Telegram Journey to 50k Targeted Group Members

Hello BHW community,

Long time lurker, newly registered member, and first thread on BHW. Been in the IM space during my college years in the 2000s, mainly for affiliate programs, but the past few years have been heavily focused in the social media realm during my free time. Background in web development and growth hacking within the startup ecosystem. As of late, been studying automation processes, design systems, and ML/AI.

For this journey, I will be learning and testing to grow a new telegram group to 50,000 targeted users. I know that there are services out there that charge at least a few grand for such type of growth. As a business person, I am determined to learn new languages, processes, and growth hacking techniques to get to that goal. I truly feel that telegram is still in its infancy phases especially for online businesses.

With that said, I will be updating a couples times a week on my progress. I will not be updating every day as I would like to allocate that time on learning and testing.

Alright. Let's get to it.


Starting group size: 14 members


*I would not be disclosing the group niche it is as per rules, but it is one of the popular types of groups that exist specifically in telegram. Please do not PM asking which group it is as I do not want my account to be breaking any rules. Thank you for understanding.

What is your plan for monetise this group?

good luck! I am following.

I was / am part of some groups on Telegram. Mostly Crypto groups and trading signals.

How do you intend to get new members to your group? And what is the monetisation plan?

furmanfurman said:

What is your plan for monetise this group?

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The telegram group has a CTA of the product that the company sells.

For myself, I am compensated for the growth. Which I was recruited to do. When I reach the milestones along the way, and eventually the 50k, I am compensated. A good added incentive to learn something new.

kweiss said:

good luck! I am following.

I was / am part of some groups on Telegram. Mostly Crypto groups and trading signals.

How do you intend to get new members to your group? And what is the monetisation plan?

Click to expand...

That is the fun part that I'll need to figure out. I will be testing out traditional methods from regular invites to growth hacking routes of referral campaigns and coding bots.

The group has a CTA for the product that they are selling. My compensation is for that growth which will eventually lead to potential customers.

3/22/19: 148 group members


Wednesday (3/20/19) - We used 3 telegram accounts that I manage in the group were used to invite 20-50 people each from a competitor's group. All 3 of the accounts were hit with the "Error: Sorry, you can only send messages mutual contacts at the moment." message. 2 out of the 3 accounts were able to invite up to 50, while the 3rd account received the message by the 20th invite.

Thursday (3/21/19) - Cannot invite with any of the 3 accounts, still given the same message of the mutual contacts. Created 2 new accounts with google numbers, within the first 5 invites, both newly created accounts were hit with the "Error: Sorry, you can only send messages mutual contacts at the moment." message.

Friday (3/21/19) - Same problem. Cannot invite members for any of the 5 accounts, the same error message of the mutual contacts.


What Have We Learned So Far:
- From previous research and testing, 50 invites per day for an account seem to be the daily limit.
- There is a high chance that the age of the accounts have a factor in the limitations of invites.
- It may possible that the IP is tracked, especially with 5 accounts hitting invitation limits. Will need to test this more.
- Inviting members manually from a competitor's page took more time than allocated, need to research a way to scrape the user information (@username) to process faster invitation process.

3/25/19: 413 group members


Saturday (3/23/19) - While waiting for the accounts to get "unsuspended" from inviting members, we wrote a python script that is able to scrape members data from public groups.

In the data scraping, we are able to obtain the following:
- Username
- User ID
- Access Hash
- Name of User
- Group Name
- Group ID

The first initial scraping of the group user data was taking close to 30 mins - 1 hr depending on the group size but was able to rework the code to about less than 10 mins now. Still some room to grow on the code in terms of time duration, and will need to test it more. If you are interested in getting any telegram public group's member data scraped, let me know and I'll be more than happy to do it for research.

Sunday (3/24/19) - The 5 accounts are now able to invite members again. Kept in mind of the 50 invite limit, but needed to test it over. With each account, members were invited in increments of 10.

Account 1 - Invited 10 Members
Account 2 - Invited 20 Members
Account 3 - Invited 30 Members
Account 4 - Invited 40 Members
Account 5 - Invited 50 Members ( was hit with the "Error: Sorry, you can only send messages mutual contacts at the moment." message)

With the remaining 4 accounts (1-4), we invited up to 49 members each without any error message.


What Have We Learned So Far:
- From further testing and research, 50 invites looks to be the limit. Need to test on how long the invitation limit resets, the assumption is --> 24 hr/daily reset.
- The age of the telegram accounts looks to have a factor, will need to test this more. Will create new accounts and test and trial. Will create new accounts with different IPs as well. Need to research for proxy providers for telegram.

Hey man, I wish you luck in your journey. I actually started my own channel but when I reached 200 users I got a message that I can't add new people to the channel directly, don't you know smthg about it?

FreeMan228 said:

Hey man, I wish you luck in your journey. I actually started my own channel but when I reached 200 users I got a message that I can't add new people to the channel directly, don't you know smthg about it?

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"As the channel‘s creator, you may invite the first 200 members to your channel. Once the member count reaches 200, the channel is on its own. If it’s a public channel, it will have a username and a telegram.me/ link (e.g. t.me/telegram) – you can post this link on social networks, advertise it in magazines, or tattoo it on your back. If you have a private channel, you can send an invite link to your friends." (https://www.telegram.org/faq_channels)

Due to this limitation, we have gone forward with creating a group instead of a channel in the beginning. Down the road, once we have established a sizable following in our group, we will direct that traffic to our channel.

Appreciate the good vibes!

That is some quick growth! Definitely something I'll be paying attention to as it doesn't look saturated.

everythingred said:

That is some quick growth! Definitely something I'll be paying attention to as it doesn't look saturated.

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Ya, there is a lot of potential in telegram because of its developer friendly nature. As more people are finding distrust in facebook/whatsapp, telegram is becoming a better option especially for businesses. Look at the cryptocurrency industry, no investor will take you seriously if you don't have a strong telegram/discord community.

3/27/19: 1065 group members


Monday (3/25/19) - Manually invited another 196 members with 4 out of the 5 accounts (49 invites each). 1 of the accounts (Account 5) is still given an error message from hitting the 50 daily limit on Sunday. Researched the remaining day on SMS provider, virtual numbers, and SIM cards for more account creation.

Tuesday (3/26/19) - 196 members invited with 4 out of the 5 accounts. Account 5 still out of commission. Research on a proxy provider for Telegram account creation.

Wednesday (3/27/19) - Account 5 is able to invite again. 245 members invited with all 5 accounts (49 invites each). Testing out a few providers for the numbers and proxy. Created 10 more accounts. Letting the accounts rest.


What Have We Learned So Far:
- It looks like hitting the 50 daily limit puts a short term "suspension" onto the account. That suspension seems to last around a couple of days. Not sure on how this factors, if those invited members report spam onto the account. Will need to test this further.
- The age of the account definitely has a factor when inviting members. Will be testing on how much time duration it will take after account creation to build up the daily limit.
- Manually inviting them takes a bit of time..... Will be researching on a method that will utilize the API to do a mass invite.

Man you growing too fast wish you best of luck

White River said:

Man you growing too fast wish you best of luck

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Ya, it'll be a double edge sword initially. As growth hacking will raise some eyebrows at first. Goal is to test the parameters/limits to optimize the growth while staying under the radar.

thanks bro for help

hey man, did you try to drive users from different sources such as facebook ads?

Good luck with your journey.You should also post picture with your daily updates.

FreeMan228 said:

hey man, did you try to drive users from different sources such as facebook ads?

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Have not utilized facebook ads. Been busy coding up a script that utilizes telegram's api.

Rocky007 said:

Good luck with your journey.You should also post picture with your daily updates.

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Thank you for the support! I'll do a screenshot for the amount of followers on each update!

Hey OP! Best of luck to you on this journey. I will be sure to check in often.

congratulations on making so much effort to achieve today's success, I am very impressed and always support you