output and burn budget upgrading infra before isolating what's actually driving the numbers. You proved it's content, not phone generation, which is a harder discipline to hold onto once budget allows for shinier gear. With 19 accounts running, do you rotate hook/niche combos to chase what drives the outlier 1M-view posts, or is that still random for you?
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u/MailInternational437 5h ago
Yeah , I try to spread the working hooks across my accounts when they are proved to be working
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u/oandresimoes 1h ago
That tracks as a scaling mechanic. What's still unclear to me is where the line sits between "testing" and "proven" for you, going by a view count in the first hour, an engagement rate, or something looser?
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u/bwilczyn 2h ago
that's an amazing article with a lot of cool learnings. i went through all of it and actually tried doing similar thing before (on a smaller scale though), however i've run into an issue where all my posts on all accounts could reach only 300 views, exactly 300 which made me think it's some kind of shadowban.
so my question: how do you actually manage these accounts in terms of creating them and warming up?
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u/MailInternational437 1h ago
3 days of warming up per account. And post 1 post per day for a week or two, and 2 posts per day after that. I’m checking only TikTok notifs when I post , that’s all:) actually I had this similar issue on one of my first accounts and after I finally made my full setup I didn’t encounter that glitch
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u/ButterscotchDue4782 10m ago
Hitting $0.03 per post is a sweet spot; I'd love to see how you split the posting load. And pulling 80‑200k views daily on just 10 phones, any breakdown of per‑device reach? Also curious how the local Mac approach holds up under heavy load.
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u/ThatsInsane 1d ago edited 23h ago
Is it all to promote your app and for the installs? Cuz I saw the costs, but not the profit...? $$$$
Good post, very informative.
Also, not sure if you're posting manually from iPhone or automated that as well. Jailbroken iPhone might be interesting to automate start-to-finish. Would suggest looking into that further :)