How CoinCola grew its Telegram group 158% with an AI invite contest

Published 5 October 2026 · Replio

CoinCola's Official Telegram Group had 5,113 members in late June 2026. On 5 October it had 13,219. The group didn't buy ads to get there and nobody counted referrals in a spreadsheet. CoinCola let its own members grow the group through an Invite & Win contest run by Replio's Telegram AI. Here is how the contest worked, what it produced, and how to run one in your own group.

About CoinCola

CoinCola is Nigeria's number one crypto platform, where people buy and sell crypto for naira peer to peer. A crypto platform runs on trust and speed, and that makes its community important. The CoinCola Official Group on Telegram is where users ask questions, follow the market, get announcements and talk to each other. A bigger, more active group means more people who know the platform, trust it and come back to trade.

CoinCola already used Replio in the group to answer questions 24/7, keep spam and scam bots out with a join captcha, and post crypto price alerts. The next step was growth.

The challenge: growth you can't buy

Paid ads can bring people to a group, but they don't bring people who stay. The members who stick around are usually the ones invited by someone they already know. Referral contests capture that, but run by hand they fall apart quickly:

• Someone has to work out who invited whom, and Telegram doesn't show that by default.
• People can game the count by inviting themselves, rejoining, or having friends join for a minute and leave.
• In a group of thousands, the contest post scrolls out of sight within minutes.
• Members keep asking how it works, how to join and where they rank, and an admin has to answer every time.

What CoinCola ran: Invite & Win on Replio

CoinCola set up an Invite & Win contest from the Giveaways section of the Replio dashboard. Replio's bot posted it in the group, pinned it, and took care of the rest:

• A personal link in one tap. Members tap "🔗 Get my invite link" and their personal link appears right in the group. There's no need to open a private chat with the bot first, which is where most people drop off.
• Fair, automatic counting. Every join through a link is credited to the person who shared it. Each joiner counts once, the first inviter keeps the credit, and people who leave stop counting. Inviting yourself counts for nothing.
• A live leaderboard. Tapping "📊 Leaderboard" posts the standings in the group with 🥇🥈🥉 for the top three. Only the latest board stays up, so the chat doesn't fill with old copies.
• A post that keeps itself visible. Replio reposts and re-pins the contest several times a day during local daytime hours, so new members always see it.
• AI that knows the contest. When someone asks "is the contest still on?" or "how do I see my rank?", the assistant answers in the chat and points them to the leaderboard button, at any hour.
• Bots kept out. The join captcha stops spam accounts from inflating the count, and winners are checked against the group before they're announced.

The results

All figures below come from CoinCola's own Telegram group statistics and Replio's contest data, and CoinCola approved publishing them.

The growth curve tells the story. The group grew slowly through August, then rose sharply once the contest got going. A "confirmed join" is strict: the person joined through a member's personal link, wasn't the inviter, and was still in the group. That makes the 4,513 a count of real new members, not of clicks or links shared.

Why it worked

Members felt the race. A leaderboard anyone can call up in the chat turns a static announcement into a competition. Every time someone checks the board, everyone else sees it too.

The rules were trustworthy. Self-invites, leave-and-rejoin tricks and bot accounts can't inflate the count, so honest members could see the game was fair and kept playing. For a crypto community that cares about trust, this mattered.

Nothing depended on an admin being awake. The links, counting, reposts and answers all ran on their own, around the clock, across time zones. CoinCola's team stayed free to run the business.

No friction at the start. The invite link appears in the group on the first tap. Every extra step, like opening the bot or pressing Start, loses people, and this flow has none.

How to run an invite contest in your own Telegram group

1. Connect your group to Replio and make the bot an admin with permission to invite users and pin messages. The Telegram group bot page walks through it.
2. Open Engage → Giveaways, choose Invite & Win, and set the title, end date and how winners are picked (top of the leaderboard, or weighted so every valid join is a ticket).
3. Optionally require new members to stay a set number of hours before their join counts, and add milestone rewards so steady inviters get recognised along the way.
4. Turn on auto-repost so the contest stays visible, and keep the join captcha on so spam accounts don't count.
5. Add your business knowledge so the AI can also answer everyday questions in the group. See AI support for Telegram.

Want to turn that audience into revenue too? The same bot can sell on Telegram with Buy buttons and paid communities. Our guide on how to sell on Telegram covers the details.

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