Telegram Business, configured right

Settings → Telegram Business. Decide first whether to use your personal number or a dedicated SIM. Personal works for solo founders. A dedicated number scales to a team and avoids 2FA collisions later.

If you start personal and migrate later, you can move username + chats — but not message history. Decide once.

Business → Location — adds a small map preview to your bio. Good for local services, irrelevant for SaaS. Business → Opening Hours — shows “Open” / “Closed until 9 AM” in your contact card. Set timezone correctly; Telegram does the math for visitors. Business → Intro — replaces the empty state when someone opens an empty chat with you. Two lines + sticker. Treat it as a one-liner pitch + clear next step.

Quick Replies are saved messages with /shortcut triggers, including media and formatting. Set up these three on day one:

• /welcome — the message you send manually when a new lead writes in.
• /pricing — one-pager with prices, links to checkout, and a Mini App button if you have one.
• /booking — link to your scheduling tool with timezone reminder.

Type / in any chat to fire one. They sync across all your devices.

Greeting auto-fires once when someone messages you for the first time, ever. Make it warm and ask one qualifying question — don’t dump your whole sales pitch.

Away auto-fires when you’re offline by your defined schedule (use the opening hours you already set). Tell them when you’ll respond, and link to a self-serve resource.

Both messages support markdown links. Both can be turned off for specific contacts (your existing customers should never see “I’ll be back at 9 AM” — exclude them).

This is the killer feature most people miss. Business → Chatbots. Paste a bot username and grant it permission to read and reply on your behalf.

You can build the bot yourself with the Bot API (getBusinessConnection, sendMessage with business_connection_id), or use a no-code tool like Make, n8n, or Salebot. Common automations:

• Tag every new contact with their inbound source.
• Auto-reply with /pricing when a message contains keywords like “rate” or “quote”.
• Forward every contact to a Notion/Airtable CRM.
• Use Claude/GPT to draft a reply you approve before sending.

Have a Telegram contact who has never messaged you write in from scratch. They should see:

1. Your intro (in the empty chat).
2. Your greeting message.
3. (Outside hours) your away message.
4. Your bot’s first AI-drafted suggestion arriving for your review within 2 seconds.

If any of those four is missing, fix it before you start driving traffic to your handle.