Most first weeks go wrong in the same direction: too much at once. Someone connects the Telegram account, three pixels, a checkout, a broker API and two bots on the first afternoon, then spends the following fortnight trying to work out which of the six things they changed caused the thing that broke.
The sequence below is slower on paper and faster in practice, because each step produces something you can check before the next one depends on it.
Day one: connect and import, then stop
Connect the Telegram account and let the import run. Open chats become contacts with display name, username, the internal identifier that survives a username change, and the time of last activity. Nothing else happens yet, and nothing else should. Details are in importing your contacts.
Resist connecting anything on the Integrations page today beyond the Telegram account itself. That page is where every connection in the product lives, and every other screen only selects from it, so there is no rush: a pixel connected on Friday works exactly as well as one connected on Monday.
Day two: stages, tags, and the boring hour
Define the stages before you touch a single contact. Five or six, each one describing what happens next rather than how the lead feels. Then sort the imported list by last activity and work down it by hand.
This is the least popular part of the week and the one with the highest return. A pipeline where everyone sits in the first stage produces no reporting, no segments and no follow-up logic. An hour of sorting turns the import from a list into something that can be filtered, which is the whole point of the client list.
Add tags as you go, but only ones you would act on. "Price objection" changes what you send next. "Nice person" does not.
Day three: the fact store before the persona
Write down what your business actually says: prices, what is included, refund terms, how long delivery takes, what you do not offer. This is the fact store, and it is separate from the assistant's voice on purpose. Facts get updated once and every bot uses the new version, while the persona describes how a reply is written.
Writing facts first also exposes how much of your sales process lives only in one person's head. Most teams discover two or three answers that everybody gives slightly differently, which is worth fixing regardless of whether a bot ever sends a message.
Day four: one bot, one audience
Set up a single bot for a single audience. Not two bots, and not one bot with conditional branches for two products, because a branch that misfires does so silently and you will find out when a customer quotes it back.
The persona should be short, closer to fifteen lines than fifty, and made of constraints and examples rather than adjectives. Paste in three replies you have genuinely sent as the target for tone. The full approach is in writing a bot persona.
Two behaviours are not yours to configure and are worth knowing about. The engine blocks flirting, romantic framing and promises the business cannot keep on every reply, no matter what the persona says. And the assistant answers in the language the incoming message arrived in, so the persona should carry register rather than language.
Day five: test it against real messages
Send the bot twenty messages you have actually received. Real ones, copied out of your own Telegram, including the rude one and the one that made no sense. Invented test cases pass because they were written by the same person who wrote the persona.
Most people find three problems in the first ten: replies too long, the assistant too eager to promise, and something answered that should have been escalated. Fix by cutting the persona rather than adding to it, and make sure the handoff sentence works, because a bot that says it will fetch a human is forgiven instantly and a confident wrong answer is not.
Do not point paid traffic at a bot you have not sent twenty real messages to. The cost of a bad first reply is not the reply. It is the lead you paid for and the fortnight before anyone reads the conversation.
Week two, and what belongs there
Tracking links, pixels, bridge pages, a checkout sync and any broker connection all belong after the pipeline is trusted. The reason is not caution for its own sake. Attribution measures a funnel, and a funnel whose stages nobody has sorted gives you numbers that look precise and mean very little.
When you do get there, start with one link per angle rather than one link for everything, keep UTM values lowercase, and expect the campaign values to arrive on the contact record and stay there for weeks. That last property is what makes a purchase in October attributable to an advertisement in August, and it is covered in Telegram ads attribution.
What a good first week looks like at the end of it
A sorted client list with real stages. A fact store your team agrees with. One bot answering one audience in the customer's own language, with a handoff that works. No pixels yet, no checkout sync yet, and no second bot.
That is a smaller footprint than most people expect after five days, and it is the version that survives contact with a busy week. Everything after this point is addition rather than repair. Current pricing and plan details for the product itself sit at scalegram.io.
One thing worth stating plainly for anyone in the trading niche. Faster operations do not make trading safer. It carries a high risk of loss for the clients at the end of any funnel, and better tooling changes your workflow rather than their results.
"Set up the pipeline before the pixels. Attribution on top of an unsorted list gives you precise answers to questions nobody asked."
— Alex Onta, Executive Director, SINGUARD
Key Takeaways
- Connect Telegram and import on day one, and connect nothing else until the list is sorted.
- Write the fact store before the persona; facts change once, voice changes everywhere.
- Launch one bot for one audience rather than one bot with conditional branches.
- Tracking links and pixels belong in week two, after the pipeline is trusted.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does the initial import take?
Connecting the account and pulling the contacts is quick. The part that takes real time is the manual pass through the list to set stages and tags, which is usually an hour or two for a few thousand contacts and is worth doing properly.
Should I let the bot reply to existing clients in week one?
Start it on new conversations and leave long-standing relationships to a human until you have read a week of its replies. The assistant reads the chat in Telegram when it writes, so it can pick up an existing conversation, but you want confidence in the persona before that happens on your best accounts.
Do I need the pixels and broker connection to get value?
No. The CRM and the assistant work on their own. The tracking layer answers a different question, which is which advertising produced which client, and it becomes useful once there are real conversions at the end of the funnel to attribute.
About the Author
Alex Onta is an Executive Director at SINGUARD. He built eTrader, the terminal, the mobile apps, eTrader Broker, Copytrading, Business and Community, along with the worldwide clustered-server infrastructure it all runs on, with his brother Roman Onta helping on the design, and he leads that division today. Together with Roman he builds the Prop Firm CRM, the Broker CRM, Scalegram and CopySignals, and the two of them carry worldwide compliance, payment processing and international business structuring side by side. He lives and works in Dubai for most of the year. Meet the executive duo leading Singuard's five divisions.