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In its latest financial results, NAGA said that 8% of new clients in 2024 came from Telegram.
That came on the back of the company being the first broker to launch a Mini App within Telegram.
What makes this more remarkable is that the company only launched that app in September.
Assuming the majority of those 8% of new clients came via the app, that means the figure may actually be misleadingly low. What would the figure have been had the app been active for the whole year?
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There have been other signs that Telegram apps are becoming more of a ‘thing’.
Crypto app Blum announced in mid-February that it had raised $5m in VC funding, with the venture arm of exchange OKX among the participants.
Blum was set up by two ex-Binance execs and, significantly, its app is only available as a Mini App within Telegram.
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How real it all is, I can’t say, but Blum has a huge following. Their Telegram channel has almost 30m subs. The company’s YouTube channel has 8.3m subs. Vladimir Serkis, one of the company’s founders, says the app has over 90m users.
Like I said, it’s difficult to say how ‘real’ these numbers are but they are not completely implausible.
Telegram has ~950m MAUs and those seem to skew more towards countries that are sanctioned, have capital controls and/or fit in the (increasingly meaningless) emerging market bucket. In other words, countries that tend to exhibit higher rates of crypto ownership.
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Exinity, the owner of Alpari and FXTM, has also made a $10m investment in PiP World. This is a company that has a couple of apps that are only accessible via Roblox or as a Telegram Mini App.
I will be real and say most of the Mini Apps I have seen are related to crypto and none of them have done much to dissuade me that crypto is basically for brainlets, get rich quickers, or – more understandably – people looking for easier access to dollars. It can be all three too!
However, there are other apps as well. For example, people have built weather apps, games, and news aggregators. Plus, the fact NAGA has done well is a sign you don’t have to be in crypto to succeed as a Mini App.
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In terms of how you actually go about launching one, Telegram has a page on how to do it. This Medium post is also a simplified version of how you can go about it.
As to why you would do it, the answer should be obvious – you get more clients. However, there are other factors to think about here.
One is the fluidity – or ‘seamlessness’ to use tech worker language – of the sign up process. It is very simple and easy to move from the Telegram app to a Mini App.
I personally use Telegram more for work, spamming messages to readers of this newsletter, and following news feeds, so I tend to have it open more on desktop than mobile. Even then, a lot of apps are easy to use.
By way of comparison, the user experience for getting an app from Google or Apple is not as good. With Telegram, you just hit ‘open app’ and you are in the app. If I get a broker app for my iPhone, I have to find a link to it – annoying if I’m on desktop – and then download the app, then open it. It’s not as smooth.
Another point here is that you are not subject to the whims of the Google and Apple store policies. I guess Telegram does have some policies but they don’t seem restrictive.
Another factor is reverse solicitation marketing. To use an analogy, we looked before at how you can market NDFs in Brazil, but then put them in a platform with CFDs. If someone trades CFDs, they did so at their own volition – you never marketed to them.
The same is true of the Telegram app. Your Mini App is just there, listed with a bunch of others. If someone finds it, you never marketed to them.
Note that this would be a strength if you were looking to market in emerging markets or the other way around, meaning you are offshore and want to reach European clients. There are already loads of brokers using affiliates and IBs this way on the app.
On the flipside, if you are doing marketing within Telegram – something I have seen at least one broker do – there are also a few cool features.
The most obvious relates to what I just said. If you are able to market your app within Telegram itself, the process of moving from a Channel to an app is really smooth. There are also tools you can use, like Telegram Bots, that help to facilitate this process.
Another factor is that Telegram has a built in option to add affiliate marketing programmes to Mini Apps. The upside is that these are extremely easy for both the app owner and the user to set up and start operating.
The downside is that you cannot (currently) get paid in anything except for Telegram Stars. These can be swapped for crypto but it’s not a great process. Otherwise you have to use them to buy stuff within the Telegram universe, which at the moment is…mostly dumb crypto apps.
That also points to a couple of potential pitfalls for Telegram Mini Apps.
One is that if you speak to normal people, who don’t work in this industry, they tend to think of Telegram as slightly shady. Branding wise it may be a negative as a result, although this could be purely anecdotal on my part.
The other problem I see is one that I think has plagued Telegram for years now, namely that the search function sucks. There are times when you can search for something that is close to being the exact name of a channel and it won’t show up.
This is similar for Mini Apps. The search function is not that good and the browser section is just much worse, compared to something like the App Store. As one anecdote for this, I was browsing a Reddit thread for this article about Mini Apps and one person said they didn’t realise they existed – not good!
It’s not even that easy to find the app section and, when you do, Telegram only shows the most popular apps based on how many Telegram Stars they generate as a daily average + the number of users.
Given most brokers don’t build their own app and those that do are probably busy enough working on their existing iOS and Android ones, the likelihood is we won’t see too many – if any – brokers trying this.
But making the effort to do so, assuming it is not too time intensive, would probably be worth it. There are a lot of cool tools and marketing opportunities within Telegram itself and, as NAGA’s results show, there are a lot of potential clients there too.
