This College Dropout Became the World's First Marketer to Respond to 50,000 Instagram DMs in a Single Day Using AI Chatbots The 24-year-old American internet celebrity entrepreneur Josh King Madrid is the world's first person to test chatbot marketing using Instagram DM automation. In 21 days, the campaign generated millions in sales

• Josh King Madrid, the founder of NFTMagazine.com, is the world's first marketer to utilize chatbots using Instagram DM automation.
• In 2019, Josh was pitched to on-board as the first user for a prototype software using chatbots with keywords and hashtags on Instagram to build a list and encourage opt-ins by the software founder who first originally introduced Josh to digital marketing in 2016
• Originally from a small town called Menifee, he moved to Irvine to attend UCI until he dropped out to focus on creating content and generating leads on social media to sell products and services online.

In 2017, Josh King Madrid dropped out of college after only four months at the University of California Irvine. He earned $27,000 that month. Just 6 months prior, he was sleeping on his parents' couch, researching if those ads talking about earning money online were actually "real," and if they were, would it be possible for him?

"I remember I joined a Facebook group for digital marketers, and within 5 minutes of joining, I got a Facebook Messenger notification. Some guy named Jeff said, "What's up, man?" I didn't respond, but he could see that I read it though. Five minutes later, he said, "Welcome to the group, man. I joined recently too. Let me know if you have any questions about digital marketing."

At the time, 18-year-old Josh did, in fact, have many questions about the idea of building a business online using social media. And only 30 minutes later, Josh decided to invest in his first online marketing tool. It was Online Sales Pro, a sales funnel and lead generation tool with a mobile app. Josh says, "If it weren't for the company being on the app store, I would have never believed it was real."

It cost him $297 of his last $305 dollars to get started. He started looking for blogs, videos, and stories of other successful marketers using this app on social media to become successful. During his first month, he worked 14-hour days and made a life-changing $80 as a college student who went by the pseudonym "JetSet" online. Six months later, he had hit his first $8,000 day, earning over $27,000 in December 2016. That's when he decided it was time to drop out.

At 18 years old, he moved into a four-bedroom penthouse for about $4,000 a month near the college campus and rented out his old dorm room to someone in his fraternity Sigma Pi for $800 monthly. Over the next few years, Josh kept re-investing his profits into growing his personal brand on Instagram by tens of thousands of followers a month.

It was December 2018, and Josh was planning a 750-person business conference he was hosting in Las Vegas in just under 100 days. He lined up 40 well-known industry experts as speakers and worked on his sales funnel daily. Josh says, "I anticipated I'd have a quick sell-out once I launched my funnel, but no one bought, even with announcing industry-famous speakers, only 50 people bought tickets, and there were only 45 days left till my conference." A week later, Josh got a call. It was Jeff, his old Facebook friend, who introduced him to digital marketing in 2016, and he wanted to make a deal. By this time, Josh was not interested in hearing a sales pitch. He wasn't the digital marketing newbie that Jeff once knew—he was receiving over 1,000 Instagram DMs a day from his fans and followers. Josh had become a highly sought out internet celebrity entrepreneur known as "JetSet" within the digital marketing space.

Jeff didn't know it at the time, but he had the leverage because JetSet had one problem, he was six figures in the hole for his conference and still needed to sell 700 more tickets—thus far, he had struggled to even sell 50.

Jeff offered JetSet a deal to become the world's first-ever beta-tester for his soon-to-be-released chatbot software for only $2,000 down, just enough to cover his development cost.

Josh liked the idea, but he was nervous he might break his Instagram. Nobody in the world had ever marketed with an Instagram DM chatbot before, and Jeff had only tested it with his own account to send 50–70 messages a day on his personal account with a couple of thousand followers. JetSet had over 320,000 followers, but at this point, being this close to the event, he was willing to try anything.

So JetSet accepted Jeff's offer, he paid the development cost, and in return, he was able to use this software to create A.I. (automated interactive) messenger chatbots. This would become the first use of a conversational chatbot funnel and social CRM for Instagram. This campaign ended up becoming a huge success, spiraling into a massive positive use case of how powerful Instagram DM automation can be.

Josh ended up generating over 11,000 leads and responding to 50,000 DMs per day (which is when they discovered the limit an account can send/reply to is roughly 50k per day). Not only did he become the world's first-ever marketer to utilize Instagram DM chatbots, but his "beta-test run" ended up producing a conversational chatbot flow that would sell out the rest of his 750 tickets in just 23 days from launching the campaign. The A.I. chatbot generated JetSet over $5 million in collective sales.

Josh made himself a staple in the digital marketing industry as the first user for a prototype software using chatbots with keywords and hashtags on Instagram to build a list and encourage opt-ins. He didn't know it back in early 2019, but his marketing campaign changed how brands and companies sell on Instagram. Instagram implemented the Instagram direct messages ads a couple of months after Josh used the chatbot for his conference. Within a year, Jeff had convinced the Nelk Boys, Tony Robbins, Grant Cardone, and other internet celebrities to come on to his platform and use Instagram DM automation in their digital marketing efforts.

Josh said, "I am grateful and honored that my conference is able to be used as a case study for conversational chatbot marketers. I've since decided to get certified in NLP and neuromarketing to help improve my conversational marketing skills, and since doing so, my sales have continued to skyrocket. I shock myself every time, just to do it again, but even bigger".

Josh remembers, "I know it was risky, but I was 20 years old and had a dream I was committed to and a friend who I believed in."

Josh admits the Instagram DM automation tech start-up is no longer around today and has been replaced by software giants Mobile Monkey and Manychat.

Today, at 24 years old, Josh states that he has gone on to produce over $20 million in online sales utilizing A.I. chatbots and admits that he has been recognized as a power-user by Manychat, where he has used the same type of marketing campaigns to sell out 5 NFT projects for clients, collectively generating 200,000 leads from Q4 2021 to Q3 2022. "My goal is to just keep improving and pushing the boundaries of what's possible in the digital marketing world with conversational chatbots," he says. He explains that his strengths are figuring out what's needed to build relationships through DMs and understanding the art of applying psychology to his copy with automation to create DM conversations that feel personalized, as he says he struggles to keep all the campaign flow charts in his head and remain organized.