Turning an Instagram DM into a First Sale, with the Actual Script
Most Nigerian student founders will sell something for the first time in a DM before they ever build anything resembling a proper checkout flow, and the DM sale is the honest beginning of most small businesses whether or not the founder ever admits it.
The trouble is that the pattern for turning an Instagram DM into a sale is rarely written down anywhere, which means every founder has to figure it out for themselves, and most figure it out by making the same avoidable mistakes over and over. The script I want to give you is not clever, and it does not require you to be a natural salesperson, but it does compress a lot of hard-learned lessons into a form you can follow the first time you try.
The starting point is that someone has slid into your DMs asking a question about your product, and you have five minutes of their attention before they get distracted and forget you exist. The five minutes are precious, and the mistakes founders make in those five minutes are almost always the same three mistakes, so the script is organised around avoiding them.
Reply within an hour if you can
The first move is speed. If you can reply within an hour of the initial message, your close rate on that conversation is meaningfully higher than if you reply within a day, since the person who sent the DM is at their peak interest in the exact moment they sent it, and the interest fades faster than founders realise. You do not need to have all the answers ready, and it is fine to say "let me get back to you on the specifics", but the acknowledgement itself needs to be quick.
Ask before you pitch
The second move is to ask a specific question before you launch into any description of your product. Something like, "quick question first, what made you reach out today, is there something specific you are trying to figure out".
This does two things.
It slows the conversation down enough that you avoid the reflex to pitch immediately,
and it gives you information about what the person actually cares about, which you can then use to shape the rest of the conversation.
Founders who skip this step tend to pitch the version of the product that they find most exciting, which is usually not the version the customer cares about.
Give them something specific to say yes to
The third move is to end the exchange with a specific thing the person can say yes to. Not "let me know if you are interested", not "we can chat more later", but "I can send you the link to try it now, and if you have five minutes tonight to give me your first impression, that would help me a lot". This works because it lowers the emotional cost of the yes, since the person is not agreeing to buy something, they are agreeing to help you, which most people are more willing to do than they are willing to make a purchase decision under time pressure.
The actual script
Putting these three moves together, a typical exchange looks like this. They say, "hey saw your post, can I hear more". You say, "yes of course, quick question first, what made you reach out today, is there something specific you are trying to figure out". They tell you. You reply with a short response that speaks to what they told you, avoiding any pitch language, and you end with, "I can send you the link to try it now, and if you have five minutes tonight to give me your first impression, that would help me a lot". Most of the time, they will say yes to the link, and the conversation moves into product territory naturally from there.
What to do when they go silent
Sometimes the exchange goes cold after the first reply, and founders often make the mistake of chasing too hard when this happens. The right move is to wait forty-eight hours and send one short follow-up that references what they told you earlier, without pushing for a decision. Something like, "circling back on this since you mentioned x last time, wanted to check if you got a chance to try the link". If they respond, continue as normal. If they still do not respond, let it go, since chasing further will damage the relationship more than the potential sale is worth, and most of the time the person will return on their own when the timing is right for them.
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