Telegram bot for a private business club
Member profiles, an event calendar and member search in one bot
About the project
The client is a private business club that runs more than 40 events in different formats: concerts, house concerts, art evenings, meetings with collectors and meaningful trips. Members need a single place to get to know each other, sign up for events, get partner discounts and access club materials. There was no complete technical specification at the start: the client had a clear goal, but the profile fields, menu sections and search rules took shape as the work progressed.
Interface
Tech stack
Task
Bring club members together in one bot: an introduction profile, member search, an event calendar with registration, partner discounts and a knowledge base.
Constraints
There were many change requests because the requirements were refined as the bot was being built. Some updates had to be released urgently after launch, while real members were testing the bot. The bot lives entirely inside the Telegram interface with no forms, so the long profile and the search for people and events had to be designed as a dialogue of messages and buttons.
Solution
We started with the core: a 13-step profile (full name, companies, position, business areas and hobbies with more than 50 multi-select options in each list, website, social media, photo) with the ability to go back and skip optional fields, a main menu of 9 items, and an event calendar with an archive and photo reports. After that we developed the bot in short iterations together with the client, adding member search in inline mode, member discounts, a knowledge base and anonymous feedback. Discount categories, knowledge base links and chats are stored in the database rather than in code, so they can be changed without reworking the dialogues.
Challenges
The main challenge was organisational: requirements kept appearing along the way, and urgent fixes overlapped with testing. To speed things up, we brought a second developer onto the team and switched to pair programming. The two worked on one task at a shared screen: the driver wrote the code while the navigator kept the big picture in mind (architecture, scenarios and edge cases) and caught mistakes right away. They swapped roles regularly and discussed decisions before they went into the code.
Further development
New menu sections, discount categories and knowledge base materials are defined as data, so the bot can grow without reworking the dialogues.
Result
We launched a Telegram bot: a new member fills in a profile and gets access to the club menu with a calendar and archive of events, member profiles and search, chats, discounts and a knowledge base. Club managers are one tap away.



