--- title: 'I Invested $1,000,000 in Telegram... (Not Clickbait)' source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=K_I0fru4-Bs' video_id: 'K_I0fru4-Bs' date: 2026-08-08 duration_sec: 1355 --- # I Invested $1,000,000 in Telegram... (Not Clickbait) > Source: [I Invested $1,000,000 in Telegram... (Not Clickbait)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=K_I0fru4-Bs) ## Summary The video chronicles the journey of a Telegram channel that evolved from a small anti-scam betting project into one of the largest IT and technology media outlets in the region. The narrator details the challenges of monetization, the pivotal decision to integrate a GPT chatbot, and the massive investment that led to explosive growth. ### Key Points - **Project Origin** [00:03] — The project started in 2018 as a Telegram channel focused on exposing scam betting projects, initially named 'NN' (abbreviation for 'naebne'). - **Early Monetization Struggles** [02:49] — The channel had a hot audience but struggled to attract advertisers due to its niche content, leading to financial instability. - **Pivot to Broader Content** [05:26] — By April 2019, the project expanded beyond betting to cover broader anti-fraud and digital literacy topics, which made it more attractive to advertisers. - **YouTube Channel Launch** [06:21] — A companion YouTube channel was launched in March 2019, quickly gaining 50,000 to 200,000 views per video, stabilizing content production. - **Revenue and Ceiling** [08:21] — By 2020-2022, the project earned about 500,000 rubles per month but hit a growth ceiling, with the Telegram audience plateauing at around 90,000 subscribers. - **Burnout and Shutdown Consideration** [11:42] — By the end of 2022, after investing 12-15 million rubles, the narrator considered closing the project due to burnout, repetitive content, and advertiser reluctance. - **The GPT Bot Idea** [14:39] — Gleb proposed embedding GPT chat into a Telegram bot, which launched in February 2023 and immediately went viral, receiving 500 requests in the first minute. - **Explosive Growth** [16:03] — The bot's word-of-mouth growth led to subscriber numbers jumping from 90,000 to over 1 million by the end of 2023, with mandatory subscription to the channel for bot access. - **Marketing Investment** [17:52] — Over 53 million rubles were spent on marketing the bot, with the channel acquisition cost exceeding $1 million, which was crucial for growth. - **Current Status** [20:25] — The channel now has over 2 million readers, publishes hundreds of posts monthly, and averages 150,000-200,000 views per post. ### Conclusion The project's success was driven by a combination of a viral product (GPT bot), aggressive marketing investment, and a strategic pivot to a broader IT and digital literacy audience. The narrator emphasizes that without the significant financial investment, the project would likely have failed. ## Transcript on a Telegram channel. And yes, back in 2023 I wanted to close it. How do you like this title? This video is not clickbait. If you don't believe me, here are the statistics on expenses in just one Yandex.Direct advertising account. I've been running a project for eight years now, which I did n't initially plan to take to the scale it eventually reached. And the most interesting thing is that the project began to grow noticeably only when I almost shut it down. It was at that moment that one of the team members made a brilliant move. The is one of the largest Telegram media outlets in the IT and technology sector. The well-known largest white-label advertisers buy ads there daily . And the channel is read by a huge audience. But let's leave all the spoilers out for now. How did this happen, and when did you have to invest so much money into developing what was in order, because the channel originally had a completely different name. . Will we be able to be in the same room with one of you? Completely by accident. Let's watch the video to the end. Yes, in this video I am 19 years old, and this is the first integration of my project N in December 2018. And yes, this is far from the only name of the project. Antinoeb. I don't want you to get screwed. He'll screw you over. Where did all this come from, actually? Remember back in 2018, there was a time when every second blogger opened a Telegram channel with sports predictions. Now, it's clear that 95% of such projects were n't created with the goal of sharing earnings or practical advice, but rather with the motive of gently screwing their audience and making a ton of money instantly. In 2018, I made a couple of investigative videos on this topic and decided to create a Telegram project that would frequent revelations about the widespread scammer capper projects and share recommendations in the field of sports analytics for free, without any clickbait and tinsel in the form of cast-iron express trains, insider reports, and inflated scores. Remember, yes, such a trick in the eighteenth and nineteenth years? And for this task, I even found a person with good expertise in the field, as it seemed to me. This is how the Telegram channel NN was born, an abbreviation of "naebne," project, but now as a username both on Telegram and on YouTube. The content I've dumped popular and, in my opinion, stupid prankster, Suba, also decided to keep up with his colleagues and opened a scam betting project. Or maybe here is an exposé by Litvin or Dava. Here are some April Fools' jokes from morning. I just bought a bomb gun for today. Insay with odds of 24. You can double the pot easily. I'm just emotional, guys. Write to our manager as soon as possible Enough, I'm turning it off. All this is not particularly important now. The main problem at that point in 2018 was : how to further develop the channel? region of several tens of thousands of people. The reach was high for that time , the audience was hot and active, how did you finance the channel? Yes, I had a stupid idea, which I consider one of my biggest mistakes. Wanting to create a truly non-camera project in the betting industry, I even launched a private chat for a month for networking and publishing more detailed sports even this way the project wouldn't work in an environmentally friendly way, and I quickly abandoned the idea, as well as any sports analysis and advice in general. In February 2019, I decided to change direction a bit and began analyzing not only local capper projects but also full-fledged bookmakers, uncovering the pitfalls of these industries. At the same time, for the first time in my life, I got burned by an employee by hiring someone who wasn’t the most honest for the editor position. The guy stupidly copied posts from other people's articles on the internet, even forgetting to remove advertising from these texts, for which he was shamefully fired. Well, yes, then this same editor tried to sell advertising on our project, without having any connection to it . Then came the consequences. Then I opened a search for new editors to join the team and, to be honest, I found some great people . Well, how do you know if a person is truly a hot prospect on the job market ? It's simple. It uses the full potential of tools that are updated every day. I'm talking about neural networks, editing programs, visual creation, and anything in general. services can be paid for with a Russian card. That's why I want to show you a tool that will allow you to stay ahead of your competitors. Zaruup is a create a virtual card for paying for international services. In just a few clicks, you can issue virtual Visa cards that link to Apple and requirements. And most importantly, with these cards you can quickly pay for subscriptions to online tools. The same Chatт GPT, Meorney, Perplexity or well-known services like Netflix or Spotify. Instead of specialized services, you can open your own card and manage your transactions. What's more, the bot supports deposits via QR, SPB, and even cryptocurrency, USDT, or Tron, so topping up your account won't take advantages: Zarup does not have tedious pay for the service instantly. Funds are credited within a couple of minutes. If you have any questions while using the bot, our 24/7 support team is always available to help . Zarub also . The bot includes a referral program that allows you to receive a 1% payout on all deposits made by each user you invite. become more mobile and better than your competitors with access to any service. We return to the video. By the end of April, it became clear to me that the project simply had no money to survive. The project minded audience, but attracting advertisers was problematic, as the content it published was highly specific. Basically, dubious organizations or the same bulls came to us. The project will either have nothing to live on, or we will have to sacrifice our reputation by creating controversy, or we will have to make a move to the side. At this point, I decide that N will continue its combat fraud not only in the betting sphere. This move will allow us attractive to a much larger number of advertisers. At least that's what I moment, an idea came to me: why not launch another YouTube channel, only for the NнN project with similar content. A standalone media project with a clear focus on digital literacy content certainly has a good chance of generating traffic. And I was right . So, in March 2019, the YouTube project Nn appeared, which initially featured the same analyses of caps and bookmakers, and then simply schemes. And right from the start, videos started to get 50, 100, 200,000 views. For a YouTube channel from scratch in 2019, this was a super good result. And at this moment, the NнN project for the first time enters a stable track in terms of content production. As you remember, the main problem of the project was finding means for existence and development. So it's kind of becoming obvious to me. The more cool content we publish , the faster we'll find traffic, advertisers, and other ways to monetize. At first, I wrote scripts for YouTube myself, while simultaneously working on my main channel. Then I wanted to achieve the result of two weekly videos on N and two was a time of sleepless nights and severe burnout. Accordingly, almost immediately I realized that I couldn’t handle this alone. And during this same period, more or less, two long-term heroes appear. Editor Vitaly and manager Gleb. Vitaly became the focused on operational work and attempts to find new development channels. Throughout 2019, we released anti-machine videos with relative consistency and ran our Telegram channel somewhat haphazardly. Well, experience. I compiled a small set of guidelines, and during the COVID-19 quarantine, we were able to establish stable and well-established work within Project N, videos with millions of views. Vitalik, by the way, has managed to reach a very serious level of skill and has even helped write more than one video for my main video. And now the In project has finally entered a stable stage of development. easier, as the video and Telegram channel, which have a general anti-fraud theme, have made it a bit easier to attract good advertisers. That is, yes, the project grew, developed, and finding money for its maintenance became easier. Millions of rubles . We investigated and exposed everything across the thoughtful audience, but it difficult to do so. At this stage, In earned an average of about half a million rubles. per month, and the bulk of the income was spent on salaries and content. Do you think this is a salaries and content. Do you think this is a problem or not? No, that's what I thought at first too. On the surface, everything looked fine. From 2020 to 2022, we managed to expose numerous scams, our videos, and record a joint podcast. By the way, you can still find it on my main channel. The old-timers, I think, remember. We were building a strong, critically minded audience and developing the channel, but at some point the project started several reasons for this. The first and, perhaps, the main one. We quickly hit a ceiling and for a long time did nothing to break through it. Yes, the videos collected their views. The Telegram channel's audience reached around 90,000 people and didn't grow much after that. I realized that in this configuration the potential of the NN project is more our limits in terms of monetization or content unless we do something. It sounds very pessimistic, but now you will understand why and where I have this attitude from. The thing is, reluctant to place content with an exposing nature, despite our high views. Other advertisers were not against the placement, but agreed to a price below the market price. That is, yes, we can jump higher in views, but to sell advertising efficiently and effectively , and, as a result, to grow and develop. At some point, I seriously thought about what to profit. It was psychologically difficult for me. I know many entrepreneurs face this. In Russia, a huge projects due to debts, loans, and obligations. But it is important to understand that there is debt, you can legally get rid of it. If you are an entrepreneur or an individual, you can use the bankruptcy procedure provided by the state itself. If your debts are contacting the lawyers at Destra Legal. I have known them for several years. During this time, they have helped thousands of people, including my subscribers. legal mechanism. At the same time, you can continue to work, and no one will take away your only home. Lawyers will help you do everything right. What's convenient is that everything can be done online. The service operates throughout Russia, and on Yandex Maps they have the description and sign up for a free consultation to determine if bankruptcy is right for your situation. The obvious way out of our situation is to create a product and draw budget from it. And yes, we had such attempts too to launch our own service that would allow users to check the quality or product or service. In simple terms, someone wants to buy an expensive course us, we conduct an audit, and help them decide whether the product is worth the money. This service sounds great on paper, but in reality, our It turns out that people are more likely to trust a product, pay a lot of money, get upset, and only then think about whether to return it. If necessary, then how? In short, bot requests from fraud victims, tested new editors, and collaborated with bloggers and media outlets. I personally got a lot of benefit from the project . I think his audience has also become much more educated. But everything comes to an end. I started thinking about the end of N in 2022, after 4 years of active work. The shutdown and monetization had a significant impact on the budget. The attitude of advertisers, the shrinking market, and the lack of other monetization methods simply prevented us from growing more actively, and sometimes prevented us from growing at all. This was also evident in the content on which we placed our main focus. By the end of 2022, the channel's topics began to repeat more and more frequently. I felt the atmosphere of burnout of the project as such. By that time, about 12, maybe 15 million rubles had already been invested in N. Yes, I understand that for many people this is not money now, but back then inflation was simpler. However, no one thought that at some point the project would simply have to be closed. Unfortunately, this is exactly the decision I almost came to then. Almost. At the end of 2022, I held a call convey an important message. We started making more and more videos on similar topics, attracting fewer new viewers. New advertisers don't come to us, so the project's vector is changing. We do n't make streaming videos anymore. From mode. Now we make a small number of videos, but we make them unique, one-of-a-kind, and viral. This was more of a task for Vitaly. Gleb's task in critical mode is also to improve content and operational the form of testing our own products on the accumulated 90,000 subscribers on Telegram, an audience on YouTube, taking budget from the project fund, trying to find really more of a secondary one, because our main focus was on content. Moreover, I clearly tell the guys that if we don’t find a growth point within 2-3 months, the project will be closed firmly and clearly. But I'll tell you honestly, I didn't believe in this idea myself. So yeah, I'm literally telling the guys crazy, killer combination in 2-3 months that will era. If your expensive team succeeds, you are a genius. If not, we disperse. Overall, it all sounds dubious. Especially considering how situationally and strangely the project was built over all these years. You already know this story the project could obviously become useful stress and fuel for someone, but for another person it could break. You ca n't guess here. So I was almost completely ready to close the project. It’s not that I did n’t believe in the best, but rather that I was question arises: why close a project that is breaking even? It's about focus and ambition. I still felt like I was wasting a lot of time and resources on this interesting directions, especially when I had my own main channel on a similar topic of digital literacy. However, over the next 2-3 months, the channel released several special projects, which, to put it mildly, did not particularly satisfy me in terms of quality. Our own products. Well, we tried launching our own VPN, but we never got it to work on a large scale, so I don't recommend it. Chill, yes, prohibition, all that stuff. But closer to the end of the time period we had agreed upon, Gleb finally dug up some brilliant idea that was truly able to completely turn the project around. Are you ready? Aren't you ready? What do you remember about 2022 and provocative question, I'll answer for you. It was then that neural networks like Chadzha Pti popularity, but Russians couldn't access them without digital migration . Gleb came up with a cool idea. Embed the GPT chat into a Telegrambot . Gleb quickly found another technical partner with a decent MVP product and, combining all their efforts, launched a bot with GPT chat and Mizhorni, and subsequently other neural networks inside. If this idea seems simple and banal to you now, in 2023 it literally blew up the February of 2022, we published the first post in N at the launch of the bot. And within a minute he lay down because he received a crazy 500 requests. We immediately began investing all the project's energy and resources into the bot, which led to a literal new era. The project began to search for itself anew and in a new way. Why? It was all down to the crazy word of mouth that was spreading the word. Every time we published a link to the main publin, we saw a sharp unsubscribed to the channel, in the bot itself. As it seems later, in some periods of traffic attraction, more than 80% of the incoming audience was word of mouth. People are friends, so we decided to curb this traffic. The bot now requires a NN Telegram channel to use it . The result of this move was growth that the project, and indeed the Telegram market, had never seen before. At the time of 23, we had 90,000 subscribers. By the end of March there were already 190, at the beginning of June 360,000, in August almost 500, in November more than 700,000, and by the end of the twenty- third year there were already more than a million subscribers. Do you think they are all Apparently not, so the project's theme shifted to media about IT, neural networks, and digital literacy. We began tailoring content to a more mainstream audience and building an editorial team. If before this the development of the project took place somehow organically, spiritually, in a small, warm atmosphere, now the next era has arrived, a new era. It was necessary to develop it as a clearly defined media business that required constant reinvestment. work ended here and that this is the result, but no. In reality , both the work and the real big expenses have only just begun. First of all, the chatbot is insane. We didn't want to cut down the available version of the bot and still leave the rich free functionality. But to simply distribute bot, which allows users who need higher limits to using our tool. Naturally, this provided the project with additional funding. Secondly, the nн team itself. All our focus was redirected neglected YouTube a bit, only releasing some big works from time to time. For example, one of the major ones is a taxi ride from Vladivostok to video. The project's Telegram team obviously had to be repackaged. large advertisers, for whom the media reaching over a million attractive placement option. Keeping the project clean, cool, and editors, constant content development, and simply expanding the team. This is how the NнN project came to its rightful place. You could say it's just luck in part. Well, what if I tell you that the GP chat bot has n't yet made a profit. And it’s not even about the costs of maintaining the bot. Of course, it could have been made positive. putting money into his own pocket. We simply made the decision to continue spending money, a lot of money, on attracting new users because we wanted and continue to want to grow. At the start, cost us a few kopecks, but over time, acquiring new users became much more expensive. Sometimes we spend more than several dozen. A paid user can cost several thousand rubles more. Also, at a certain point, Telegram's policy And not only in ours. Yes, since June 24, any paid services exclusively for Stars. Well, of course, not just any. We all know how it happens. warning them to block bots that fail to convert payments into their internal currency, from which Telegram and Apple collect commissions. We have switched to these conditions. Many don't. Pavel Durov, I'm asking you to clarify whether it's possible to restore ruble payment methods within private bots without, so to speak , the consequences of blocking. Some of your bots have this capability, but other bots receive warnings. Thank you. I can't say how much was spent on the specific maintenance of the bot and on experiments within this bot, perhaps even more than in the title of this video, or maybe not, maybe even more. But we spent more than 53 million rubles on the bot's marketing itself, which directly influenced result, the acquisition of subscribers to the Telegram channel N. We required a mandatory subscription in just one of the marketing channels. for the NN Telegram channel alone cost more than $1 million. If we had n't invested so much money, we wouldn't have achieved this result. I think that if it weren’t for died somewhere at the end of 23, beginning of 24 in the crazy competition that began then. The very method of developing traffic and mandatory subscriptions has become, perhaps, the most mainstream in Telegram right now. By the way, some admins and businessmen have made it less than semi-legal cheating. If this video gets 20,000 likes, I'll make a Telegram scammers who've made hundreds of millions of dollars from this, and there's a lot of material there. I have all the data at hand, and I think the guys I'm talking about will even watch this video. So I'm waiting for your likes. And this is how the NN project took on the form you see it in now. One of the largest closed if not for a certain set of circumstances. The channel currently has over 2 million readers and hundreds of different large advertisers. Hundreds of posts are published per month, and they average 150,000-200,000 views, which average 150,000-200,000 views, which By the way, Gleb also has a YouTube channel. He also released a video with his vision of the development of nн. Go to his channel, subscribe and ask niche audience from the world of IT and media. So, if my story inspired you , welc Gleb at the link in the description. Well, and to me in the comments under the video. Draw. Together with Gleb, I decided to make a big fat prank in this video. Remember that our project had such unique, compelling due to an unfortunate set of circumstances and the cruelty of the market. So, the giveaway will be specifically for those same startuppers, those who were inspired, let's say, by the story and this video in general and the project itself, and want to steam up with us in the sauna. Yes. Take a steam bath right in the bathhouse. We decided to play out an evening trip to the bathhouse with me and Glev. Let's organize a networking event, If you are in another city or another country, we will bring you there at our expense and cover all associated costs. If you're a girl and this idea doesn't appeal to you , and you win the giveaway, we can offer you a MacBook instead of a sauna opportunity, we decided to give away one MacBook for your business. So here is a my viewers. To participate, you need to go to the NN Telegram channel using the link in the description, subscribe to NнН, my personal channel, Gleb's personal channel, click the " Participate" button, and that's it, you creative comments below the video. Please don't joke about the bathhouse. And please don't block or slow down Telegram. Bye. slow down Telegram. Bye. Oh, my legs are worn out.