Mass Broadcast Campaign — An Experiment I Shut Down
A broadcast system reading a list from a sheet and sending personalised messages at randomised intervals inside a safe time window. It worked technically — then WhatsApp restricted the number. I shut it down myself.
The problem
A member list in a sheet, and a wish to reach them with a message personalised by name — without sending to hundreds of numbers by hand.
The approach
I assumed the problem was technical: how to send a lot without it reading as automated. So I built controls around it — a daily cap, a sending window between 10am and 11pm, and a random wait of three to seven minutes between messages.
What I built
A Telegram trigger receives the image and caption, reads the daily cap from the caption's first line, broadcasts through the WhatsApp interface, and updates each number's status in the sheet. Media is passed by direct link rather than base64, because file helpers do not work inside the task runner.
The result
It worked technically, end to end — then WhatsApp restricted the number. That number was the operational bot's number, so the automated replies went down with it. I shut the campaign down myself and never restarted it.
- Stack
- n8n · Telegram Bot API · WAHA · Google Sheets
- Role
- Designed it, built it, and killed it
- Disciplines
- Automation · Marketing
- Client
- Anonymised by agreement
A system working technically does not make it safe to run. Broadcasting from the same number as the operational bot risked the whole asset for a short-term gain — separating the numbers is not an optimisation, it is a precondition.