How I identify niche Telegram channel owners who are manually translating foreign news every day (and why they're the perfect first customer

I've been trying to find first customers for my AI news aggregator. After sending cold messages to ~10 Telegram channel owners and getting 3 blocks and 1 "interesting" reply, I figured out a better targeting method.

Here's the exact process I now use to find high-fit prospects before reaching out.

The signal I look for

The best-fit customer for my product is someone who:

• Runs a niche Telegram channel (not a media company)

• Manually monitors foreign sources every day

• Already has some monetization (ads, paid subscribers)

The third point matters. No monetization = no budget. The first two mean they have the pain.

How to find them on tgstat.ru

tgstat.ru is a Telegram analytics platform that indexes most public channels. Here's the filter I use:

1. Go to tgstat.ru → Catalog → pick a niche category

2. Filter by: 1,000–15,000 subscribers (solo author zone)

3. Sort by: post frequency (higher = more active)

4. Open each channel and look for these signals:

Green flags:

• Posts at irregular times (morning peak, then gaps) — means one person posting when they can

• Foreign sources mentioned in posts (Reuters, Bloomberg, specific country media)

• Short author commentary on each post — means they're reading and curating, not just reposting

• Advertising contact is a personal @username, not a separate ad account

Red flags:

• "Aggregator" or "all news" in description — they already have automation

• Posts every hour like clockwork — probably already automated

• Ad contact is telega.in or a separate @ads account — means there's a team, not a solo author

The outreach that actually worked

When I found a channel with clear foreign source dependency, I mentioned the specific sources in my message:

Instead of:

"I have an AI news bot that might help you"

I wrote:

"I see you're pulling from Reuters, Vietnamese sources, and Mongolian business media daily — that's a lot of translation. I built a bot that handles exactly this automatically."

The one person who replied positively was someone where I could name 4-5 specific foreign sources from their recent posts.

The three blocks came from channels where I messaged the advertising contact, not the author directly.

The lesson

The contact point matters more than the pitch. Ad managers get dozens of commercial messages daily and block first. Authors get almost none — and if you show you actually read their channel, they respond.

For my niche (Telegram channel owners monitoring foreign news), the right contact is almost always buried in the channel description or a pinned post, not in the advertising contacts section.

If you're selling to niche media owners or content creators, curious whether this maps to your experience — or if you've found a better signal for identifying manual pain vs automated pain.

Demo bot (to see what the product actually does): t.me/ainewsdemobot