Buying a policy without leaving Telegram
In Uzbekistan, Telegram is where people already are all day, so asking them to open a browser and log in somewhere else costs real customers. I put the whole insurance site inside the chat window instead.
Telegram here isn't one app among many — it's where people already spend their day. Asking someone to leave a conversation, open a browser, find the site and sign in is a genuine cost, and plenty of people simply don't bother.
So I built a version of our site that runs inside Telegram itself. You tap a button in a chat and the calculator opens in the same window — quote, documents, card payment — without ever leaving the app.
Where people already are
The entry point is a bot that behaves like a menu rather than a conversation:
- Send it anything at all and it answers with a short greeting and a row of buttons: motor liability, casco, travel, health.
- Those buttons open the site inside Telegram, instead of throwing the customer out into a browser.
- It replies in the language of the person's own Telegram settings, not whatever the website last remembered about them.
- A "contact us" button answers instantly with phone numbers and doesn't open anything — the most common question deserves the fastest possible answer.
There's also a permanent button beside the chat's text box, so the site stays one tap away at any point.
The site, inside the chat window
Rather than build a second app, the existing site notices when it's running inside Telegram and adapts itself. Telegram passes a marker on the first page load, and when the site sees it, it does three things:
- Hides its own header and footer. Telegram already draws a title bar and a back button, so ours would only compete with them.
- Expands to full height. By default a Mini App opens as a half-height sheet, which is fine for a game and useless for a form.
- Remembers. The marker arrives only on the very first page, so it's held for the rest of the session — otherwise the second page would snap back to looking like an ordinary website.
The point is that it is the same site. Same calculators, same payment, one codebase — so every fix we ship reaches both at once.
The link that lands on the wrong page
The longest piece of work produced the smallest visible result. A Telegram link can point at one specific product: tap it and you should land on motor liability, not the homepage.
Telegram delivers that instruction two different ways. On a computer it's attached to the end of the address in a part that never reaches our server. On a phone it arrives as a normal part of the address, which does.
We were handling only the computer version — in the browser, after the page had already been drawn. On a phone that meant the customer watched the homepage appear and then jump somewhere else a moment later.
The fix was to handle the phone case on the server and redirect before anything is rendered, so the correct page arrives fully built the first time. The desktop case is deliberately still handled in the browser, because redirecting earlier there draws the page before its data is ready.
Why I'm proud of it
It opened a new sales channel for almost nothing. No second app, no separate release, no duplicated payment code — a bot menu, a few dozen lines that put the site into a different mode, and one shared list of links that both halves read from, so the bot's buttons and the site's routes can't quietly drift apart.
And it removes the kind of friction that never shows up in a bug report: the customer never has to leave the app they were already in. They tap a button in a chat and come out the other side holding a policy.