u/eastwill54

Why am I suspended? I am basically just starting. I am doing the assessment thingy for the Aether S2S Screener (I think), and after spending quite some time finishing the graded question, I cannot click the submit button for the feedback part. Then I received an email informing me of the deactivation. What did I do wrong?

Hey all! Anyone got a good recommendation for a PDF editor that's actually secure? I deal with confidential info so I need something trustworthy - just please, not Adobe. Bonus points if it isn't a subscription nightmare. Thanks!

I run growth for a couple of small brands and every launch starts the same way: find 50 people in the niche worth talking to. For a long time that meant searching a hashtag, opening profiles one at a time, reading bios for an email, checking if the account was even active, pasting into a sheet. An afternoon for 40 names, half of which never replied.

What changed wasn't a tool, it was how I search. The tool part comes at the end and takes ten minutes. The search part is the whole job, so that's most of this post.

1. Search the way the customer talks, not the way the category is named

Most people search "fitness" or "skincare" and get the same 30 huge accounts every brand already emails. Using dog food as the running example, here's what works instead:

• The practice, not the product. #rawfeeding, "grain free dog", "dog allergies". People posting about a practice have an audience that cares about it.
• The sub-niche. "frenchie mom", #dachshundsofinstagram, "hiking with dogs". Narrower audience, higher engagement, far cheaper to work with.
• A competitor's brand name as the keyword. People with a competitor's name in their caption are already buying in your category. That's a lead list as much as an influencer list.
• Your product type plus "review" or "haul". "dog food review", "dog treats haul". Pulls people who already make product content.
• A city if you sell locally. "dog groomer austin", #austindogs. Small accounts, real customers, they answer DMs.

Hashtag search gives you people who tagged themselves into the topic. Keyword search gives you what Instagram thinks is about the topic. They only partly overlap, so run both.

2. How to think of searches you'd never guess

This is the creative part and it's where the good lists come from. Some ways to get unstuck:

• Ask who else sells to your customer. A raw dog food buyer also buys from dog walkers, holistic vets, dog photographers, agility trainers. Search those. Their audiences are your audience and nobody in dog food is emailing them.
• Think about the moment of need. When does someone start caring about dog food? New puppy, a vet visit, a diagnosis, moving to a farm. Search #newpuppy, "dog IBD", "dog with allergies". You catch people at the start of the decision.
• Steal from one great account. Find one creator who's perfect and look at what hashtags they use, who they tag, who they follow. Every one of those is a new search you didn't think of.
• Use the export to find the next export. Once you have a sheet, read the bios and captions of the top 20 rows. The words they use to describe themselves are your next keywords. This loop is how you go from 5 searches to 25.
• Go one step sideways from your product. Dog food is one step from dog health, two from pet-friendly travel, three from van life. Each step out is less obvious to competitors and often more engaged.
• Search in the language of the audience if you sell abroad. #hundefutter, #croquettes. Different accounts entirely, and usually less competition.

Write down 8 to 10 searches before you touch anything. Half will be duds, and you'll only know which half after you've seen the sheets.

3. Go one level deeper than the search results

Take the biggest account from any search, a brand or a top creator. Then pull three things from it:

• Its followers. A big raw feeding account's followers are full of small creators and shop owners in the same world.
• The commenters on its best 5 posts. Commenters are active today, not two years ago, and they're deep in the topic.
• The likers on those posts. Bigger list, less signal, still in-niche.

Two or three big accounts done this way gives you a few thousand people in the niche, most small, most active. Databases don't have them because they're too small to index. That's exactly why they're good.

4. Cut to the reachable ones, then rank

Keep only rows with an email or a website. If neither is there you can't contact them without a cold DM, so out they go. On a creator list maybe a third survive, on a followers list less. Fine, you started with thousands.

Then sort by engagement rate first, follower count second. You want the top-left corner: high engagement, mid-sized. Those accounts are cheap or free to work with, their audience actually reads the post, and they reply to email because they don't get fifty a day. A 12k account at 6 percent beats a 200k account at 0.8 percent for almost anything a small brand does.

Top 20 get the first email. New search, new sheet, repeat.

5. The export part

Everything above assumes the search results, followers, commenters and likers are already in a spreadsheet with follower count, engagement rate, email and website as columns. That's the bit that used to take the afternoon.

I use Mastros for Instagram for it. It's a Chrome extension: you run the search or open the profile on Instagram, open the panel, hit Save, and the page you're looking at comes out as a CSV or XLSX with those columns filled.

Been on Chrome forever and finally getting tired of it. Not a de-google crusade or anything, I just have way too many tabs open all day and want something that handles that better.

Saw Ace mentioned a couple times, the AI browser one. Anyone actually using it day to day? Wondering if it's worth it or if I should just go Brave/Vivaldi like everyone always says. Mostly do shopping research, reading long articles, normal life stuff.

Creating my own creators lists to outreach to for my brand has always been stupidly complex. I have struggled a ton on this, and I think today I found a way to fix it.

Paid alternatives are lame. Yes UGC marketplaces (out of market prices) and creator databases (old, outdated, wrongly categorized lists) I am speaking about you!

Manual creator search is rough, you search a hashtag, scroll forever, screenshot the accounts that look decent, copy follower counts into a spreadsheet by hand, then message ten people and hear back from two.

After a long search I figured out how without spending a dime for extra tools other than your favourite LLM of choice.

Let's say your niche is dog food,

1. I would do a keyword research using Claude and DataForSEO API (or you can do it by hand on google keyword tools for FREE). Asking to find all intent based, informative search and other words related to your business. So you might discover that people searching are searching more for "healthy dog food", and "best treats.." and there is a new topic that is trending up "raw dog food diet"...

2. Okay great, then I would say we can use to assess what and how people are searching for and create the positioning strategy. Since we can easily infer that If I search for "best treats", I most likely care about content "dog treat review". This works better, if you expand this into your SEO and GEO strategy by repurposing your social media content into your site.

3. I make a search using a free chrome extension called Mastros Instagram Scraper. Using the extension directly from Instagram site, I search per keywords and hashtags on instagram. Then I make the list into CSV or JSON. + Download the zip of the media in case I use the creators media for inspiration + future reference.

4. I check the list and filter for best engagement, bio with email and I grasp the content reading the post description. In case of big batches I just dump the json made by Mastros to claude and tell him to shortlist me the top 10 to check manually.

END: I have my shortlist of creators for my niche with emails, engagement, handle, content pieces. Position strategy with keywords and topics to cover with the content. in 2 hours max spending 0$ + any LLM involved.

What is your process today? Any suggestions on how improve my workflow?

I’m looking for a database IDE that works well for both analysts running queries and developers doing more involved database work.

The main things I care about are:

• Support for multiple database types
• A good SQL editor with autocomplete
• Easy navigation between connections, schemas, and tables
• Clear results and export options
• Tools for comparing or understanding database objects
• Something that stays manageable when several databases are open

I’ve been looking at DbVisualizer, DBeaver, and DataGrip, although they seem to have slightly different strengths. DbVisualizer looks like a solid middle ground for mixed teams, while DataGrip appears more developer-focused and DBeaver has a broad feature set.

What are you using, and what’s your role? I’d be especially interested to hear whether the same IDE works well for both analysts and developers, or whether your team uses different tools.

We're at that stage where we need to bring in a specialist for social ads. I know the basics of Ads Manager, but I want to equip our new hire with a toolset that lets them focus on strategy, not button-clicking. I've been impressed with how much time a bulk launcher like Blip can save on the operational side.

What else is essential? Beyond the launcher, what analytics or management tools do you consider must-haves to keep a media buyer efficient and sane?

Hey there, I've been browsing for a while and have been playing a lot with Duolingo but it doesn't seem to really help with the grammar so much. I also tested things like Anki but it was quite technical and ended up feeling like just a bunch of flashcards. Any recommendation from what worked for you would help. thanks!

looking at a pretty big gpu bill right now.

the normal cloud cost tools can obviously tell me what the instances cost.

but im trying to get more granular.

cost by workload. team. job. maybe even gpu utilization vs what were actually paying for.

are there any finops platforms that do this well?

what are you guys using?

Am I shadowbanned?

Bakit degraded na ang mga output ng mga generative AI?

Natanong ko na naman siya ulit kasi kakatapos lang ng away namin ni Gemini. Lahat ng expletives and curses, binato ko na sa kanya. Kung maging sentient man sila, baka ako una nilang gantihan, lol. Conversational ang approach ko to get results, pero parang di niya ma-gets. Kailangan ko pa i-point out sa kanya kung gaano siya katanga, and it admit naman na may oversight daw siya. Gigil kasi 'di ko feel na naka-"premium" ako. Well, free from Coursera/DTI.

Pero back in 2024, hindi naman sila ganito. In fact, ang intuitive nila. One chat lang, alam nila kung ano ang gusto ko, sometimes more pa nga. Literal na napadali nila ang buhay ko.

Hindi lang 'to isolated sa Gemini. Nakikipag-away din ako sa ChatGPT, Grok and company-sanctioned AI na Rovo AI.