I built my own ManyChat with Claude. Here's why.

Published about 24 hours ago • 1 min read

Quick one from me today. I've been heads down building out Vagrant Press, and I figured it's worth sharing where it's at because a lot of the lessons are transferable.

Short version: the system is working. It's just not making money yet.

Now that the foundation is in place, it's time to flood it with people.

Here's what I'm thinking.

The deal scraping system

In the last 24 hours, the site added:

  • 317 books
  • 288 deals
  • 200 free books
  • 2 book social posts → 16 successful social posts across 8 platforms

This runs every day. Over time I'll scale up the social cadence once the new accounts are warmed up.

And every day, a summary email of the best deals in your preferred genres goes out automatically too.

So the system to find book deals, enrich them, and push them out to users is doing its job.

The problem is the attract stage. Right now I have basically zero traffic.

SEO

One surprise with this though... a lot of pages are already indexed by Google.

  • 1,630 indexed on Google
  • Another 3,000 discovered but not indexed yet

Clicks are sitting at 6, which is hilariously low.

It's cause the domain authority is low, which is expected for a new site so, my indexed pages are likely showing up on page 10 of Google.

I have a longer-term plan to fix that, but it's a slow burn and not right for right now.

The next goal

First 100–1,000 email subs.

While the system is posting to 7 social platforms automatically, reach isn't there yet. I'm effectively shouting into the void.

So I have to seed it.

Two athings I'm planning.

  1. Manual promotion in relevant communities. Spearfishing, basically. Going into book deal communities, asking for feedback, and promoting deals we find in places people already hang out.
  2. Paid acquisition on Instagram. Reason being there's a big book community there, I know the Meta paid system, and I've built something specifically to turn engagement into email subs.

On that last point, I essentially used Claude to build my own ManyChat competitor.

When someone comments on a post, it does two things:

  1. Replies to their comment with a CTA to check their inbox.
  2. Sends them a DM with a link to the book deal AND asks if they want to join the email list.

I looked at other platforms, but IG is the one where I can hit every KPI I care about in one place.

If you want to see how it works, just head to the profile and comment on any post:

​https://www.instagram.com/vagrant_press/​

The goal right now is just to get this in front of more people. Hit 1,000 subs, then I can start monetising through sponsorships.

Any questions or ideas, hit reply.

Pete "book deals" Boyle

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