In this first‑person narrative, Daniel Fazio recounts how, in 2018, he launched an Instagram growth agency that leveraged the follow‑unfollow automation tool Jarvee. To overcome the trust barrier of asking strangers for their Instagram passwords and paying for services, he secured five free clients by cold‑emailing Instagram users, using a personal connection as a reference. Over three months he delivered measurable follower gains for these clients, creating verifiable case studies. Armed with before‑and‑after results, he shifted to paid outreach, rapidly scaling to 80 paying clients and generating about $12,000 in monthly revenue shortly after graduating college. The story outlines his step‑by‑step client acquisition strategy, the role of automation, and the importance of proof‑of‑performance in early agency growth.
Chapters
The first agency I ever ran was an Instagram growth agency. And this is when follow unfollow worked. So this was like 2018 or something like that. Dude, it actually cooked. You used this platform, it was called Jarvee, and you could like automate the following and the unfollowing and shit. And it had all the statistics in it and you needed their Instagram password. And I was like, how are you gonna get someone, a stranger from the internet to give you their Instagram password? Like let alone pay me, it's like $150. So this is like a BDC product 'cause it's just like people wanna grow their Instagram. Yeah. So I was like, well, the only way this is going to work is if I have other people like verifiable active people on Instagram where if someone were to message them, they would say, yes, this is legit. So I had to go find 5 people to do free. The first person was someone I knew. So then I had her and I leveraged her to get the next 4 people for free. And I just cold emailed people. I go on their Instagram profile, click the email button and email them and be like, hey, I'm working with this person right here and I'm looking for more clients to do it for free because I need case studies to show that I'm not a random internet scammer. Mm-hmm. You can message her, you can do whatever. I had to get on calls with these people to do it for free. So then I did that, did it for free for 5 people for 3 months. And then only when I got the before and after pictures of they went from this many followers to this many followers was I able to then start cold emailing people asking for actual money. And then I got that 80 people. It was making like pretty damn good amount of money. It was like $12K a month. I was like 20, fresh outta college. That's what it took. That's what you do.
