Why we built Rippl on Telegram first
Six months into building Rippl, we killed the Instagram integration. Not because it was hard to build. Because it was wrong.
The moment we realised Instagram wasn't the answer
We launched a beta with a handful of creators on Instagram Stories. The early numbers looked decent. Impressions, engagement, all the metrics Instagram loves to serve back to you. But when we dug into the conversions, we found something that made us pause: the people sharing links in the captions and swipe-ups weren't communities. They were audiences. Strangers. The difference matters.
A creator with 50,000 followers sharing a link in a Story is broadcast marketing dressed up in social clothing. The people clicking aren't doing so because they trust the recommendation. They're clicking because they saw it. The link lands in a feed full of noise.
We realised we'd been thinking about this wrong. We weren't building a platform for influencers to spray links at followers. We were building a platform for communities to share things that actually mattered to them.
Telegram is where recommendations have weight
Telegram groups and channels are strange places if you're used to the usual social media. There's no algorithmic feed. No engagement bait. No ads trying to distract you. It's just people who chose to be in a group, reading messages from people they trust (or at least know). The ratio of noise to signal is inverted compared to mainstream platforms.
When someone in a Telegram group about productivity tools shares a link, the other members actually pay attention. They know why that person is in the group. They know the recommendation probably isn't random.
That's when we understood what Rippl needed to be. Not a spray-and-pray tool for sending links to the biggest audience possible. A system that lets community owners, niche creators, micro-influencers with tight circles, and student ambassadors actually earn for sharing things their people genuinely care about. And let brands reach those communities directly with measurable, honest metrics.
Building around trust, not follower counts
The technical choice to build on Telegram (and add WhatsApp, Discord, Snapchat, and niche groups) meant we had to rethink how we tracked results. Follower counts are useless in these spaces. Identity verification became essential. So did pay-per-verified-click and pay-per-action pricing. If a brand is going to pay a community member to share something, the brand needs to know who that person is and what actually happened when someone clicked the link.
That's also why we built the anti-fraud layer into the platform from day one. We're not brokering links between strangers. We're verifying every promoter. We're tracking every click and conversion. When a community owner in a Telegram group shares a promo link, both the brand and the platform know it happened, who did it, and whether it led to a real result.
Free tier users get three promo links to start. Pro and Business tiers unlock unlimited. Channel verification is free over time, or you can fast-track it for £9.99. The MRVL 500 founding-promoter program offers Builder and Vanguard tiers for the people we want to build with from the start. Simple. Honest. Built for people, not algorithms.
The real work was listening, not building
We spent weeks talking to Telegram group admins, Discord server owners, and community managers before we wrote a single line of campaign code. What we heard was consistent: they had real influence over their people. They wanted to make money from that without polluting their groups with random affiliate spam. They wanted tools that were boring and reliable, not shiny and complicated.
Brands, meanwhile, told us they were tired of influencer agencies showing them follower counts and engagement metrics. They wanted to know: did anyone actually care? Did it convert? Can I pay only for results that matter to my business?
Telegram fit both briefs. So did the other platforms we added. The common thread isn't the app itself. It's that these are places where recommendations carry real weight because the community is real.
What this means for how Rippl works
Promoters use the iOS and Android apps to generate trackable links. They drop those links into their Telegram channels, WhatsApp groups, Discord servers, Snapchat communities, or wherever their audience actually gathers. People click. We track the verified click or conversion. They earn. It's that cycle repeated at scale across thousands of small, trusted communities instead of broadcast to millions of strangers.
Brands see where their traffic came from. They know which community, which promoter, whether it led to a click or a purchase. They set a CPC or CPA target and a budget cap. They pay only for results. No platform fee on top. No minimum spend. No commitments to vanity metrics.
The dashboard shows everything. Earnings, campaign performance, click tracking. Payouts go to Stripe. Simple enough that a student ambassador can use it. Serious enough that a brand managing a six-figure campaign can trust it.
We could have built Rippl as another layer on top of Instagram and TikTok. Instead, we chose to build where communities actually live. The question now is whether your brand is still chasing follower counts, or whether you're ready to reach the communities where recommendations actually matter.