Everyone agrees you should warm up a new account before posting. Almost nobody agrees on what that means. "Scroll for a few days" is the usual advice, which is not a plan — it is a vibe.
If you are going to automate it, you need an actual shape. Here is the one we landed on and why each part is there.
The single clearest bot signal
A brand new account whose very first action is publishing content does not look like a person. People download an app, get curious, scroll for a while, like a few things, come back the next day. Then, eventually, some of them post.
An account that inverts that order has announced itself before it has said anything. Every downstream trick — good hooks, trending sounds, perfect posting times — is being applied to an account that already got sorted into the wrong bucket. This is the most common reason for 0 views on clean content.
The shape of a ramp
Three things vary over the warm-up: how much, what kind, and when.
How much: a daily budget that climbs
Day one gets a small number of actions. Each following day gets a little more, up to a ceiling. The exact numbers matter less than the property: the account gets busier gradually, the way a new user's interest grows, rather than arriving fully formed.
A ramp that jumps from nothing to full activity on day two has just moved the signal, not removed it.
What kind: mostly watching
The mix should be dominated by the passive actions, because that is what real usage looks like:
- Scrolling and watching is the overwhelming majority. Most of what anyone does on a short-form app is consume.
- Liking is occasional. Real people like a small fraction of what they see.
- Following is rare. A new account that follows forty people on day one is doing something people do not do.
- Reading comments and scrolling back happen sometimes, and they are worth including precisely because bots skip them.
The ratios are more important than the totals. An account doing 200 actions a day that are 95% scrolling looks far more ordinary than one doing 40 actions that are half follows.
When: not on a metronome
Fixed intervals are a fingerprint on their own. Real sessions cluster — someone picks up their phone, spends eleven minutes, puts it down, comes back after dinner. Waits between actions vary. Some sessions are short. Some days are quieter than others. And nobody uses the app at 4am every single night.
Knowing when it is done
"Warmed up" should be a threshold you can check, not a feeling. Ours is three conditions together:
- A minimum number of days elapsed since the account started.
- A minimum total number of actions performed.
- No flags, captchas, or verification prompts seen along the way.
The third one is the important one. If an account has been challenged during warm-up, adding more activity does not fix it — that is a throttled account, and it needs a different response.
Only when all three hold does the account join the posting rotation. After that it does not stop being active: an account that posts and never scrolls again is its own kind of strange.
Doing this by hand
You can. It is a few minutes a day per account, for a week or two, per account, before any of them earns the right to post. That is completely reasonable for one or two accounts and completely unreasonable for ten.
That arithmetic is the entire reason Autopilot exists: it runs the ramp on real iPhones connected to your own Mac and only lets an account into the posting rotation once it has cleared the gate.
One caveat worth repeating: automating an account breaks the platforms' terms of service, whatever the pacing looks like. A careful ramp reduces the obvious signals. It does not make the practice permitted, and no tool can promise your account survives.