The argument in one line.
Every Instagram account already has enough engagement to calculate its theoretical revenue — three formulas convert follower counts, comment volumes, and story views into a precise daily target that back-solves any income goal.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A creator or online business owner already posting consistently on Instagram but not converting engagement into predictable revenue.
- A coach, course creator, or agency owner who wants to know exactly how many comments or followers they need per day to hit a revenue goal.
- Someone running or considering DM automation and wants benchmarks to validate projections.
- A content team that tracks vanity metrics and needs a framework for upstream leading indicators instead.
SKIP IF…
- You are not yet posting regularly on Instagram — the formulas assume a baseline of consistent organic content.
- You sell physical products with low margins where a 5% sales-page conversion is unrealistic.
- You want platform-agnostic advice — everything here is Instagram-DM-specific.
The full version, fast.
Instagram DMs are an underused sales channel, and three formulas let you calculate the exact engagement volume needed to hit any revenue target. The new-follower funnel converts 76% of followers into messageable contacts, 50% click the link, and 5% buy. The comment-trigger funnel converts at 75% open, 70% click, 5% purchase. Story replies convert at 1% response rate, 80% open, 70% click, 5% buy. Plug your target sales per day into any formula and you get the daily input metric your content team should be optimizing for — comments or followers, not revenue.
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00:00 – 00:43
01 · Why You're Not Monetizing
Direct hook: the problem is not content or follower count. The money is sitting in your existing engagement, untouched. Authority frame: $100M+ generated for top-tier Instagram accounts.
00:43 – 02:03
02 · DM New Followers Funnel
Case study: women's weight-loss client goes from 10,000 to 81,293 leads/month in the first month of automated new-follower messaging. 60,000 of those leads came from the new-follower DM alone.
02:03 – 04:21
03 · Formula One: New Followers
Benchmark rates: 76% of new followers are messageable, 50% click the first message link, 5% buy. To make 3 sales/day you need 157 new followers/day. Formula built from millions of data points.
04:21 – 05:32
04 · Adjust For Your Sales Process
The 5% sales-page rate is a plug-in variable. Swap it for your webinar registration rate, call-booking rate, or application fill rate.
05:32 – 07:32
05 · Formula Two: Post Comments
Comment-trigger automation. Dan Go case study: 20 comments/post becomes 3,000 leads in one day, sales calendar fully booked. Formula: 75% open, 70% click, 5% buy. 3 sales/day = 113 comments needed.
07:32 – 09:07
06 · Comment Funnel Best Practices
Track comments not revenue — comments are the upstream metric. Bad DM copy kills engagement; good copy reads like a quick phone message.
09:07 – 11:20
07 · Formula Three: Story Replies
Mindvalley case study: 970 replies from one story. Formula: 1% of viewers reply, 80% open, 70% click, 5% buy. 3 sales/day = 106 replies needed. Three-story lift usually 3x story reach.
11:20 – 11:41
08 · Reverse Engineer 100K Recap
Summary of all three formulas. Agency CTA for those who want the work done for them.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Your Instagram engagement already has a calculable dollar value — most creators just never do the math.
- 76% of new followers who have never messaged you can be reached with an automated DM the moment they follow.
- Comments are the single upstream metric that controls all downstream revenue — track them, not sales.
- Messaging new followers automatically can 8x lead volume without changing content or follower count.
- A comment-trigger automation that feels bot-written will kill engagement; one that reads like a quick phone reply compounds it.
- Story replies convert into sales at a higher open rate (80%) than comment DMs (75%) because replying to a story is a warmer signal than commenting on a post.
- Only 1% of story viewers will reply to a CTA — if you get less, the offer or copy is the problem, not the audience.
- The right leading indicator for a content team is comments per post, not bookings or revenue.
- 3 sales per day from new followers requires just 157 new followers — a realistic goal for accounts growing at 5K/month.
- Multistep sales funnels (webinars, calls) slot directly into the formula by replacing the 5% sales-page rate with your actual funnel entry conversion.
- An automation that performs poorly does not just underperform — it actively drives unfollows and kills account engagement.
- Most businesses ignore story views as a lead source entirely, treating a warm audience list as a broadcast channel with no conversion process attached.
Three formulas that make Instagram engagement calculable.
WHAT TO LEARN
Instagram DMs are a conversion surface with measurable rates at every step — which means any revenue target can be solved backward into a daily follower, comment, or story-view goal.
- Treat engagement as a pipeline: 76% of new followers are reachable via automated DM, 50% of those will click a link, and 5% will buy — three numbers that convert any daily follower count into an expected revenue figure.
- Comments are a leading indicator, not a vanity metric. The upstream number that determines downstream sales is comments per post, not bookings or revenue — shifting what a team tracks immediately changes what it optimizes for.
- Story replies are the most underused warm lead source on Instagram. A viewer who replies to a story CTA converts at an 80% open rate because the signal of intent is stronger than a comment on a post.
- Automated DM copy fails when it reads like a bot. The high-performing version reads like a quick message someone typed on their phone — short, direct, and human-sounding, not templated.
- Every sales funnel has a first-step conversion rate that can replace the standard 5% sales-page benchmark: webinar registration rate, call-booking rate, or application fill rate all slot into the same formula.
- A story CTA that gets less than 1% reply rate is a copy or offer problem, not an audience problem — the benchmark is achievable and can be improved by iterating on the specific keyword and the value being offered.
- Three stories is enough to see a 3x lift in story reach when a keyword reply CTA is introduced, because interactive stories surface more broadly than passive ones.
Terms worth knowing.
- DM automation
- Software (like ManyChat) that sends pre-written Instagram direct messages automatically when a user triggers an action — following, commenting a keyword, or replying to a story.
- Comment trigger
- An automation rule that fires a DM whenever someone comments a specific keyword on a post, converting a public interaction into a private sales conversation.
- Story reply funnel
- A strategy where a creator invites story viewers to reply with a specific word, automatically routing them into a DM sequence that delivers a lead magnet or sales page link.
- New follower DM
- An automated message sent to every new follower who has not previously messaged the account, used to open a sales conversation at the moment of peak interest.
- Upstream metric
- A leading indicator that sits earlier in the funnel than the outcome you care about — here, comments per day rather than sales per day, because comments directly determine sales volume.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
00:22
“The money you wish you were making is already sitting in your engagement, your new followers, your comments, and your story views.”
07:52
“The number that your team should be tracking and reporting on from your content is not the revenue — it's actually the comments that are coming in because that is the upstream metric that controls everything downstream.”
09:09
“Most businesses downright disrespect the selling power of stories.”
Word for word.
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00:00If you're posting on Instagram every single day and you're still not making at least a $100,000 a month from your content, I wanna be very direct with you. The problem is not your content, it's not your follower account, it's not your niche.
00:12The money you wish you were making is , your new followers, your comments, and your story views. Let me explain. My name is Natasha Willis.
00:21I'm the co founder of School of Bots, and we generated over a $100,000,000 for our clients who are the top Instagram accounts in their niche. In this video, I'm gonna show you exactly how to calculate what your current Instagram engagement is actually worth, your followers, your comments, and your story views, and what it would take for you to be at a 100 k a month or more from organic content.
00:42Alright. Let's get into it. Instagram now allows you to message every new follower automatically who hasn't messaged you before.
00:49Now, my clients are printing with this, and yet most businesses don't even know that this is possible yet. One of my agency clients runs the number one women's weight loss program online. And before we started working together, they had 10,000 new leads coming into their Instagram inbox every single month.
01:05Now most businesses would call that a good month, but in the first month working with us, they hit 81,293 new leads coming into their inbox. That is more than an eight x.
01:1621,000 of them came from posts and stories, and 60,000 of them, the majority, actually came from this one thing, messaging new followers. And then the next month, they hit 90,000 new leads.
01:29The same method, but with more volume. And the coolest part isn't even getting the 80,000 leads. It's that we were able to accurately estimate how many leads we were going to get thirty days before we even accomplished these impressive numbers.
01:43So from the moment that we signed on this agency client, we were able to reverse engineer how much revenue they could expect in the next thirty days from this one funnel. And I know your numbers might not look like theirs yet, but the method works for every single account size whether you're getting a couple 100 new followers a week or thousands or even tens of thousands.
02:03Now, before I give you this first formula out of three that I'm gonna give you in this video, I wanna tell you how it came to be. A few years back, I had this light bulb moment. What if we looked at our top performing funnels, like one that has brought in over $3,000,000, another one that has brought in over $5,000,000, and hundreds more like that, and figured out how we could reverse engineer getting those kinds of results guaranteed.
02:24So I went step by step in the entire DM funnel process to figure out what numbers were realistic to achieve at every single step, and that is what led us to this formula that you can now use to reverse engineer what it would take for you to get to a 100 a month and beyond just from organic content. Okay. So the first part of this is Instagram lets you send an automated message to every new follower who has not messaged you before.
02:49You end up being able to message about 76% of your new followers because that is the average that we have found across now millions of new follower data of people who follow but haven't messaged you yet. So 76% of them, we can message.
03:02Then in that message, you are sending people a link to go and buy. By the way, I'm gonna come back to this after I share the formula so that I can speak about a few different sales processes since you might not just be sending people to a sales page. Okay.
03:14So after you send them the link, then 50% of the people you messaged click the button in your first message. That sends them to your sales page, and then 5% of people buy once they get to your sales page. So in your head right now, think about the number of sales that you actually want per day.
03:31Let's say that that was three sales a day. Now you take that number of sales and you divide it by these numbers. The fastest way to calculate this is to take the number of sales that you want, let's say three in my example, divide that by point zero five, which was the sales page conversion rate, divide that by point five, which was the number of people who are clicking to the sales page, and then divide that by point seven six, which is the number of people we can send a message to.
03:57That means that with a five percent sales page conversion rate, 60 people are clicking to your sales page from the DM, you messaged a 120 people, and you need a 157 new followers per day to make three sales a day.
04:11Just to be transparent, as you might imagine, it goes much deeper than this when we are running projections for our agency clients. And if you're interested in doing that, you can apply to work with us at the link in the description. Now, are other steps in between the steps that I just shared depending on what your actual sales process looks like as a business.
04:28Let's say that you run webinars or you sell people after they joined your email list for some time or you use sales calls. So what you'll wanna do is just swap out that 5% in the formula for the first step of your sales process. If it is, let's say, getting people to book a call, then the first step might be how many people actually fill out your application when they get to your website page, or how many people book a call if you just go directly there.
04:50Or for webinars, maybe it's your webinar registration rate. So those are the numbers that you're gonna wanna swap in for that step there, and then to keep it going because if you do have a, uh, multistep sales process, then that means you have other numbers. Right?
05:04For your webinars, you might have your webinar show rate. For your calls, you might have your call show rate and close rate, all that good stuff. So go ahead and plug all that into the end of the formula, and then that total formula is then gonna give you the number of sales that you could expect to get every single day from your new followers.
05:19So the t l d r here is I have given you this version of the formula so that any account, any business of any size can use this to still accurately estimate what it would take for you to accomplish your goal revenue. Now that is one of three formulas. We cover new followers, so now let's talk about your post comments.
05:36The people commenting on your posts are the easiest audience you will ever have to convert. They have already chosen to interact with you, and for most accounts, every single one of them goes completely cold within sixty seconds of them actually commenting. Let me give you an example of the opposite.
05:51Dan Go, one of the top fitness and performance coaches for high achieving CEOs and executives, was averaging 20 comments per post. Was pretty good engagement for his niche. Zero of it was routing to his DMs.
06:03So within a day of us setting up the comment trigger automation for him as a client, we generated over 3,000 leads. His sales teams calendar was completely booked out for the rest of the month, and the 20 comments per post went to 300 to a couple thousand comments per post on average, and we've also had individual posts hit 32,000 comments and beyond.
06:25So here's the formula for how to reverse engineer something like this. When someone comments a specific word on your post, that triggers an automatic DM. Now that first message is typically gonna see a 75% open rate.
06:39Of those people who open it, about 70% of them would click the first button in the message, which would send them to your sales page. And then from there, I'm just gonna keep the sales page conversion rate average of 5% the same. So we convert 5% of those people into customers.
06:53So let's go through the formula together. Let's say that your goal was to make three sales a day or whatever number you have in your head from when we just talked about the new follower formula. You would need however many sales you wanna make per day divided by point zero five, which is a sales page conversion rate, divided by point seven, which is the number of people who are going to click to your sales page, divided by point seven five, which is the number of people who are going to open the message that you sent them after they commented on your post.
07:20Now, that means with a 5% sales page conversion rate, you get 60 people clicking to your sales page from your DM, 85 people, and you need a 113 post comments to make three sales a day. Now, let me pause for the math here for a moment and explain why this is so important. The number that your team should be tracking and reporting on from your content is not the revenue that they've generated, the calls that they've booked, whatever kind of number that is the end goal.
07:46It's actually the comments that are coming in because that is the upstream metric that controls everything downstream. When we flip that on its head for content teams, we say, hey, stop tracking the actual output and instead only focus entirely on how you can get as many comments as possible from your posts or focus entirely on how you can get as many new followers as possible per day, then revenue immediately skyrockets because they're looking at the right leading indicator.
08:12Now even if your numbers don't look like Dan's, this formula works on every single account size to reverse engineer what it would take for you to get to your goal revenue. I'm not gonna dive too deep into this, but common trigger automations need the right DM funnel, which means the right call to action word, the right first message, and whole back and forth automated conversation that doesn't feel like a bot wrote it.
08:33Right? And when it's done correctly, it's one of the highest ROI automations that we build for any account. When it's done wrong, it can kill your account engagement and literally make people unfollow you.
08:43So it's important for you to get this right and ultimately, the best advice I can give you is for to just feel genuine as if you quickly typed it out on your phone and that's how you're approaching your messages. And I have a lot of other videos on this channel as well that go into how to approach those messages and other strategies too that you can use to figure out how to build that experience up.
09:00So so far, we have covered new followers and post comments. The last one is the one that most accounts are completely overlooking. Most businesses .
09:12It is a for most of them. So let's fix that for you. First, I'm gonna give you an Mindvalley, the number one personal development company in the world, was getting a couple dozen story responses maximum.
09:27Every single story for six years straight. We came in and launched one of our high performing story strategies, and guess what happened? They had their best story in six years.
09:37It had five times their normal story views and 970 people replied to it. That is 970 people who raised their hand, they entered a DM funnel, and became trackable leads just from a single story.
09:49So here's the formula that you can use to reverse engineer getting sales from your stories. You invite people to reply something to your story, so the specific word, ideally seven characters or less, to get something genuinely valuable or get the link to your offer. Around 1% of your story viewers should respond with that word.
10:06Now, if you get less than 1% of people responding, that means your offer wasn't clear or strong enough. So keep massaging the copy until you hit that 1% mark.
10:15Now once a reply comes in, that person enters your Guillempa. The first message should get an 80% open rate minimum. From there, 70% of people should click the button in your message, which sends them to your sales page.
10:28And then from there, we'll use the same 5% sales page conversion rate as just a healthy benchmark. In order to make three sales per day or whatever number you want to, you would need to take the number of sales that you want a day divide it by point zero five, which is our sales page conversion rate, divided by point seven, which is the number of people who click to your sales page, then divide that by point eight, which is the number of people who opened the message you sent them.
10:53Now that means with a 5% sales page conversion rate that you'd get 60 people clicking to your sales page from the d m, 85 people receiving a message from you, and a 106 people replying to your story needed for you to make three sales a day. So even if you feel like your story reach is low right now, this process will increase your reach.
11:13We usually see at least a three x lift within three stories of using a call to action in it, telling people to reply a specific word. So to recap, now you know what your Instagram engagement is actually worth and how to scientifically reverse engineer getting to a 100 k a month and far beyond that from organic content.
11:31Or if you'd rather hire the number one in the world at this, you can apply to work with my agency at the link in the video description. I'll see you in the next video.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Every engagement signal on Instagram — a new follow, a comment, a story reply — has an implied dollar value that almost no creator ever calculates. Natasha Willis, co-founder of the DM automation agency School of Bots, built her firm's entire client playbook on three backward-engineered formulas that convert those signals into a precise daily action target. The argument is blunt: you're not underperforming on content, you're underconverting on engagement you already have.
Named ideas worth stealing.
03:03model
New Follower DM Formula
- 76% of new followers are messageable
- 50% of messaged followers click the link
- 5% of link visitors buy
- Solve backwards from your daily sales target
Multiply your target sales/day by the inverse of each conversion rate to find how many new followers you need daily.
Steal forAny Instagram account doing lead gen or direct sales — plug in your own conversion rates to get a personalized growth target
06:32model
Comment Trigger Formula
- 75% DM open rate after keyword comment
- 70% click-through to sales page
- 5% sales page conversion
- Comments are the upstream leading indicator
Calculate daily comment volume needed to hit any sales target; shift content team KPIs to comments-per-post.
Steal forContent teams that report on revenue — reframe to comments as the metric to optimize
10:00model
Story Reply Formula
- ~1% of story viewers reply to a keyword CTA
- 80% of responders open the DM
- 70% click to sales page
- 5% buy
Story views are a warm audience; invite a specific-word reply to convert passive viewers into DM leads.
Steal forHigh-story-view accounts that have never monetized that surface; strong for personal brands with loyal viewers
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
11:24product
“Or if you'd rather hire the number one in the world at this, you can apply to work with my agency at the link in the video description.”
Soft-sold at the end after all three formulas are delivered. Also briefly pitched at ~4:08 mid-video. The formulas themselves serve as a low-friction lead magnet that pre-qualifies viewers before the hard ask. Agency qualifier: $2M+/year + 100K+ followers.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
Visual structure at a glance.
