Telegram Apps Center is the main directory of mini-applications in Telegram with millions of users
Interview with the head of the Telegram Apps Center, a global application catalog that seeks to integrate into the Telegram application. And it seems that he has every chance of doing this in the next year or two.
Asked questions
Dmitry Begovatov – IT columnist, podcast author “Startup Secrets”creator of a platform for startups Product Radar.
Issue Guest
Gleb Vorontsov
Head of Telegram Apps Center, a global catalog of telegram bots (web apps, games, utilities, blockchain).
Telegram is a super app
Gleb Vorontsov, a guest of my recent episode of the Startup Secrets podcast, long ago understood what real super-applications are.
Until recently, he headed VK Mini Apps, where useful utilities are published within the most popular social network in Russia.
Today Gleb heads the Telegram Mini Apps direction at the TON Foundation, with the support of which the Telegram Apps Center (tApps Center) is being developed.
Telegram Apps Center is a global catalog of bots in Telegram, which plans to eventually become part of the interface of our favorite messenger.
Generally speaking, it is now difficult to imagine Telegram as a messenger in the traditional sense: for users from Russia, it has replaced news sources, social networks, correspondence, as well as many other useful applications that are used daily.
Today Telegram has more than 900 million users, and a huge part of them use the new features of the platform – mini-applications.
However, all this variety has an obvious problem: finding the right bot yourself is almost impossible.
The application does not have a single catalog of services, and most third-party sites do not update their catalogs or give away the best places in the top for money.
I talked with Gleb about the prospects for the development of mini-applications inside Telegram, successful examples, features of the catalog and grants for application developers.
Why did a single catalog appear only now?
The first telegram bots began to appear back in 2015, and since then the number of users and functionality have grown every year.
Recently, so many useful bots have appeared that I even had to create a separate Telegram channel to talk about the most interesting of them.
Therefore, in a conversation with Gleb, I asked a question: why did the official catalog of bots in Telegram appear only now?
According to him, an important indicator of the prospects for an “application store inside Telegram” for the tApps Center development team was the success of VK Mini Apps, where Gleb worked before joining the Telegram team.
The secret to the popularity of VK Mini Apps
Today, the VK Mini Apps platform has up to 50 million unique users per month.
That is, most of the users of the social network go to Mini Apps and use the services inside the application.
Gleb was at the origins of the creation of VK Mini Apps and went from developer to head of a business unit, so I couldn’t help but ask him about the secrets of the success of the VK platform.
Most web applications within VK operate in the B2C segment, since users mainly log into the social network for entertainment content in their free time.
However, there is a large business segment within VK, and communities need tools to develop their sites and attract new traffic. So in the B2B segment there are also many applications that help build funnels, attract traffic and design your communities.
Considering that Telegram has long ceased to be an ordinary messenger, the idea of creating its own catalog of web applications became obvious to the TON Foundation team.
Who is the TON Foundation and why should they develop the Telegram Apps Center
The TON Foundation is an international organization registered in Switzerland, which is funded by the most generous TON holders and helps develop blockchain technologies within TON.
It is thanks to the TON blockchain that a cryptocurrency appeared in Telegram, which is integrated into many services: from Telegram Ads to the user wallet. The capabilities of bots have been seriously expanded using crypto.
Gleb and the development team hope that soon Pavel Durov will add an entry point to the catalog with some fresh Telegram update, and the Telegram Apps Center will appear for every user of the messenger.
A serious obstacle to catalog integration in Telegram is the existing App Store policy, which limits the capabilities of built-in application catalogs. So we may have to wait for a few more directives from the European Union to introduce an official marketplace inside the messenger!
Next, Gleb and I talked about how the Telegram Apps Center works: what applications will be of interest to users, is it difficult to get into the catalog, and how the team plans to support talented developers
About the development of Telegram Apps Center
We decided to start our conversation with the case of Gleb’s favorite application in the Apps Center: it turned out to be a game about developing your pet called Gatto.
Telegram Apps Center The idea of the game is as simple as possible: you develop your pet, monitor its health and dress it in beautiful clothes. The trick of Gatto is that your pets can then be sold to other players for real money, and with each level its value increases.
The Gatto app has skyrocketed to the top of the Apps Center rankings, and its audience is growing by thousands of percent per month.
Today, the top of the catalog is mainly entertainment applications, and this is not the will of fate, but a well-thought-out strategy from Gleb and the team to capture the market.
The fact is that the simplest games with the opportunity to earn real money easily attract users to the site. Because of this, the popularity of the catalog and TON as a whole is growing.
So now it is entertainment services that most often fall into the Editor's Choice category.
Where does Telegram Apps get users from?
Gleb and the team understand that to attract traffic you should not use traditional tools, such as advertising in search results.
Telegram already has 900 million users, and they are the ones who can go to the catalog and choose a Web application to their liking.
So the main source of traffic for the catalog is advertising within Telegram.
Initially, the guys advertised through Telegram Ads, a targeted advertising platform that is shown on different channels.
Thus, the average cost per user was $1. Surprisingly, the quality of users was much higher than the marketing team expected.
If it was initially believed that attracted users would simply go to the site and leave it, then in reality each user on average found and opened more than two applications. This suggests that the platform is really interesting to those who are using Telegram right now.
Recently, Gleb’s team began to attract traffic using Web 3.0 tools, namely through the Notcoin community. Users were given tasks to go to the application marketplace, for which they received a chance to mine a coin and sell it for real money.
However, with such traffic-driving methods, the focus on entertainment apps becomes even greater. Notсoin is used by a certain audience of users, and they are unlikely to be interested in applications for personal effectiveness.
However, Gleb and the team understand that it is precisely such users who will be able to attract users to the platform and are ready to actively learn something new. So, perhaps at this stage this is the most correct strategy.
Catalog audience
We had a great conversation about attracting users, and then I realized an interesting thing: how to recognize your audience, given that Telegram is obsessed with user privacy?
And no, there will be no revelations about Telegram’s usage policies: Gleb and the team don’t know that much about the site’s users. And this was a completely new experience for the team of developers who moved from VK Mini Apps: building portraits of their audience there was as easy as shelling pears.
To learn more about their users, developers had to make direct contact and launch audience surveys.
It would be nice to dig up a photo of such a survey here
It turned out that users from the CIS make up only a quarter of the audience.
The whole layout looks something like this:
Gleb added that recently the guys have seen an increase in the audience from the USA: it is already 10% and is actively growing.
How to get into the catalog
The selection criteria are as simple as possible: you need to be a web bot or a game. It is these developments that most often end up in user recommendations. Text bots have lower priority.
This is due to the fact that moderation inside the store is now done manually: the team independently reviews candidates and selects the best.
However, Gleb said that his team is right now working to make its catalog a full-fledged marketplace. Soon, users will be able to leave ratings, and this should become the main algorithm for promoting applications in the store.
In the meantime, we have to work in “manual mode”.
How to protect your app from fraudulent reviews
As soon as developers have real motivation to get to the top of the store, developers will have to face the problem of inflated reviews. As the author of a service that votes for the best startups, Product Radar, I understand that this problem is very difficult to deal with.
Gleb and the team understand that they currently do not have enough resources for a full-fledged moderation service. Moreover, as the product grows, moderation will take up more and more resources that could be invested in business growth. Therefore, the main feature of the service came to the rescue: blockchain.
The team plans to introduce a unique identifier for each user so that fake accounts simply cannot get onto the platform. For real users, this will not complicate the registration process in any way, but it will add a lot of problems for those who want to “hack the system.”
Developer Grants
In addition to creating a space for startups, the Telegram Apps team has created grants for talented developers.
Here are the main types of grants:
Grant for creating a startup, up to $10 thousand: if you have a team, a cool idea and a desire to make a project inside the TON blockchain.
Grant for project development, up to $10 thousand: this option is suitable for those who are already developing their project within the TON blockchain, but want to receive money to improve their product.
Grant for integration into TON, up to $50 thousand: if you already have a product with a significant audience that has not yet been implemented into the TON ecosystem, you can receive a grant and develop tokenomics within your product yourself.
The guys get an increase in activity within TON, and startups get the necessary funding. It's a win-win situation.
What to read/listen/watch to stay on top of TON and mini-applications
Telegram channels:
The Daily Ton – a channel for those who want to learn more about the development of TON and everything connected with it;
Web3 on affordable – a channel where they talk about Internet 3.0 in simple language and what they eat it with;
Book:
50 business models of the new economy – the success story of unicorns that have appeared over the past 20 years and changed the rules of the game
Anime:
Akir – this is the very case when a picture from childhood is worth reviewing as an adult in order to discover all the hidden meanings.
Gurren Lagann – a picture that begins with a standard story about the formation of a hero and ends with the problems of all humanity.
The main secret to startup success
I ask this question to all the guests of my podcast, and Gleb was no exception.
In his opinion, the recipe for success consists of two ingredients:
A motivated team that wants to develop each other.
An idea that creates value for the user and solves their problem.
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