🏷 Telegram has launched the most affordable way for businesses to authenticate their customers’ phone numbers — just $0.01 per code, anywhere in the world.

📥 Now businesses can save millions by sending verification codes to their users right through Telegram. This method is much cheaper, faster, and more secure than traditional SMS verification. We call it Telegram Gateway 🔗

💵 Phone number verification is a multibillion-dollar industry. Telegram alone has been spending around $10M per month to authenticate all the users who sign up and log in to our service.

🏅 We’ve made this investment so that others won’t have to. Since we’ve already verified the phone numbers of nearly a billion people, other businesses can avoid high verification costs. And if the phone number they want to verify is not connected to a Telegram account, we won’t charge at all.

🎁 Our prices are unprecedentedly low, so I’m not sure if Telegram Gateway will become a significant revenue source for us. But we hope that this initiative will make the world more efficient, reducing costs and prices for many services worldwide 🤝

4️⃣0️⃣ To celebrate my 40th birthday today, we’ve added 3 new limited edition gifts — 🎂🗓 🕯

They come from one of my favorite emoji packs — BirthdayCollection 🕯

Enjoy! 🍸

#lifestories 🐶

Exactly 18 years ago today, I launched VK—my first large company. Below is the story of how it happened.

I graduated from Saint-Petersburg University in the summer of 2006. I wanted to keep in touch with my former classmates, but I knew it would be hard without a website where everyone could find each other. So, in late August 2006, I set a goal—to build a social network for university students and graduates in four weeks.

I was pretty good at coding. At 12, I built web-based games with vector animations and sound effects. At 13, I was already asked to teach older kids Pascal (a computer language) in summer camps for programmers.

And yet, planning to build a fully-fledged social network in four weeks was overconfident. To make it worse, I decided not to use any ready-made third-party modules. I wanted to create everything from scratch: from profiles and private messages to photo albums and search.

The task seemed too large to grasp. Where do I even start? Back then, my brother Nikolai lived in Germany. Nikolai is a brilliant mathematician and algorithmic programmer, but he’s always considered web development beneath him. At that time, he was focused on his Math thesis at the Max Planck University in Bonn. He refused to help with the code but gave advice: “Write the code for user authorization first,” he said. “You’ll get through.”

This made sense. I started with a login page that generated session IDs. Sessions could then be used to identify users, show them their profile pages, and allow them to edit them. Even the sign-up process could wait: I prepopulated the entries for the first few users manually in the database.

That's when I first understood it clearly: Every complex task is just a combination of many simple ones. If you split a big project into manageable parts and arrange them in the right order, you can get anything done. In theory. In practice, you also encounter all kinds of technical obstacles that test your persistence.

In September 2006, I typically wrote code for 20 hours in a row, had one meal and then slept for 10 hours. After a day of work, I’d boil myself a bucket of pasta and eat it with a generous amount of cheese. No other food was required. I didn’t care whether it was day or night outside. Social connections stopped existing. All that mattered was the code.

I tried to make each section of my project flawless, and that took time. Obsessing over details didn’t help to get everything done in four weeks. But being the only team member allowed me to minimize time spent on internal communication. And since I knew every line of the code base by heart, I could find and fix bugs faster.

On October 10, 2006, I had a beta version of the social network up and running. I called it VKontakte (VK), which means “in contact”. It took me six weeks instead of four to create it. But the result was worth it. Users that I invited from my previous project—a students’ portal I’d been building since 2003—signed up by the thousands and started to invite friends.

I kept adding new features quickly, and competitors struggled to catch up. A few months later, I hired another developer. By that time, VK already had a million members. Within seven years, VK would reach 100 million monthly users. At that point, I was fired by the board of VK, so I left the company to focus fully on Telegram.

That experience of single-handedly building the first version of VK in 2006 was so valuable that it defined my career. As the sole member of the product team, I had to do the work of a front-end developer, back-end developer, UX/UI designer, system administrator, and product manager—all at once. I got to understand the basics of all these jobs. I learned the tiniest details of how a social network works.

I also learned that there are no complex tasks in this world—only many small ones that look scary when combined. Split a big task into smaller parts, organize them in the right sequence—and “you’ll get through”.

➕ Turning 40 today. Exactly 18 years ago I launched my first large project and grew it from zero to 100,000,000 users 👨‍🦳

Should I tell you how it happened in another “life stories” post? Feel free to vote in the meaningful poll below 🔽

🔥 I love the Telegram team. Just yesterday, I suggested 10 improvements to our apps. We had mockups ready the same day, and today, we already have fully functional builds with these features implemented 😳

🆕 These updates include 5 improvements to gifts, 3 to hashtags, the ability to add media to a message after it’s been sent, and the ability to view the time a message was edited 🔜

⚡️ All in just one day. It’s no surprise that the Telegram team has shaped how most messaging apps work today, contributing to nearly every innovation in communication 😒

#lifestories

On the 27th of August 2024, I was still in the police station in Paris. It was my third day there. With no devices or internet access, it felt like an extreme digital detox.

That day I was having my regular hours-long interview with the police. Between the questions, I asked my lawyer if my ❤️ Julia would come for questioning too. He said she was expected to, but couldn’t come. I pressed him on the reasons. “Got scared? Left Paris?”, I asked. He hesitated. “She’s pregnant,” he finally said.

It was not the answer I expected at that moment. I remained calm throughout my time in police custody, but this turn of events caught me off guard. After a pause, I said: “Thank you for the good news”. Other people present — the translator, the clerk, the policeman — produced awkward smiles.

I later learnt that the police didn’t know how to break the news of Julia’s pregnancy to me. The circumstances were not exactly celebratory. Julia was alone in a foreign country she’d never been to before. No one knew when I would be able to talk to her again.

Luckily, I was released late in the evening the next day. As I entered the rooftop terrace of the place Julia was staying at, magnificent fireworks erupted right in front of me. Below, the opening ceremony of the Paralympics had just begun.

But the mood was not festive. I learnt that while I was away, the pressure on Julia had been insane. Some blogger started a rumor that she was a “Mossad agent.” Other people came up with the nonsensical idea that it was her posts (and not my chartered flight details) that had prompted the police to welcome me at the airport.

With her devices confiscated, she couldn’t access her accounts on Telegram and Instagram for weeks. Her going radio silent on social media provoked even more speculation. Cyber-bullying aimed at her kept reaching new highs.

Julia stood strong. But, unlike me, she wasn’t used to hostility. She is not made for war.

Two days ago, she was visiting the doctor who monitored her pregnancy. I was in the middle of my 12-hour work day when Julia sent me “😭😭😭” from the doctor’s office. I instantly knew what was wrong.

🫡📊 And here’s another poll.

👵 As I approach my 40th birthday, I realize I have many life stories to tell. Should I start posting them here? 📝

🏷 Yesterday we introduced two limited-edition gifts. Both have now sold out. The entire supply of 🍭500,000 lollipops and 🌸100,000 cherry blossoms was gone within hours 😮

⚡️ We didn’t expect that to happen so fast, so we’re now working on an update to better handle sold-out items 👨‍💻

🛒 Should we introduce more limited-edition gifts? ❓

🥳 The holiday season (which includes my birthday 😏) is just around the corner, and today we are launching Gifts!

🎁 Gifts are a great way to congratulate your loved ones on important events. Gift recipients can choose to display them on their profiles or sell them for Stars ⭐

📦 Some gifts are in limited supply. Later this year we’ll introduce the ability to convert these limited-edition gifts into TON-based NFTs. Users will then be able to auction and trade these tokenized gifts outside Telegram, with ownership recorded on the blockchain 🔗

🔜 We also launched other exciting features today, which I’ll cover in a separate post. For now, I’ll let you dive into the gift selection process 🫴🙂

🔜 While we patiently wait for Google to approve the latest Telegram update, let’s take a break for some nostalgia 👨‍🦳

❤️ Here’s my eldest daughter instructing me on how to launch Telegram in the summer of 2013. She’s the real brain behind this whole thing, folks ☕️