Telegram Lead Bot + Admin Panel

01Context

Small service businesses — salons, clinics, tutors, agencies — lose customers every time a message goes unanswered. The owner is busy, replies hours later, and the lead has already gone to a competitor. The job here was a reusable template: a bot that captures and qualifies incoming leads instantly, and a web admin where the owner sees everything in one place instead of scrolling Telegram.

02Problem

The buyer's pain, in their words: "I keep losing leads because I can't reply fast enough, and when I finally do, I have no idea who I've already spoken to." Manual chat means slow first responses, no records, no overview, and no way to track which leads closed.

03Solution

A single deployable service with two parts that share one database and one event loop:

• Bot (aiogram 3, FSM): /start → a guided dialog collects name → contact → task description with validation at each step, then stores the lead and confirms with a ticket number. Built on finite-state machines so the conversation never gets lost mid-way.
• Admin (FastAPI + Jinja2): password-protected dashboard with live stats (total / today / new / closed), a filterable lead table, and one-click status workflow (new → contacted → closed).
• Persistence: SQLAlchemy 2 (async) + aiosqlite, auto-created on startup and seeded with sample data so the demo is never empty.
• Deploy: one Dockerfile, one process, /health endpoint for uptime checks — ready for Railway or an always-on VPS.

04Outcome

A bot like this turns a multi-hour first response into an instant one and gives the owner a real overview of their pipeline. The lead never waits, never gets lost, and the owner stops digging through chat history. Concretely, the template delivers:

05Tradeoffs & what I'd improve

• SQLite over Postgres — perfect for a single-instance demo and small businesses; for high write volume I'd switch to PostgreSQL (one config line in DATABASE_URL).
• Polling over webhooks — simplest to deploy anywhere; for very high traffic I'd move to webhooks behind a reverse proxy.
• Add CRM sync — next iteration would push leads to Google Sheets / HubSpot / Airtable automatically, so the owner never leaves their existing workflow.