The Challenge
Scale Requirements
Pillow Talk needed to discover 50,000+ relevant Instagram influencers across beauty, wellness, and lifestyle niches—manual research wasn't feasible.
Instagram Bot Detection
Instagram's aggressive anti-bot protections block automated scrapers. Rate limits, CAPTCHAs, and IP bans made direct scraping impossible.
Data Quality
Needed verified profiles with follower counts, engagement metrics, contact info, and niche categorization—not just usernames.
The Solution
Multi-Engine Discovery Strategy
Built a three-pronged approach combining Firecrawl (AI-powered web scraping), Google Custom Search Engine, and Bio-hub (Instagram bio aggregator). Each engine covers different discovery patterns, with circuit breakers to handle rate limits and failures gracefully.
- ✓Firecrawl: Bypasses anti-bot with browser automation and proxy rotation
- ✓Google CSE: Discovers profiles via indexed Instagram pages and external mentions
- ✓Bio-hub: Aggregates Instagram bios with niche keywords for targeted discovery
// Try engines with fallback strategy
const engines = [
{ name: 'firecrawl', fn: searchFirecrawl },
{ name: 'google', fn: searchGoogleCSE },
{ name: 'biohub', fn: searchBioHub }
];
for (const engine of engines) {
try {
const results = await engine.fn(query);
if (results.length > 0) {
return { engine: engine.name, data: results };
}
} catch (error) {
console.error(`${engine.name} failed, trying next`);
continue; // Circuit breaker pattern
}
}
throw new Error('All engines exhausted');Key Features
Intelligent Search & Discovery
Multi-Engine Search
Query across Firecrawl, Google CSE, and Bio-hub simultaneously. Smart deduplication prevents profile duplicates across engines.
Profile Discovery
Rich profile cards with follower counts, engagement rates, bio excerpts, and niche tags extracted via GPT-4 classification.
Content Strategy Tools
Campaign Analytics
Track outreach performance, response rates, and conversion metrics. Identify high-performing niches and influencer segments.
AI Marketing Brainstorm
GPT-4 powered campaign ideation tool. Generate content angles, hashtag strategies, and collaboration concepts based on influencer profiles.
Technical Architecture
Firecrawl Anti-Bot Strategy
Firecrawl handles browser fingerprinting, JavaScript rendering, and CAPTCHA solving automatically. Proxy rotation and request throttling prevent IP bans while maintaining high throughput.
import FirecrawlApp from "@mendable/firecrawl-js";
const app = new FirecrawlApp({ apiKey: FIRECRAWL_KEY });
// Scrape Instagram profile with anti-bot evasion
const result = await app.scrapeUrl(
"https://instagram.com/" + username,
{
formats: ["html", "markdown"],
onlyMainContent: true,
waitFor: 3000
}
);
// Extract structured data
const profile = parseInstagramData(result.markdown);Technology Stack
Frontend
Backend
Database
Scraping
Search
AI/ML
Deployment
Results & Impact
Key Learnings
- →Multi-engine redundancy is essential: No single scraping method survives platform changes—diversification prevents total failure
- →Rate limiting is a moving target: Instagram's detection evolves constantly—adaptive throttling and circuit breakers keep systems resilient
- →Data quality beats quantity: 50K verified profiles with engagement metrics > 500K raw usernames with no context
- →Firecrawl is worth the cost: Managing proxies, CAPTCHAs, and browser automation in-house would cost 10x more in engineering time
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