Platform overview
How the Instasent dashboard is organised — projects, audience, segments, campaigns, automations and the AI assistant.
Instasent is a customer-communication platform. You collect contacts and the things they do, group them into audiences, and reach them over SMS — one message at a time or as a campaign. Everything in the dashboard hangs off a few core concepts. This page explains them and where each one lives.
If you would rather drive Instasent from code, the same concepts are exposed by the Product API. The dashboard and the API act on the same data.
Projects
A project is the top-level container for your work. It holds an audience, the segments and campaigns built on top of it, your automations, and the settings that apply to all of them. Most organisations run one project per brand or product line.
Everything below — audience, segments, campaigns — belongs to a single project. Switch projects from the selector at the top of the dashboard.
Audience
Your audience is every contact in a project, together with what you know about them: attributes (name, phone, locale, custom fields) and events (what they did and when). Each message you send also lands as an event on the contact's timeline, so the audience is both who you can reach and a record of how you have reached them.
Contacts arrive in two ways:
From the dashboard
Import a list or add contacts by hand for a quick start.
From your systems
Stream contacts and events in continuously through the Product API or the Ingest API. This keeps the audience in sync with your own database.
Segments
A segment is a saved, dynamic slice of the audience — "contacts in Spain who opened a campaign in the last 30 days", for example. Segments are defined by a filter over attributes and events, and they re-evaluate themselves: as contacts match or stop matching, the segment updates on its own. You target campaigns and automations at segments rather than at static lists.
Campaigns
A campaign is a one-off send to a segment: write the message, pick the audience, review, and send (or schedule it). Once it goes out you get delivery and engagement stats, and every send shows up on each contact's timeline.
Automations
An automation sends messages in response to what contacts do, without you pressing send each time. A contact entering a segment, or a specific event arriving, can trigger a message or a sequence. Use automations for welcomes, reminders, and follow-ups that should run continuously rather than as a single campaign.
AI assistant
The dashboard includes an AI assistant that answers questions about your audience and helps you act on it — "how many contacts in Madrid?", "draft a reminder for cart abandoners". It reads your project data and these help guides, so its answers stay grounded in how Instasent actually works.
External AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, MCP clients) and OAuth-connected apps are described on AI agents & MCP — most connectors are coming soon.
Connected apps
Connected apps let external tools work with your Instasent data through a secure OAuth authorisation. You approve each app and can revoke it at any time. See AI agents & MCP for the product roadmap and Connected apps & OAuth for the developer guide (in progress).