DARKSIDE is one of Russia's largest brands of hookah tobacco, accessories, and related products. This article is based on the experience of the brand's senior SMM specialist, who started building a bot in the Constructor on their own, without developers, and grew the project into a full-fledged digital ecosystem.
The challenge
The idea started out as a one-off New Year special project: helping the audience, who stock up on tobacco over the holidays, figure out flavor combinations. But it quickly became clear that the bot was useful after the holidays too. That became the reason to develop it into a permanent communication channel.
Industry restrictions added complexity: traditional advertising isn't available to the brand, and all communication with the audience can only be informational and must be aimed at existing consumers of its products, not at attracting new ones. That means every user is especially valuable, and the brand needs to build long-term relationships with them rather than a one-off advertising contact.
What was done
Over several years, the team has built a whole system of tools into the bot:
A catalog of flavors and mixes. The bot's main section, helping users navigate the brand's range, including the hidden references in product line names
Games and quizzes. A quiz on hookah industry knowledge with several difficulty levels and video achievements for completing it
MIX BOT (mini app). A separate catalog and flavor combination builder with filters by category and tag, created together with a third-party developer, since the task went beyond the Constructor's standard tools
Surveys and feedback collection. Regular questionnaires about new flavors, with results going directly to the product developers
Contests of varying complexity. From simple "subscribe and name your city" mechanics to multi-level quizzes and games built as mini apps, with participant leaderboards
Event registration and job application collection. The bot also serves as an HR and event management tool
Segmented broadcasts. Messages are targeted based on accumulated user data: occupation, region, and behavior in the bot
A "channel - bot - chat" setup, where each has its own role: the channel for news and regular content, the bot for specific tasks and on-demand information, and the chat for the community to talk
App demo
The centerpiece became MIX BOT, a mini app inside the bot built with Telegram WebApp technology. Users can:
choose flavor tags and find ready-made flavor combinations
enter the names of the tobaccos they have at home and get mix recommendations
like combinations to save them in their personal section
publish their own mixes after moderation and share them with friends via a link
The mini app's database contains more than 2,500 ready-made combinations, and access to the section opens only after subscribing to the brand's channel, which further helps attract the target audience.
What to consider for a similar project
Bots aren't indexed by search engines, so you have to drive all the traffic yourself, most often through ads in other channels
Mechanics with complex participation requirements get less reach, but they filter out random "prize hunters" and bring in a higher-quality audience
The longer a user stays in the bot, the more data you can collect about them and the more precise your broadcast segmentation becomes
Set aside time to maintain the bot
Results
Audience growth: the brand's channel grew from 9,500 to 28,000 subscribers in two years, and the bot overtook the channel in subscriber count
Different audiences in one ecosystem: the overlap between channel and bot subscribers is about 50%, meaning the bot attracted people who aren't ready for frequent contact with the brand in the channel
High content engagement: nearly 600,000 requests to the flavor catalog out of 2 million total requests in the bot
A useful research tool: up to 18,000 responses to surveys on new flavors, which directly shape product development
MIX BOT as a standalone product inside the bot. More than 9,000 active users
Flexible interactive mechanics: from light activations with thousands of participants to complex games where users spent over an hour with the brand and played the promo level more than 100,000 times
Additional business functions: from registration for offline events to collecting job applications, all in one tool
A bot stops being just a tool for running interactive campaigns once you see it as a full-fledged ecosystem. A product catalog, game mechanics, feedback collection, HR functions, and segmented broadcasts can all be combined in one place that lives in the user's familiar Telegram feed.
