Mark Basa, director at HOKK Finance, discusses how his company is run solely through instant messaging app Telegram.

How do you use Telegram for running your business?

We have hundreds of different chat groups with our team and contractors that are specific to a topic, for example, development, moderators, social media, and many more. We schedule calls when we need to. We send audio files when we don’t have time to type long messages (happens a lot). And amongst it all, we reply in memes. Ridiculous as it sounds, memes are a bit like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics to us. If we read something, most of the time a hilarious meme is enough to show our response. 

Why did you decide to run your business over Telegram?

It’s just a part of crypto. Telegram is the heart of most projects using blockchain. I just wish they’d make it more crypto specific so you could do more with international teams like Slack.

What are the benefits of this approach?

There’s no bs in communication. Everything is agile. Want to build a product? Use Telegram. Want to do a competition? Use Telegram. I have brought in every one of our suppliers from PR, development, and graphic design. We’re all on it, and it makes workflow super fast. I only use Slack now when I have to. However, Telegram does limit how much we can scale on task and objective planning. 

Are there any challenges, and how did you resolve them?

Messages – otherwise urgent voice callA. Everyone is extremely autonomous, and there is little micro-managing. We trust each other to do our jobs. 

How does your team find using Telegram for doing their daily jobs?

They love it besides the obvious challenges of doing business. 

What do your other stakeholders think of this?

99% of them are on Telegram, so it’s rare that we have to migrate them over and set up how we do things. 

What advice would you give to people looking to run a business online?

Stop with all the garbage planning meetings, and just get on Telegram and start using it to scale at speed.