Why Startups Are Shifting to TON and How to Succeed?

Launching a startup in 2025 is like working in one of the most overstimulated and saturated tech ecosystems we’ve ever seen. Markets are full. Attention is limited. Capital is tighter. So, how do you break through?

For increasingly early-stage founders, the solution is: build on TON.

Not because it’s trendy. But because it’s made for distribution, scalability, and mass adoption — the three things every single startup needs to survive. TON gives access to hundreds of millions of Telegram users overnight, instant onboarding, and scalable infrastructure without the sky-high price tag. In a world where speed and responsiveness are all that count, TON lets founders ship, iterate, and scale quicker than ever before. By choosing TON, you’re not just following a new trend—you’re positioning your startup at the forefront of a platform designed for the next wave of global innovation.

What Makes TON Different — and Startup-Friendly?

TON is not “yet another chain.” It’s a peer-to-peer network backed by Telegram with its proprietary architecture for messaging-native apps, speed payment, and scale apps. Having been built on one of the world’s largest messaging platforms offers startup opportunities unavailable elsewhere.

Here’s what makes it startup-ready:

1. User Acquisition Built-In

Marketing a Web3 product typically means beginning from a ground-up to build a community. With TON, your channel is already established — Telegram. With over 900 million active users, Telegram has a built-in audience that isn’t just global but extremely active as well.

You can go from idea → product → users in weeks, not months. There is no user education needed for wallets, gas, or L2 chains. Just hook up your Mini App with a Telegram bot and see your MVP take off in the market. Onboarding is easy, reducing adoption barriers, so you can care more about creating features that add value.

2. Fast, Cheap, and Simple Payments

TON’s local token transfer is in real-time and in cents. Need to try out microtransactions? In-app purchases? Subscription model? TON natively supports all of it — without Layer 2 tricks or third-party bridges. New revenue streams and business models may be tried out without fear of exorbitant transaction fees or technical hardship.

Bonus: You also get solid wallet integration through Tonkeeper, Wallet, and future releases from Telegram. This makes it easy for users to make transactions, further increasing engagement and retention.

3. Easier Path to Virality

Recall the days when your product would expand because users shared it with others. TON brings that all back. Telegram-native bots, wallet links, and message-driven UX ensure users can share your app like they forward a meme. Viral growth isn’t only possible—it’s in the DNA of the platform.

If your product is charged with virality, then TON is an accelerator. When coupled with frictionless sign-up, native social features, and payment ease, this trio becomes a growth driver of considerable power. It’s no surprise that organic search positions on Google page 1 average 1,447 words, and an optimized Telegram-first landing experience gives your product the discoverability kick it needs.

Case in Point: What a TON Startup Looks Like

Let’s take a quick real-world example:

If a group is creating a peer-to-peer tutoring platform. Instead of building a full-fledged web application, they:

Create a TON Smart Contract for Escrow and Payments

Build a smart contract that holds student payments in escrow. Payments to the tutor are released only after the session is completed, giving both parties trust and accountability. If a session is canceled or not followed through, the money automatically gets refunded to the student, minimizing disputes and risk. The platform can also automatically deduct a small fee, creating a transparent, sustainable business model. The contract is implemented in FunC and securely handles bookings, confirmations, and payouts on-chain, providing a tamper-proof record of all transactions. This also enhances user trust with reduced administrative overhead.

Build a Telegram Bot for Session Booking and Communication

Design a Telegram bot through which students can sign up, find tutors, reserve sessions, and get notified—all within the ease of Telegram’s comfortable interface. The bot facilitates the workflow from discovery right up to reminders for sessions and post-session feedback, making the process seamless and intuitive. It also confirms reservations and tracks payment status in real-time, keeping both students and tutors updated all the time. By keeping all conversations within Telegram, you avoid making users change applications, resulting in increased engagement and satisfaction.

Launch an NFT-Based Credential System for Tutors

Reward tutors with NFTs as authenticated credentials upon approval or following a minimum number of sessions. These NFTs serve as public, blockchain-verified proof of their proficiency and reliability, stored in their TON wallet where everyone can see them. This credential system not only incentivizes tutors to be extremely skilled but also builds trust with students, who are easily able to verify a tutor’s credentials. These NFTs can become lucrative digital assets in the future, representing a tutor’s reputation and accomplishments on the platform. This forward-looking credentials approach distinguishes your platform and leverages the unique abilities of TON’s blockchain technology.

By leveraging TON and intrinsic Telegram feature sets, startups avoid Web2 development costs and overhead. Instead of spending months and $100K+, teams can ship quickly, acquire users directly, and iterate on real feedback.

Within a few months, one of the projects built an MVP, gained 5,000 users from Telegram, and started making revenue without full-stack bloat. Payment, notification, and user flows are intuitive and seamless with smart contracts and bots working in harmony.

This isn’t theory. Quicker shipping and deeper investment from teams once proven traction on TON. And with 27.6% of each click going to the #1 Google result, native Telegram UX puts your product in competition for higher conversion and fewer frictions, putting you at a true advantage in the Web3 fight.

The Biggest Mistake Founders Make?

Treating TON as Ethereum. TON is not EVM-compatible, and that’s a blessing in disguise. It makes for cleaner architecture, simpler apps, and higher integration. By committing to TON’s particular structure, you’re able to develop products quickly, more efficiently, and most importantly, natively within the Telegram ecosystem. This is not a technical differentiation—it’s a strategic one, allowing startups to develop solutions closer to what users require and the nature of messaging platforms today.

But it also means you must have developers who understand really how TON works under the hood:

• Cells and slices – TON has its low-level data structure. Programmers need to be aware of how to pack, read, and refer to information in an efficient way using such components. Knowledge of cells and slices is necessary for improving contract performance and reducing storage costs, which can further determine the scalability and reliability of your app. Without it, even simple contracts can turn into resource-intensive or expensive-to-run contracts.
• Manual state management – Contrary to most chains, TON contracts do not have the property of retaining memory across call instances by default. The developers must manually serialize and deserialize state within storage cells. It is more of a process to find out how data survives and consumes a considerable amount of planning to ensure that contracts respond as desired in interactions. It also presents new opportunities for contract innovation design, but only if you are aware of how to take advantage of them.
• Asynchronous messaging – Inter-contract communication is done through asynchronous message passing. This will require close timing planning, failure recovery, and gas budgeting. Your developers need to arrange contracts for late response handling, failure scenarios, and the asynchronous workflow niceties, which are pretty different from synchronous execution models of other blockchains. Doing it well is having your app scale and communicate with other services in the TON ecosystem smoothly.
• Telegram integration – Since Telegram is natively part of the TON ecosystem, developers should understand how wallets, bot integrations, and notifications interact in user flows. Leveraging Telegram’s APIs and features allows for simple onboarding, real-time interaction, and a straightforward yet revolutionary user experience. Integration is critical to unlock the true value of applications built upon TON so that instant notifications, frictionless payments, and viral sharing can be initiated.

Without this particular skill, communities are met with unexpected issues, where contract logic is suboptimal, user flows are interrupted, etc. TON’s nuances require a set of new styles and the adopting of new paradigms.Teams who take the time to learn these rules can spot efficiencies,.produce more robust and scalable products, and build experiences that really stand out in the Web3 space.

Fact: Most of the failed projects on TON fail because they’re trying to use it like a plug-and-play blockchain. It won’t work.

It takes a tailored solution, careful technical knowledge, and comprehension to work with the platform’s strengths in mind to be successful on TON. For founders and developers who are willing to work with those differences, however, TON is an excellent development and expansion platform.

So, How Do You Get It Right?

Here’s the path we recommend for early-stage teams:

1. Build for Telegram First

Uncover underlying interactions of your app on Telegram UX. Employ a bot and a mini-app as your native frontend. In Telegram-first, you get access to a huge, super-highly-engaged user base on day one, and your product is open, intuitive, and accessible to millions. And on top of that, you can draw upon native strengths of Telegram—like notification, group chat, and frictionless sign-up—to create a frictionless user experience that’s native and intuitive.

2. Use Native TON Contracts, Not Generic Web3 Tools

TON’s smart contract programming language is unique and specifically optimized for messaging apps, microtransactions, and tokenization. Don’t try to Frankenstein chain EVM tools together. Native TON development means you get to utilize special features and performance opportunities that simply aren’t present with generic Web3 tools. By natively building on TON, you get to leverage the platform’s efficient architecture, lowered cost, and closer integration with Telegram, getting ahead of the competition shackled by legacy blockchain toolchains.

3. Test Fast, Iterate Faster

TON’s low gas fees make experimentation cheap. You can deploy 100 versions of your payment functionality or token economy and spend less than a dollar in gas fees. That level of experimentation freedom allows you to try out ideas, experiment with user experience, and pivot quickly without the terror of runaway expense. That’s the secret to product-market fit in a changing world, and TON’s architecture has that agile mentality at its core.

4. Leverage the Ecosystem

Seek grants from TON funders. Join the dev chats. Work with other Telegram-native products. There’s real traction — don’t try to do it alone. The TON community is strong and vibrant, with resources, ideas, and co-op opportunities that can get you traction and lead you around the corner. By riding the ecosystem, your startup positions itself for long-term success. Being surrounded by other builders, mentors, and early adopters is not just going to increase your odds of success but also keep you on the bleeding edge and connected to fresh frontiers when they emerge. Partnering with an experienced ton development company can accelerate this process even further.

Bottom Line: TON Is a Strategic Advantage

If you’re a startup entrepreneur in the year 2025, there are three things you need to succeed:

1. Distribution: having the ability to get in front of users quickly and at scale, with your product growing organically. With today’s noisy market, even the best ideas are at risk of falling through the cracks unless there’s a clear way of picking up users. You have to build distribution into your plan from day one if you’re going to cut through the noise and experience significant growth.
2. Affordable infrastructure: cheap, dependable access to technology that allows you to scale, build, and deploy without burning through your capital. Startups must make the most of every dollar, and the right infrastructure can mean the difference between aggressive iteration and grinding to a halt due to prohibitive cost or technical debt.
3. Fast iteration — Having the ability to test, learn, and iterate on your product quickly so that you can respond to market feedback and outmanoeuvre your rivals. The most successful startups are those that can test hypotheses quickly, pivot when necessary, and tune their offering through real-world learning.

TON excels in all three of these areas. Its ecosystem offers unmatched access to a large, active user base and distribution without friction. Its network architecture is designed to keep infrastructure costs low, so startups can build and scale without being slowed down by costs. With TON’s developer-friendly tools and the robust support of organizations such as TheRaven, you can bring ideas to market faster than ever.