Yet about four months and 70 Instagram posts later, @cookingwithfatmax is far from stardom. Despite how cute Max looked or how plump my steamed pork buns appeared, the account stagnated at roughly 300 followers. Max’s “likes” plateaued at an average of about 60. No sponsorship offers appeared in my inbox.

So I turned to some obscure marketing blogs that suggested a simpler path: Buy some bots, otherwise known as fake followers, to make the account look more attractive to real people and to help expand an audience. I bought 2,500 bot followers and waited for the likes to pour in and the audience to swell.

To my surprise, Max became even less popular. His number of followers hemorrhaged, presumably because Instagram purged many of the phony accounts. The average number of likes on the posts dipped to about 45.

This week, I asked Ahalogy, a marketing technology business in Cincinnati, for a reality check.

“You just can’t be an overnight success,” said Bob Gilbreath, who leads Ahalogy. “This is a real job that takes a lot of effort. Stay at it with several posts a day, several ideas, and build relationships.”

Above all, he said, “no shortcuts.”

In the end, the experiment bore less fruit than my past exploits, like renting out an Airbnb or buying cryptocurrency. Becoming an influencer on Instagram was more challenging than I had ever imagined. Here’s what I learned.