How It All Started
We built a task manager inside Telegram. Now you can assign tasks to your chat members.
"We have a corporate messenger and a task tracker, but somehow the team is still discussing everything in Telegram..."— I kept hearing this from managers I knew, and watched it play out in my own teams. So I decided to build a task manager right inside Telegram.
How did the idea come about?
It's simple. Think about how any project kicks off. People meet, talk things through, and create a Telegram chat. That happened in every single team I ever worked with — even in places that actively pushed corporate messengers and task trackers.
For a couple of years, I ran Sber's office in Innopolis, and I saw it firsthand: they had everything in-house — knowledge bases, task trackers, messengers. A whole state within a state, their own universe. And even there, the moment a new project came up, the first thing anyone did was spin up a Telegram chat. Some colleagues and even entire departments would create extra chats on the side too.
That's where the idea came from: if we're already comfortable discussing projects in Telegram, why do we have to track tasks and commitments somewhere else instead of right there?
I already had experience building a service on Telegram. In 2020, my partner and I launched @AlertStocksBot — a bot for investors that sends personal notifications when stock prices move or dividend payments are coming up. We knew Telegram inside and out.
Then in 2021, Telegram rolled out a stable API that made it possible to build fully-featured web apps, not just simple bots.
So I decided to give it a shot — and naturally ran into a whole set of questions along the way, which I'll answer in detail in this article.
How do you plan to compete with the big players like Jira?
Many Russian companies use Atlassian products — Jira and Confluence — for project management. They're the de facto standard tools for developers worldwide.
Jira's thing is that it offers an enormous number of customization options. You can engineer your own unique team management setup and build an entirely bespoke project methodology.
In Russia, Yandex is doing something similar with Yandex Tracker. The thing about these tools is that they're monstrously large — which most teams simply don't need. That said, people who use Yandex Tracker or Jira for serious projects are often quite open to using something like our app for lighter work.
So we're not trying to take on the enterprise task manager market. We're positioning ourselves more modestly.
Fair enough — but aren't there already simpler, friendlier task managers out there?
You don't need a Porsche to get from A to B. There are simpler, more affordable cars that do the job just as well.
The same goes for task managers. I've always run my own tasks and projects in small, lightweight tools like Todoist, Things, or TickTick. They have clean interfaces and work great for simple personal projects and to-do lists.
But all of these apps share one serious weakness: they fall short when it comes to real team collaboration.
Getting even a small team onboard requires jumping through an absurd number of hoops. Some of them technically support team features — but in practice it's clunky and unnatural.
The typical workflow looks like this: you set up a project in Todoist → gather the team to discuss tasks in a Telegram chat → go back to Todoist to log everything → return to the chat to drop a link to the task.
These friction points slow everything down. And if you want all the features you need in one tool, you're forced to migrate the whole team to something like Jira or Asana and spend weeks getting everyone up to speed.
We wanted to bring simplicity and seamless communication together in a single tool.
Just add UTasks to any shared chat and you can assign tasks to its members — you to them, and they to you. Write a task title, set a date, pick an assignee from the chat, and you're off. That's it.
The chat becomes the foundation of a shared project. On top of that, you also get personal task lists — all in one place. You can move tasks between personal and shared projects freely.
Why Telegram specifically?
Right now, Telegram is the most user-friendly messenger in the world. WhatsApp has a larger audience, but it's harder to use. What takes three taps in WhatsApp takes two in Telegram — and what takes two in WhatsApp takes one in Telegram.
Telegram is also growing fast and confidently. The app already has over 800 million users, and at its current pace, it'll likely hit a billion by the end of next year.
That's why I believe now is exactly the right time for a full ecosystem to take shape around Telegram. That ecosystem already includes things like the Wallet crypto app — and I think a task manager fits in just as naturally.
From the start, we designed the UTasks web app to feel native inside Telegram rather than bolted on. After our latest update, it looks completely at home — which is exactly what we were going for.
Where does the money come from?
Initially I funded the project myself — spending several million rubles out of pocket. My partners and I put together a strong team: developers, a designer, an SMM specialist, a QA engineer, and a DevOps engineer.
Savings burned through pretty quickly, and I knew early on that we'd need outside investment before long.
Six months into development, we closed a round — a standard early-stage check of a few hundred thousand dollars from an angel investor I knew personally.
That round bought us time and resources to scale. Though right now we're not focused on growing at all costs — first we want to nail down the right acquisition channel.
Who is your target audience?
No matter what you build, other founders will always hit you with this question. Honestly, when it comes to UTasks, it throws me off — because I genuinely believe any Telegram user is a potential customer.
But seriously, we're planning to test demand across several cohorts:
**Tech workers.**Not just developers — product and project managers and other members of IT teams.
**Freelancers.**People juggling multiple clients who need to keep track of all their agreements and deliverables.
**Creative professionals.**Designers, copywriters, SMM specialists, and similar.
**Small businesses.**A small flower shop or auto repair garage that needs to track a handful of orders at once, for example.
The last hypothesis has already been validated: a couple dozen entrepreneurs from our network — including people based abroad — started using the app actively. They give us feedback daily and tell us what they want to see next.
One of them turned out to be so excited about the product that he brought us over a hundred users. How? He simply added the bot to every chat he was already in.
In our marketing, we're counting on ambassadors like him to spread the word organically.
How will you make money?
We're going with a classic subscription model and kept it simple — no complicated tier structure. Just two plans: one free, one paid.
For example, only paid subscribers can organize projects into folders — a handy way to keep work and personal projects neatly separated.
We priced the paid plan simply: we looked at what competitors charge and came in slightly below. A monthly subscription is 249 rubles; annual is 2,190. As they say in startup circles — less than a cup of coffee.
What are your goals?
Growth: Our main goal for the next month is to reach 1,000 paying users. In parallel, we're searching for an acquisition channel where the cost to acquire a user pays back within six months — ideally three.
We're starting with Russia and the CIS because we understand how Telegram is used here and know the local workflow. Once we've proven the model here, we'll move into international markets: Iran, India, Indonesia, and Latin America.
Product: In the very near term, we're shipping three key features:
File attachments. It's on the list — we just haven't gotten to it yet. It'll be a paid feature.
Multilingual support. When we launched, international scale felt far off — but our first wave of users showed otherwise. The app currently runs in three languages: Russian, English, and Spanish. Persian and Portuguese are coming soon.
Sub-projects. Today, a project is tied to a single Telegram group, but within one group people often run several mini-projects. We'll support nested sub-projects with their own task lists.
Experiment:
We also have an unconventional feature idea in mind for freelancers. Down the road, we'd like to add the ability to attach a monetary value to a task.
The flow would work like this: the task author sets an agreed price in a dedicated field → the freelancer completes the task → the author confirms completion → the assignee gets paid automatically, right then and there.
All payments happen inside Telegram. The assignee can withdraw funds to fiat — straight to their card — at any time.
Once we build the audience, we'd like to explore this direction. Freelancers — does that sound useful to you?
And one question for everyone: what do you think of the task tracker? Does it make you want to give it a try?
I'd love to hear your feedback, and I hope to see you in UTasks.
Denis, December 2023