Instagram Goldmine — discover the brands paying creators in your niche on Instagram

What Instagram Goldmine does

Goldmine Butler does this for Amazon storefronts. Instagram Goldmine does the same job for Instagram: find brands already paying creators in your niche, so you know who to pitch.

You seed it with 3-10 Instagram usernames of creators whose audience overlaps yours. Goldmine walks Instagram's "suggested for you" graph from each seed, identifies similar creators, and harvests posts on their profiles tagged with #ad, #partner, paid-partnership disclosures, or explicit brand mentions. The output is a list of brand-name + post + creator combinations you can pitch from.

This workspace is read-only. No DMs sent, no follows, no engagement. Pure research.

Before you start

• A signed-in Instagram account in Chrome.
• 3-10 Instagram seed usernames of creators in your niche. The @ is optional; profile URLs (https://instagram.com/handle) also work.
• An hour or so the first time you run it on a fresh niche — discovery + scanning is slower than the rest of the Instagram stack because it walks the graph.

Running your first discovery

1. Open Instagram Goldmine under Instagram Butler.
2. In Seed usernames, paste 3-10 starter profiles. Be selective — these are the seeds Instagram is asked to suggest similar creators from. A bad seed produces noisy output.
3. In Filters:

• Min followers — default 50,000. Filters out spam accounts and very-small creators. Drop to 10K if you're after micro-influencer collabs.
• Min post views — default 10,000. Filters out low-engagement posts.
• Min comment count — default 25. Helps surface genuinely-engaged posts vs vanity-metric ones.
• Max posts per profile — default 30. Caps how deep Goldmine reads into each creator's feed.
• Max suggested per seed — default 25. How many similar-creators to pull per seed.
• Max total profiles — default 100. Hard ceiling so the run doesn't sprawl.

1. Run mode — seeds-and-suggested (default) scans the seeds + their suggested graph. seeds-only skips the graph for tighter control.
2. Reels first — leave on. Reels carry sponsorship signal more consistently than feed posts.
3. Click Start Discovery.

A Chrome window opens. Goldmine walks each seed, pulls Instagram's suggested-accounts graph, visits each suggested creator, and scans their recent posts for disclosure tags. The Posts table fills in real-time.

Working the results

Every qualifying post becomes a row with:

• Brand name — extracted from the post caption (when the brand is @mentioned or named).
• Creator handle — who posted it.
• Post URL — click to open in browser.
• Disclosure type — #ad, #partner, paid-partnership, mention.
• Engagement — views, likes, comments.

What to do with the list:

• Filter by brand to see which brands appear most often — those are the busiest sponsors in your niche.
• Export CSV to feed into Pitch Butler or a spreadsheet for outreach planning.
• Open the post URL to read the actual caption — useful for crafting your pitch ("I saw your campaign with @creator and have a similar audience").

Tuning over time

• Seed quality — the single biggest factor. Two perfectly-matched seeds outperform ten loose ones. Refresh seeds when output gets stale.
• Min followers + min views — raise if the output feels too noisy with low-quality creators. Lower if you're after micro-influencer-tier collabs.
• safeMode — when on, Goldmine uses longer pacing and more random delays. Useful if Instagram has flagged your account recently. Costs 2-3× run time.

Where the data goes

Discovered posts and the per-seed graph are cached in the preseed cache. Subsequent runs deduplicate against history so you don't re-scan the same profile.

Common gotchas

• Manual sign-in mid-run — Instagram rate-limits the suggested-accounts graph heavily for non-verified accounts. If it prompts for verification, solve in the spawned Chrome window and Goldmine resumes.
• No brands extracted from captions — the brand wasn't @mentioned or named in plain text (might be in the image only). Open the post URL to verify.
• Same creator appears repeatedly — multiple seeds suggested them. Deduplication works on posts, not creators, so this is expected if the creator is doing many sponsorships.
• Run is very slow — Instagram's suggested-graph is rate-limited per-profile. There's no way to speed past it; let it run.

Related

• Goldmine Butler tutorial — same idea for Amazon Creator storefronts.
• Instagram Butler tutorial — pitch the brands Instagram Goldmine surfaces.
• Pitch Butler tutorial — track them in the unified CRM.