Case 01 · Telegram · trading
CORTES the road to paid
The author already had YouTube and Instagram. The Telegram channel was started for one job: moving people from there into a paid channel. I built the content so that someone arriving from social media would reach the offer on their own.
12,822
subscribers
2.0-3.2K
views per post
5
funnel stages
The task
Where we started
The audience exists, but it lives on YouTube and Instagram.
Starting point
The author already has an audience on YouTube and Instagram. The Telegram channel was set up as the next step: a place where followers from social media stay in touch every day. At the time of writing it has 12,822 subscribers.
Goal
Move these people into the paid channel. A hard sell won’t work: they subscribed a couple of days ago after watching a video and have no reason yet to trust this particular Telegram channel.
Constraint
A few formats, and one of them has to take only a couple of minutes. Otherwise regular posting stops by week two and the channel dies.
The solution
A five-step funnel
Screenshots from the channel, in Russian. Only the Telegram context menu is cropped out.
Stage 01
The “Thoughts” column
A short format that keeps the channel engaged.
Someone watches a video on YouTube and subscribes. From then on, everything depends on whether the channel keeps showing up in their feed. So posts have to be frequent, and the author can’t write long breakdowns at that pace - trading comes first.
Hence the format: two to four lines and a chart. The author deliberately gives no entry points.
Stage 02
Proof
You can talk about expertise for ages, or you can just show it once.
We post the actual open positions with a four-word caption. It got 3,200 views and 92 reactions, more than any text post that week.
Posts like this went out rarely. Otherwise it turns into bragging.
Stage 03
Warm-up
A personal story and an answered objection go out a week before the offer.
First the author tells how half the deposit was lost on 30x leverage with no stop-loss. Then comes the answer to “I only have $100 - is it worth starting?”
The first post shows that the author has made mistakes and knows what they cost. The second takes apart the main reason not to buy before anyone raises it. After those two, there’s little left to argue with in the offer.
Stage 04
The offer
A marathon with a low entry price works as a bridge to the paid channel.
Instead of pitching a private channel subscription, we announce a marathon with a $50 entry. The amount was picked to match the objection from the previous post, so the offer reads as the answer to it.
Marathon participants then move on to the paid channel by themselves.
Stage 05
The comeback
After the marathon, the author went quiet for several months and came back with a post that sells nothing.
Part of the audience drifted away during the break. Before reviving the channel, you need to know how many people are left, so the post ends with a direct request.
103 people responded out of 2,300 views. That’s more than any post in the funnel.
Format
The “Thoughts” column
This is what kept the posting regular. Two rules, then repeat.
- 01
An anchor headline
“Thoughts on BTC”, “Thoughts on SOL” - only the ticker changes. Readers recognise the format before finishing the first line and know in advance how long the post will take.
- 02
No entry points
Instead of a signal, we write “be a bit careful right now”. The free column promises nothing, and that’s exactly why it works as a shop window for the paid channel: same thing there, only in detail and with analysis.
Results
What did the numbers show?
Telegram reach, taken from post screenshots. No paid promotion, no rounding up.
Views hold steady at 2.0-3.2K - that’s 16-25% of the subscriber base. The daily column keeps them even: there are no dips between funnel posts.
The best post was a screenshot. The positions screen got 3,200 views against 2,100-2,500 for other posts that week. Proof beats any explanation.
The offer dipped in views; the comeback didn’t. The marathon post got 2,000 views against 2,500 for the column: a sales post always dips. And the post after a months-long break got 103 reactions, a record for the channel.
Next case
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