If you paste a link to a Discord or Telegram conversation into your app, you’re telling your users that they need to go somewhere far from your app. You’ve already paid to get their attention, and then you hand it over to a third-party app that gives you nothing back. Is it rational?
The “Rented” Space Problem
The main issue with third-party messengers is not just loss of control, it’s the data black hole. If your users are talking about your product in a Discord server, you cannot precisely analyse whether the sentiment is positive or negative, you don’t know if your biggest spenders are quietly unhappy, and you don’t notice when a specific bug in a specific flow is driving churn.
There is also the risk of brand jacking. Public spaces like Discord servers or Telegram groups are easy entry points for competitors, resellers and other opportunists who are happy to redirect your users away from your product.
An in-app community solves this: the same conversations happen, but they happen in a space you can actually measure and improve.
Integration That Doesn’t Break Your Roadmap
A common objection sounds like this: “We can’t build a messenger in-house, it’s too hard.” Product and engineering teams don’t want to own yet another complex feature, worry about load, or push a full app release every time the chat UI needs a small change.
The alternative is to plug in a ready-made social layer and keep configuration and updates in one place, without falling into “version hell” where different cohorts of users see different generations of the chat experience.
Real Growth, Not Just Noise
When the community lives inside your product instead of somewhere else, your core metrics start to move in the right direction:
- Retention increase. When people are connected not only to your content but also to each other, monthly retention tends to grow once the community is part of the product.
- Actionable insights. AI can process thousands of messages and surface clear signals about what users love, what confuses them and what they expect next.
- Sales lift. With copy-and-repeat widgets, users can share actions such as buying a subscription or turning on a feature, and others in the community can replicate that action with a single click.
Keeping the Crowd Safe
Managing a community does not have to mean hiring a large team of moderators.
Modern systems can handle most of the heavy lifting automatically:
- multi-layer AI that detects toxic and fraudulent behaviour in real time;
- automatic blurring or masking of personal details such as phone numbers to reduce scam risk;
- clear rules and tools that keep the worst behaviour away from the rest of the community.
You get a space that stays on-brand without having to manually review every message.
If the main conversation about your product is happening outside your app, you are leaving both revenue and growth on the table. Bringing that conversation into your own product turns community from a rented digital channel into a real growth lever that lives inside the product itself. Teams that use tools like watchers.io to power that layer keep both the conversation and the value close to the product, instead of handing it over to third parties.
