Why we bet the business on Telegram

The crowded feed problem nobody talks about

Instagram, TikTok, Twitter. They're powerful, sure. But they're also where every brand screams at once. Your ad sits next to a competitor's. Algorithms decide who sees it. You're paying for eyeballs, not trust. I spent years watching brands burn budgets on impression-based campaigns that looked good in a dashboard but delivered nothing in the real world.

Then I started noticing something. People weren't abandoning social media. They were fragmenting. Moving conversations into smaller, tighter spaces. Telegram groups. WhatsApp circles. Discord servers. Private Snapchat communities. Spaces where word-of-mouth still works.

A brand doesn't need millions of impressions. It needs the right 200 people in a room where someone they actually know is vouching for it.

Telegram isn't a social network. It's a delivery mechanism.

Here's what took me a while to understand: Telegram isn't competing with TikTok for attention. It's solving a different problem entirely. A community manager in Telegram can send a message to 5,000 members and know that 60% will see it within minutes. Not because of an algorithm. Because they're there. They've opted in. They're checking it regularly.

When we started building Rippl, we didn't ask 'how do we make influencers more efficient?' We asked 'what if we paid the people who already have trust inside real communities?' A niche Discord server about cybersecurity has 800 members. The person who runs it has spent two years building that trust. They know their audience. When they recommend something, people listen.

Telegram also doesn't require you to be a 'creator.' You don't need a verified badge or a follower count. You just need a group of people who value what you share. A student who runs a university housing group. A parent managing a school WhatsApp. A hobby club moderator. These are the people marketing should reach, not celebrities.

How we built Rippl around this reality

When we designed the platform, we made some deliberate choices. Every promoter is identity-verified. No anonymous accounts. No bot networks. Brands working with us know they're paying for real people in real communities, not hollow metrics. It's slower than affiliate networks that don't care about fraud. It's also the only way this actually works at scale.

We set up pay-per-verified-click and pay-per-action pricing because we wanted skin in the game for both sides. A brand sets a budget and a cost goal. A community promoter generates a trackable link, shares it inside their Telegram or WhatsApp group, and earns when someone actually clicks or converts. No middleman taking a cut. No mystery. Just performance.

The tech is straightforward: anti-fraud tracking, a wallet, an earnings dashboard, payouts via Stripe. We also made the barrier to entry low. Free tier gets you 3 promo links. Pro starts at £9.99 a month. We're not trying to extract value from creators. We're trying to make it worth their time.

A real example: why this works

Take a fintech app looking to grow in the UK. Spending £50,000 on Google ads gets them maybe 300 app installs at £167 each. Not bad. But they're cold traffic. Half the users uninstall within a week.

Same fintech works with us instead. They run CPA campaigns at £8 per verified conversion. They reach out to 40 community promoters on Telegram. Some run investment groups. Some run student finance communities. Some run side-hustle networks. These are people who already talk about money, savings, investing. The app gets shared into spaces where it actually belongs.

They get 280 conversions in two weeks. Cost per acquisition: £8.40. Retention is higher because the recommendation came from someone trusted, not an algorithm. And the brand now knows exactly which communities drive the best users.

That's not influencer marketing. That's not affiliate spam. It's communities doing what they've always done: telling each other about good stuff. We just made it measurable and paid for it fairly.

The friction we didn't expect

Building this wasn't frictionless. We spent months working out channel verification because we needed a way for brands to trust that a Telegram group is real and that the person claiming to run it actually does. We made it free (takes a few days) or fast-track for £9.99. We built iOS and Android apps because not everyone uses Telegram in a browser. We set up the MRVL 500 program to give founding promoters - the people taking the early risk - better terms and visibility.

We also had to fight the instinct to scale quickly. Easy to say 'let's add Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, whatever.' Harder to say no. But Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Snapchat, and niche groups are where the actual behaviour is. That's where communities live. Everything else feels like we're chasing social platforms and their algorithmic whims instead of building something that works.

What this means for brands that are tired of the old playbook

If you're a marketer and you're exhausted by CPMs, algorithms, and attribution nightmares, Telegram-native communities offer a way out. Not instead of paid ads. Alongside them. You get measurable results. You reach people in contexts where they actually trust recommendations. You pay for outcomes, not vanity metrics.

And if you run a community - a Telegram group, a Discord server, a WhatsApp circle - and people keep asking if you're 'monetising,' now you have an answer that doesn't compromise the space. Share a link. Earn money. Keep your community the way you like it.