u/Wide_Dragonfruit2699

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.

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?

I run a Turkish-language AI persona. Not the US market, so some of this may not

transfer, but the numbers are real and I have not seen anyone post about this

side of it.

I never used Fanvue. Not because I think it is bad, I just never got there. My

first audience came from Facebook and they were already on Telegram, so that is

where I went.

Short version of the setup. I opened a Facebook page first, because the older

audience is heavier there. 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 answer.

That was the first signal that this was going to be a volume problem and not a

traffic problem.

The reasons for Telegram were boring: my character does not get flagged there,

payments are simple, there is no platform cut, and almost everyone already has

the app installed.

One thing I did not expect. Putting the Telegram link in my feed posts did

almost nothing. Sending the same link as a reply to someone who had messaged me

worked. I do not have a clean number for the difference but it was not close.

With only about 1,000 followers I already had a real number of people in the

channel.

First month I made about $700. That is from zero, and it includes the time I

spent learning how to generate the content in the first place. I am on a Mac so

I rented GPUs and ran ComfyUI, trained a LoRA for the character. Best single day

was 7,397 stars, which is $95. I have the Telegram stats screenshots if anyone

wants to see them.

Then it broke, and this is the part I actually want to talk about.

I was getting hundreds of DMs a day. Facebook and Instagram together, thousands

of messages. I could not answer them, so I started replying to everyone with the

same link to push them to Telegram. Doing that hundreds of times is, I think,

what got the Instagram account disabled. Appeals got it back a couple of times

and then it was gone for good. Facebook went the same way. Instagram was close

to 10k, Facebook around 7k.

I opened a second account, same name, reposted the same reels from my local

folder. It died at around 1,000 followers. The third one did too. On both of

those I sent no links at all and I added the AI label. They still died, so I

assume it is device or IP level. After the first ban, nothing I opened from that

machine survived.

But the bans are not the interesting failure here.

Even in Telegram, where the people who came were the ones who would actually

spend, I hit a wall. Every conversation has its own context. What this person

likes, what they already bought, what they asked for last week, what I already

sent them. With hundreds of conversations open I could not hold any of it. I

started sending the same photo to someone twice. I lost track of who had paid

for what.

And the money was in exactly the part I could not scale. People bought from the

channel, but they paid more for something made only for them, in DMs. So the

higher margin sits in the one to one work, which is the thing that does not

scale.

Then I looked at my hourly stats and found the thing that actually decided it

for me. My channel has three peaks. One at 11:00 UTC, one at 20:00, and one at

03:00. Activity runs across about 20 hours of the day. I am one person in one

timezone, and one of my busiest hours is three in the morning.

I stopped posting regularly in March because of school and moving. The channel

went from 1,200 members down to 917, so it bleeds when you leave it. But it

still earned money in July from content I made in January and February, which I

did not expect.

I am building something for the DM side now, mostly because of that 3am peak.

Not linking it, that is not why I posted.

What I want to know from people who are further along: at what point did you

stop answering DMs yourself, and what did you do instead?