For channels
You cannot message them.
We can.
Your post reaches whoever opens the channel that afternoon. An alert reaches the people who asked for it, the day it happens — because each of them said yes to that exact sentence.
Open the bot
All of it happens in Telegram
There is nowhere to sign up. You open a chat.
Everything below happens in one Telegram conversation with our bot. There is no account to create, no email, no password and no dashboard to learn: open the chat and press START — that is what sends /start — and it answers telling you what to write next. If you already have the chat open, type /start yourself.
It knows who you are because Telegram tells it, not because you typed anything, which is also why nobody can publish alerts as somebody else’s channel.
Thursday
Write /submit and I will ask you four things: your link, the exact alert whoever signs up will get, the language of your page, and the channel you are publishing it from.
There is nothing to sign up for and no form: you get your link to publish straight away.
Submit
Send your link and your sentence
Your link, the exact message, and where you publish it.
Write /submit and the bot asks you four things: your link — with your affiliate tag, from your site, however you have it — the exact message your people will get, which of our languages your page should be in, and the address of the channel you are publishing this one from.
The sentence goes out in whatever language you wrote it, so the page is asked for separately: you know what your people read, and nothing else here does — at that point your link has not even been opened yet. The last one goes at the foot of the alert, so whoever gets it knows where it came from. It is asked every time and not once, because the same person can run several channels. Answer «nothing» and the alert goes out naming nobody, which is more honest than crediting the channel next door.
Then a person opens your link — a person, not a crawler: we never read anybody’s site automatically — and checks two things:
- That it is affiliate marketing. Something someone can buy.
- That it goes where your sentence promises. A category counts if the sentence promised a category.
Where the link lives is not one of them. There is no list of approved shops — Amazon, your own site, a shop nobody has heard of: if it passes those two, it goes in.
You hear back on Telegram as soon as somebody has looked at it, and what comes back is two links to the same yes: your alert’s page, and one that skips the page and opens the bot in Telegram, where they read the alert and agree to be sent it. Which you hand out is decided by who does the explaining, not by which is better.
The page is a landing and it does the explaining for you: what the offer is, how many are already waiting, how any of this works, and a preview carrying the name of what you are offering — so you can drop it anywhere with nothing written around it. The second link explains nothing at all: it opens the bot, shows them the alert and asks them to accept, and that is the whole of it. So it is the one for the post where you have already done the explaining — your own channel, normally, where the page would repeat what they just read and charge them a trip to the browser for it. Neither saves them Telegram, our button lands there too: that is where an alert can be sent to one person and nowhere else. Either way they read your sentence and see your link, whole, before they accept — and the page is the only one of the two that counts anything for you.
Thursday
Which language should that page be in?
Your alert has a page:
https://holdout.deals/l/7f3c9a21b4e05d68
And this one skips the page: it opens the bot in Telegram, where they read the alert and agree to be sent it.
https://t.me/HoldoutDealsBot?start=l7f3c9a21b4e05d68
Which you hand out depends on who does the explaining. The page does it for you; the second link does not. So: the second where your own post has already sold the offer, the page anywhere the link has to speak for itself. Only the page counts opens and clicks for you.
Publish it
That is the hard part done
You have your links. Everything after this is two words.
Put your link where your people already are — the channel, a post, your own site, the description of a video. From here Holdout does the waiting for you: the page shows your sentence, counts the opens and the clicks, and every person who says yes is one more who can be told, privately, the day it happens.
There is nothing else to keep up with. Whenever you come back, weeks later, you are the one who decides — and it ends one of two ways:
How it works for you
- What does it cost?
- Nothing. Not now and not later: sending your alerts to your own people is free and stays free. What we will charge for one day is something else entirely — a paid ranking of channels, so people looking for deals find you. Neither you nor your audience is the product.
- How many alerts can I have?
- As many as you like; there is no quota. Each link is one alert and it closes the moment it goes out. Sending the same link twice does not make a second one — it is the same alert, at the same address.
- What language will my alert go out in?
- Your sentence goes out exactly as you wrote it: we never translate it. What is translated is everything around it — the footer that says who it comes from and how to stop, and anything the bot says — and that goes in the reader’s language: what they have told us, else what Telegram says their phone is set to, else yours, else English. Today we speak English and Spanish.
- Can I correct one, or take it back?
- If we did not pass it, yes: send the same link again with a better sentence and it goes back in the queue. Once it is approved the sentence is frozen — to say something else, send another link. And if the offer is gone,
/canceltakes the whole alert off the table and tells everyone waiting. After/firethere is nothing to undo, because it is already on their phones. - Do I have to publish on Telegram?
- No. Your Holdout link goes wherever you like: a channel, a post, your own site, the description of a video. Telegram is only where the alert lands, because that is where somebody can say yes and be written to once.
What we will never do
- Will you sell the people who sign up?
- No, and there will never be an auction. Whoever signs up through your link is yours, free, always. The ranking we will charge for one day sells a position on a board — never a person.
- Will you write to them yourselves?
- Never on our own account. One sign-up produces one message, the one they read before accepting, and nothing else ever. Once it has been delivered, if they are not waiting for anything else, we delete them: what is left behind leads to nobody.
- Will anyone see who signed up?
- Only how many. The page shows a count and nothing else — no names, no list, not for you and not for anyone. We could not show more if we wanted to: what we hold is a Telegram id, and it goes when the alert has been delivered.
- Will you wrap my link to count clicks?
- Not the one that reaches them: it goes out untouched, with your tag, never wrapped in anything of ours, so we do not know whether anybody clicked it. On your Holdout page we do count opens and clicks — plain numbers, no cookie, no address, nobody attached to them — because that is what tells you whether the page is working.
- Will you rewrite what I wrote?
- What we approved is what goes out, word for word — and not even you can change it afterwards, which is the whole point of somebody having checked it. We open your link once, at review, and we never read anybody’s site automatically after that.
Two minutes on Telegram and your first alert is in review.
Suggest an alert