I look at other people's Instagram all day

Looking at other people's Instagram is my actual job

I work in marketing. I look after several brands at once, which means a decent chunk of my week is spent finding out what everybody else in those categories is up to. New products, new pricing, new photographer, whatever they have quietly stopped talking about.

And I like it. That is the part people find strange. Some of my colleagues treat competitive research as a chore to be survived once a quarter. I will happily lose forty minutes to a competitor’s grid working out why they suddenly went all in on one product line.

The problem was never the looking. The problem was every single tool built for it.

The other viewers are genuinely terrible

I am not being snobby here. Go and try them. You type in a handle and the page immediately does four things, none of which are showing you the profile.

A thing slides up from the bottom. A thing slides in from the side. There is a countdown for some reason. There are three buttons that look like the button you want and one that is the button you want, and you are going to pick wrong at least once. Half the time the content never loads at all and you get a second ad instead, which somehow feels personal.

It also just did not work very well. Stories that never appeared. Profiles that loaded as a blank grid. Tabs that went nowhere. I kept closing these sites thinking a fairly simple thing was being made extremely difficult on purpose.

So I built the boring version

WHISPERLOOK is a search box. You put a handle in it and you get the profile. That is the entire concept and it took an embarrassing amount of restraint to stop there.

No account. No app. No newsletter modal eight seconds in. Nothing counting down at you. If a thing is going to load, it loads, and if it cannot, it says so in plain words instead of spinning forever and hoping you leave.

I built it for me, honestly. I just could not find a version of this that a normal person would want to use twice.

And yes, I would rather they didn't see me doing it

Here is the slightly awkward bit. I am researching companies that are, in some cases, researching me back. I would prefer not to announce it.

This is not sinister. I am reading a public profile that a marketing team built specifically so that people would read it. But if I follow a competitor, I am now sitting in their follower list with my actual name on it, and small teams absolutely look at that list. It is a bit like doing research in someone’s shop while wearing a shirt with your own logo on it.

Looking without an account solves that. There is no account here to follow anyone with. And for content that comes through in a way that supports it, you are not turning up in a story viewer list either, which I will admit was a significant part of my motivation.

I will be straight about the limit, because half this category lies about it. This is not an invisibility cloak. It means you are not volunteering your name. It does not mean you have vanished, and anyone promising otherwise is selling something. Can someone see you viewed their profile has the honest version.

What I actually do with it

My routine is unglamorous. A short list of handles, maybe a dozen across all the brands I look after. Once a month I go down the list, and for each one I look at three things: what they have posted since last time, what is in their highlights, and where the bio link points now.

Highlights are the underrated one. That is where the price lists and service menus live, because a business needs those to stay up longer than a day. People scroll straight past a row of little circles that frequently contains the exact number they came looking for.

Then I pull what I found into my own notes and let the tools I already use do the pattern spotting across all of it at once. That is where the actual insight comes from. The looking is just gathering. What I needed was a way to gather that did not take an hour and did not involve closing eleven pop-ups.

If you want that routine written out properly, it is in researching your industry without using Instagram.

It costs money, so there are ads. Quiet ones.

Every lookup on here is billed by a data provider. It is a fraction of a cent, which sounds like nothing right up until a few thousand people do it in an afternoon.

So there have to be ads. I am not going to pretend otherwise or put a tip jar on it. But the ads are not going to yell, because the yelling is the thing that made me build this in the first place, and there would be something deeply stupid about recreating it.

The rules I set before there was any money involved, which is the only time you can set them honestly: nothing next to the search box, nothing under the search button, nothing inside the viewer, nothing near the controls, nothing that pops up, slides in, follows you down the page or pretends to be content. If an ad ever gets in the way of the thing you came here to do, I have broken my own rule and you should tell me.

The longer version of the money side is in what it costs to run this.

Why it is public at all

This started as a thing I made for myself, and for a while that is all it was. Then it occurred to me that I am not remotely the only person who needs to look at a public Instagram profile occasionally without signing up, installing anything, or being shouted at.

Marketers, obviously. But also anyone checking whether a business is still open, what a venue actually looks like, or what a contractor’s last six jobs went like. Normal reasons. There are a lot of them.

So it is here. It is free, it is a search box, and it will not yell at you. That is genuinely the whole pitch.