Building the "Shopify for Telegram": How I'm automating the Creator Economy
While many are focused on traditional platforms for monetization, I’ve been looking closely at the Telegram ecosystem. The engagement there is high, but the tools for creators are still quite limited.
In my experience, many group owners and experts are still managing their projects manually. They spend a significant amount of time every day verifying payment receipts and managing member access. This manual process is a major obstacle to growth.
I started developing the Kiges ecosystem to address these inefficiencies. My current focus is Kiges Handig, a service designed to automate the operational side of a Telegram community.
A few things I’ve noticed while building this:
The importance of instant access. If a user has to wait even a few minutes for someone to manually verify their payment, the experience is diminished. Automation ensures that access is granted immediately, which is essential in a digital environment.
Systems should work in the background. A creator should not have to manually intervene in the subscription process. The goal is to have a system that handles payments, renewals, and access management silently and reliably.
Professional content protection. For anyone providing exclusive value, security is a priority. Implementing native restrictions for forwarding and copying has been one of the most requested features to help maintain the exclusivity of the content.
I’m currently focused on making Kiges Handig a stable and scalable solution for communities of any size. I’m building this as a solo founder and I’m interested in connecting with others who are building in the Telegram space or working on automated SaaS products.
For the developers here: How are you approaching high-concurrency tasks in the Telegram ecosystem? I’m interested to hear about different architectural choices for scaling bots.
Manually verifying payment receipts for a growing community is a huge bottleneck that distracts creators from actually producing high-quality content. Most group owners don't realize that automating the offboarding process for expired subscriptions is just as vital for maintaining premium value as the onboarding itself. Have you considered implementing a tiered access system where users can automatically upgrade their roles based on their lifetime spend?
You're right about the bottleneck. Manual work is what stops many creators from scaling their community.
The offboarding part was a priority for me. Kiges Handig revokes access immediately when a subscription ends, so there is no need for manual cleanup. It keeps the group exclusive for those who actually pay.
The tiered access idea is great. Right now the platform supports multiple products and plans per bot, but an automated upgrade based on lifetime spend is a very logical next step. I’ll add this to the feature list.
In your experience, do users care more about the features of a higher tier or just the status/role name?
The status of a specific role often drives more engagement in private communities because it creates a clear social hierarchy that rewards the most loyal members.
While features are important for utility, it is that visible "VIP" or "Elite" badge next to a name that usually triggers the FOMO needed to get people to upgrade their lifetime spend.
I see this psychological trigger work effectively in my high-tier PR and media placement work where we leverage a brand's exclusive status to build massive authority on major news outlets.
Are you thinking about making those tier transitions public in the chat so other members can see when someone levels up?