DEV Community: Ivan Tishkov

How Telegram Mini Apps Reduced Our Onboarding from 2 Minutes to 10 Seconds

Ivan Tishkov — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 12:30:42 +0000

When I started building my latest side project, I thought the hardest part would be the game itself.

I was wrong.

The real challenge wasn't networking, animations, or game logic.

It was everything that happened before the game even started.

I realized I wasn't optimizing gameplay.

I was optimizing the time between someone saying:

"Let's play."

and actually playing.

That changed the way I think about product development.

The Problem

If you've ever tried to get a group of friends into a multiplayer mobile game, you've probably seen something like this.

Receive a link ⭢ Open the App Store ⭢ Download the app ⭢ Install ⭢ Create an account ⭢ Verify your email ⭢ Sign in ⭢ Find a room ⭢ Start playing

Every additional step increases the chance that someone simply gives up.

Not because they don't want to play.

Because onboarding has already become work.

What We Wanted Instead

Before writing the first line of code, I defined one simple requirement.

Joining a game should feel almost effortless.

The ideal flow looked like this.

Receive a link ⭢ Tap ⭢ Play

That's it.

No friction.

No unnecessary decisions.

Why Telegram Mini Apps

After exploring different approaches, Telegram Mini Apps turned out to solve most of the onboarding problems automatically.

Users already have:

Telegram installed.
An authenticated identity.
A profile.
A social graph.
A familiar interface.

Instead of asking people to create another account, we simply use the one they already have.

The Result

Our onboarding flow became dramatically shorter.

Receive a link ⭢ Open Telegram ⭢ Start playing

No installation.

No registration.

No passwords.

No email verification.

For first-time users joining a friend's room, the entire process usually takes 5–10 seconds.

Ironically, this became one of the most important performance metrics of the project.

Not FPS.

Not API latency.

Not Lighthouse scores.

Time to first game.

The Most Surprising Part

I expected people to say things like:

"That's a cool Telegram app."

Almost nobody did.

Instead, they said:

"Wait... we're already in?"

That was the moment I realized something important.

Users rarely care about the technology behind your product.

They care about how quickly they reach value.

The best onboarding experience is often the one nobody notices.

It Wasn't Free

Telegram Mini Apps solve many problems, but they also introduce new engineering challenges.

For example:

Working within a mobile WebView.
Optimizing animations for mobile devices.
Handling deep links.
Managing application state.
Designing interfaces for small vertical screens.

Still, every one of those trade-offs felt worthwhile compared to asking users to go through a traditional registration flow.

What This Project Changed for Me

Before this project, I thought great products were built by adding more features.

Now I think the opposite.

Great products often win because they remove more obstacles.

Every extra screen.

Every required field.

Every password.

Every verification step.

Each one is another opportunity for users to leave before experiencing any value.

Final Thoughts

Today, whenever I start building something new, I ask myself a different question.

Not:

"What else can I build?"

But:

"What can I remove before users get their first moment of value?"

For this project, Telegram Mini Apps reduced that journey from roughly two minutes to around ten seconds.

Looking back, that wasn't just an implementation detail.

It was one of the best product decisions I made.

About the project

The ideas described in this article came from building a real-time multiplayer Telegram Mini App. I'll be writing more about its architecture, networking, UI challenges, and product decisions in future posts.

A quick question for DEV authors

Ivan Tishkov — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 11:49:52 +0000

Hi everyone!

I'm new to DEV and I'm planning to start writing regularly about product development and software engineering.

Before publishing more articles, I wanted to ask a quick question.

How long did it take for your first article to start appearing in tag feeds and getting its first views?

Was it immediate?

Or did it take a while for a brand new account?

I'd love to hear about your experience.

Thanks!

I Thought I Was Building a Game. I Was Actually Removing Friction.

Ivan Tishkov — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 10:54:16 +0000

When I started building my latest side project, I thought I was solving the wrong problem.

I believed I was building a multiplayer game.

Months later I realized that almost none of my time had actually been spent on "the game."

Most of it was spent removing friction.

And that completely changed the way I think about product development.

We often optimize the wrong thing

As engineers, we naturally focus on features.

Can we add matchmaking?

Can we improve the animations?

Can we make the UI look better?

Can we support more players?

Those things matter.

But eventually I realized there was a much bigger problem.

People weren't leaving because the game wasn't fun.

Many of them never even reached the game.

Every extra step costs users

Imagine a simple situation.

A group of friends decides they want to play something together.

The conversation usually sounds like this.

"Let's play."

Simple.

Until reality starts.

Somebody needs to install an app.

Somebody has to register.

Someone forgot their password.

Someone has poor mobile internet.

Someone doesn't want another app they'll delete tomorrow.

Someone can't find the private room.

Five minutes later...

Nobody is playing anymore.

The excitement disappears long before the first interaction with the product itself.

That's when I realized something.

People weren't abandoning the product.

They were abandoning the onboarding.

Measuring time to value

Developers often measure things like:

Page load time
API latency
FPS
Memory usage

Those metrics matter.

But I started paying attention to something different.

How long does it take until the user gets the first moment of value?

Not when the application opens.

Not when authentication finishes.

Not when analytics initialize.

When the user actually experiences what they came for.

That became the metric I cared about the most.

So I removed everything I could

Instead of adding features, I started deleting steps.

Registration disappeared.

Passwords disappeared.

Searching for rooms disappeared.

Extra menus disappeared.

The goal became surprisingly simple.

Someone receives a link.

They tap it.

They're already where they wanted to be.

That single idea influenced almost every product decision afterwards.

Technology isn't the feature

The interesting part is that nobody ever mentioned the technology.

Nobody said:

"Nice authentication flow."

Nobody said:

"Cool onboarding."

Nobody cared.

Instead they said things like:

"That was fast."

Or:

"We're already in?"

That's when I realized something important.

Good onboarding is almost invisible.

If people notice it, it's probably too complicated.

The unexpected result

Originally, I thought I was building a multiplayer game.

In reality, I spent months reducing the distance between two moments:

"Let's do this."

and

"We're doing it."

Everything else became secondary.

Why this matters beyond games

This isn't really about games.

It's about every digital product.

Food delivery.

Banking.

Travel.

Social apps.

Developer tools.

Every unnecessary click introduces doubt.

Every extra screen gives users another opportunity to leave.

Sometimes improving a product doesn't require another feature.

Sometimes it simply requires removing five unnecessary clicks.

Final thoughts

Looking back, I don't think the biggest lesson from this project was technical.

It was psychological.

People rarely quit because your product is bad.

More often, they quit because reaching your product takes too much effort.

Now, whenever I build something new, I ask a different question.

Not:

"What should I add next?"

But:

"What can I remove before the user gets value?"

Ironically, the project that taught me this lesson happened to be a multiplayer poker game running as a Telegram Mini App.

But the lesson has nothing to do with poker.

It's something I'll probably carry into every product I build from now on.