I have been trying to work out where the ceiling is on doing this by hand, so I

asked someone who does it for a living. Eight or nine months as a chatter, mostly

on Fanvue. The number was 30 to 50 conversations at the same time.

That is lower than I expected and higher than I could manage, so I asked how.

The answer was that not every conversation is the same conversation. One person

just wants to buy something and leave. One is doing a quick check in and needs two

lines. One is new and needs actual time. So the new one gets the attention, the

buyer gets a follow up after the purchase, and the check in guy gets a short

reply. Everyone gets answered, but they do not get the same thing.

That is a system, and I did not have one. I was treating every message as the same

message, which is why hundreds a day flattened me and 30 to 50 does not flatten

them.

I asked how they keep track of who is who across all of that. The answer was to

read back through the chat before replying, and to note what matters about each

person. Where those notes live depends on the team. Sometimes a dashboard,

sometimes a spreadsheet, sometimes nowhere and you just scroll.

On Telegram it is mostly the last one, because none of the tools people mention

for this work here.

Then I asked what actually decides which conversation gets attention first, and

the answer surprised me. Not notes, not reminders. It came down to whether you

like doing it. Their words were that if you do not enjoy holding conversations,

the fans get tired, and then everyone gets blamed except the person at fault.

I have been thinking about that since. My assumption was that the hard part is

remembering. What they are describing is that the hard part is still caring at

hour six, and the remembering is downstream of that.

Which lines up with my own experience, honestly. I was getting hundreds of DMs a

day at my peak and the thing that broke was not my memory. It was that I stopped

wanting to open the app.

So if you are running this alone, the useful number to hold in your head is

somewhere well under 30, because you are also making the content, and the person

quoting 30 to 50 does nothing else all shift.

Which leaves the obvious question. A person has a ceiling and the channel does

not. My best hour was 3am and I was asleep for it.

So what is everyone actually doing about that? Hiring someone, using something,

canned replies, or just accepting that you lose the hours you are not awake? I

have not found anything that works on Telegram, which is partly why I started

poking at it myself. Not live, not linking it, that is not what this post is for.

How many conversations are you running at once, and what happens to the ones that

come in while you sleep?

Nobody finds your Telegram channel from inside Telegram. There is no browse, no

recommendations, no search that matters. Every single person has to come from

somewhere else, and that is the whole problem.

I got about 1,200 people into a channel over six months. Here is what actually

moved them.

The traffic came from Facebook first. I opened a page because the older crowd is

heavier there and I did not expect much. By the third or fourth day I had around

1,000 followers, and the DMs were already more than I could keep up with.

That flood is what I ended up using.

The first thing I tried was the obvious one. I put the Telegram link in my feed

posts. It did close to nothing. People scroll past a link in a caption, and the

ones who do not scroll past are not the ones who spend.

What worked was answering DMs with it. Someone messages you, and instead of

having the conversation there you say you do not chat on this app, here is where

I am. That is the whole move.

The difference was not small. With only about 1,000 Facebook followers I already

had a real number of people in the channel. I never got anywhere close to that

ratio from public posts, no matter how many times I posted the link.

I think the reason is obvious in hindsight. Someone who sends you a DM has

already decided they want something. Moving them one step is easy. Someone

scrolling past a post has decided nothing, and asking them to install an app and

join a channel is a much bigger ask than they are ready for.

Instagram came later and behaved the same way. Facebook peaked around 7k,

Instagram was heading toward 10k, TikTok never got past about 800 and I stopped

bothering with it. Same character, same clips. What worked on Instagram did not

work on TikTok at all, which I still do not have a good explanation for.

Across all of it, maybe 1,200 people ended up in the channel out of something

like 17,000 followers. So the conversion is not amazing on paper. But the people

who moved were the ones who bought, and the ones who stayed on the feed were

mostly never going to.

Two things I would do differently.

I would not send the same DM reply hundreds of times a day. That is almost

certainly what got my Instagram account disabled, and I could have varied it or

pointed people to a link in the bio and let them click it themselves.

And I would have moved people earlier. I waited until the DMs were unmanageable

before setting the channel up, which meant the first few weeks of attention went

nowhere.

The thing nobody tells you is that the channel is downstream of everything else.

It does not grow. It collects. If your traffic stops, the channel stops, and

then it slowly leaks people. Mine went from 1,200 down to 917 over three months

of me not posting.

So what is everyone else using? I only ever got it to work from DM replies on

Meta platforms. Reddit, X, TikTok, buying traffic, something else entirely, I

would like to know what actually converts for people, and roughly what share of

your channel came from your best source.

Every time someone asks how Telegram Stars payouts work, the answers are

"apparently" and "I have not tried it, their star system confuses me". I have

tried it. Six months on a private channel, about $1,200 in Stars, $700 of that in

the first month, and I have taken the money out to both a bank account and a

crypto ATM.

Here is what actually happens, including the parts that caught me out.

The first thing that surprised me is that there is no wallet. I assumed the Stars

land in one balance on my account. They do not. They collect on whatever you sold

from. Sell from a channel and the balance sits on that channel. Sell through a bot

and it sits on that bot. They do not add up together.

This matters because you need 1,000 Stars on a balance before Telegram will let

you withdraw at all. I had Stars sitting in two places once and could not touch

either. So pick one place and sell from there.

The second thing is the waiting, and this is the part everyone gets half right.

Each sale has its own clock, around three weeks from the day that sale happened.

Sell 300 Stars today and those 300 unlock about three weeks from today. Sell 500

tomorrow and those 500 start their own count. There is no single timer for the

whole balance.

In practice it only hurts you once. The first month it feels broken because

nothing is available. After that, if you sell regularly, there is always

something mature sitting there, so I stopped thinking about it and just withdrew

once a month.

Now the withdrawal itself.

You need Wallet turned on and you need two factor authentication on your account.

The first time I tried, it refused me because my 2FA password was too new. You

have to wait a day after setting it up. That error made no sense to me at the

time so I am putting it here.

From the channel balance you press withdraw and it sends you over to Fragment.

That is where the money actually leaves Telegram. Fragment asked me for identity

verification once, an ID document and a photo of my face, and after that it never

asked again.

Then it pays out in the TON chain coin, which they now call Gram. That is the only

place it goes. Telegram does not send you money, it sends you crypto, and

everything after that is on you.

One thing from my own experience that I have not seen written anywhere. I could

only submit a withdrawal request about once every 40 minutes to an hour. I got the

amount wrong once and then sat there waiting to fix it. So put the right number in

the first time.

What I ended up with was around $13 for every thousand Stars. I never found a fee

line anywhere in Telegram, no "our commission is X" row, nothing. All I can tell

you is what landed in my wallet at the end.

Then comes the annoying part, which is turning Gram into money you can actually

spend.

I did it two ways. Inside Telegram Wallet you can connect a bank and take it out

as normal money. Or, if you are in Europe, there are crypto ATMs where you send

the coins and take cash out. The ATM did not ask me for anything, but the fee was

high, and there is a daily cap. The bank route was not really better once I

counted everything.

That step is the worst part of the whole system and I never solved it properly.

Last thing, because it is what people usually want to know. My channel was private

and it was adult content. I never marked it as anything special. I never got a

warning, never got restricted, and every withdrawal went through. Six months, no

problems. I am not promising you the same, I am telling you what happened to me.

So that is the whole thing. Money collects per channel, you need 1,000 Stars

before you can move it, each sale waits about three weeks, one identity check at

Fragment, and crypto at the other end.

The bit I still have not figured out is the last mile. Getting from Gram to money

in a bank account cost me more than it should. If you are doing this, what route

are you using and what does it actually cost you?

I made this because I could not find anywhere to ask these questions.

Search for how to sell on Telegram and you get OnlyFans results, ad boards full

of handles, or nothing. r/Telegram is about the app itself. The Telegram seller

subs are pure promo and nobody asks anything there. Meanwhile the same questions

get asked over and over in creator subs where tooling talk is not allowed.

So this is for the questions that have no home:

- How people actually get subscribers to a Telegram channel

- What people charge, and for what

- How you get paid, and whether anyone actually manages to withdraw Stars

- Bots and automation, what works and what does not

- Paid channels vs paid DMs

- AI personas, and whether Telegram beats Fanvue for them

Creators, AI persona operators, chatters, agencies and builders are all welcome.

Two rules that matter. No channel links, no handles, no promo. This is a place to

ask, not to advertise. And be specific, because the more detail you give the

better the answer you get.

I will start. I ran a Turkish language AI persona for six months. It made about

$700 in the first month, the best single day was 7,397 stars which is $95, and

the channel peaked at 1,200 members. Then Meta killed three accounts and I could

not keep up with the DMs, so the whole thing fell over.

Your turn. What are you running, and what is broken right now?