Yappy Bot - engagement automation for a video platform

Overview

This is a case about promoting my own profile on Yappy - a Russian video-hosting platform, a TikTok analogue. I was building a personal brand, posting my own videos and promoting them with my own Browser Automation Studio bot rather than paying boosting services.

The bot does the full set of activities - registers accounts, adds views, subscriptions, likes and comments, runs mass-following - and it all happens over HTTP requests, browserless, which is what makes it fast and cheap.

Problem

Point A was simple: a profile with no audience, and a price for buying one quickly that kills the appetite for it. By service rates, one Yappy subscriber cost around 3 ₽ and one view around 0.22 ₽. Reaching roughly 300,000 views and 8,000 subscribers would have meant paying about 90,000 ₽.

And price is not the only problem. Boosting services run at their own pace, with daily caps (around 100 a day on their own price screenshots), and start when it suits them, not you. You pay and wait, controlling neither the speed nor the timing.

Solution

Instead of buying a service I built a tool. The key function is an SMS account registrar that creates an account for about 2 ₽. Accounts are the bot’s workforce: they can be dressed up (avatar, cover, name, login) and subscribed to random recommended bloggers so they look alive.

Then comes a set of modes toggled in the settings: views, subscriptions, likes, comments, a comment spammer, activity across all of a profile’s videos, mass-following and unfollows. Targets are set in Excel - a profile or video link and the required amount - so the same bot promotes a single clip or the whole account in parallel.

All activity runs browserless, on requests, with a proxy pool and random delays between actions - the log shows each step getting its own proxy and its own pause. That keeps the speed high and spaces the actions out in time so the run does not look like one burst.

Features

• SMS account registrar - an account for about 2 ₽
• Account dressing: avatar, cover, name, login, subscriptions to recommended bloggers
• Activity modes: views, infinite views, subscriptions, likes, comments
• Comment spammer and “activity across all profile videos”
• Mass-following from recommendations and onto selected bloggers’ subscribers, plus unfollows
• Runs over HTTP requests, browserless - speed, and hiding the machine’s parameters
• Proxy pool and random delays between actions
• Excel-driven targets: profile/video and the required amount, many targets in parallel
• Multithreading and account validity checks
• Comments drawn from a file with a random pick - variety instead of copies

Development Process

The project’s economics dictated its architecture. If the main barrier is the price of accounts and activity, then everything hinges on cheap registration and running without a browser. An SMS registrar at 2 ₽ and an HTTP client instead of Chromium are the two decisions everything else follows from: an account costs pennies, and actions run fast and in parallel.

The second is Excel-driven control. The bot is not tied to one target: a list of profiles and videos with their required numbers lives in a spreadsheet, and the same tool promotes a single video or a whole channel. That turns a one-off task into a reusable asset - an “army of accounts” you can point at any of your own clips.

Then there is pacing. The random delays and proxy pool in the log are not decoration: activity is spread out over time so the run looks smooth rather than an instant spike.

Results

• Promoting my own profile cost several times less than services - around 16,000 ₽ instead of the 90,000 ₽ their rates implied
• The result is a controllable asset: a set of accounts that can move any video on the channel, not just one
• Speed and launch timing are under my own control, with none of the services’ daily caps
• One tool covers the whole activity set: registration, views, subscriptions, likes, comments, mass-following
• Excel-driven targets allow several clips to run in parallel

What Was Learned

The case is about the economics of “buy a service versus build a tool”. A one-off boost through a service is paying for a result at someone else’s pace and under someone else’s caps. Your own bot costs more up front in build time but less over the distance and, more importantly, hands you the controls: speed, timing and targets are yours.

Technically the whole advantage rests on two things that recur across similar projects in this portfolio: a cheap account and running without a browser. The same principle - the browser only where nothing else will do, everything else on requests - underpins iHerb + PochtaGlobal and grows into a full platform in the RPA Automation Panel.