How to Set Up Your Notifications on Zinn Hub

Why notifications are your speed advantage

Read the rest of the Freelancer Academy and a pattern emerges. The article on winning your first sale tells you to respond to every message within an hour. The proposal-writing guide notes the first three or four proposals get the most attention. The reviews guide calls the first 60 minutes after order acceptance “the most under-used window in freelance work.”

All of those advantages depend on something obvious that most sellers ignore: you have to actually know an order, message or brief landed. Email checked once a day at 9pm doesn’t cut it. A Slack workspace you forgot you connected six months ago doesn’t cut it. The fastest seller in any given moment is usually the one with notifications routed to the channel they happen to be looking at right now — and the slowest is usually the one with nothing reaching them at all.

Setting your notifications up properly takes ten minutes once. The compound across hundreds of orders is one of the highest-return setup tasks on the entire platform.

The four channels at a glance

Zinn Hub gives you four notification channels. Each fits different work patterns; most sellers use two or three together.

Where to find your settings

The notifications system is live for both Zinners and Zinnectors, at slightly different URLs depending on which side of the marketplace you’re using:

Bookmark whichever URL applies to you — you’ll come back to it occasionally as your work pattern shifts. The page itself is a single grid: rows down the left for each event category, columns across the top for each channel, tickboxes in every cell. Tick a cell, you get that event on that channel. Untick, you don’t. Save preferences at the bottom and you’re done.

Channels you haven’t connected yet appear greyed out with a “Connect” link to set them up. You can come back later as you add channels.

The 18 event categories

The matrix lists 18 categories, each containing one or more individual events. You control the whole category as a unit per channel — if you want order-related alerts on Telegram, tick the Order updates row in the Telegram column and every event in that category routes to Telegram. The full set of categories:

The categories that earn the most attention from active Zinners are the time-critical ones: Order updates, Order lifecycle, Direct messages, Revisions, and Cancellations. These are where speed matters most and where missed notifications cost real money.

The list expands over time as new platform features roll out, so you may see additional categories appear in your matrix. The structure stays the same: tick the channels you want for each new row, save, done.

Critical events you can’t turn off

Some events are too important to silence and the platform locks them on. You’ll always be alerted to these regardless of any other configuration:

• Critical security alerts — suspicious activity on your account
• Wallet debit confirmations — money leaving your balance
• Payout failures — transfers that didn’t complete
• Account suspension or unsuspension events

The reasoning is simple: anything affecting your money or your account access has to reach you. A seller who silenced their notifications and missed a payout failure is a seller who finds out a week later by accident. The platform doesn’t let that happen.

The cost-saver toggle

If you connect Telegram and start routing alerts there, you don’t necessarily want a duplicate email landing in your inbox five seconds later. The cost-saver toggle solves this. The exact wording on the page:

“When Telegram is connected, suppress email for non-critical events I would receive on Telegram anyway.”

Tick it and you get a single notification per event on the channel you’re actually watching, instead of two on channels you’re not. Critical events still hit email regardless — the suppression only applies to non-critical alerts where the duplication is genuine noise.

For most sellers who connect Telegram, this toggle should be on. You’ll see the alert on Telegram (where you’ll act on it) and your email stays clear for things you actually need to read at email pace.

Setting up email

Email is the default channel and ships on for every category from the moment you sign up. The address used is the one on your Zinn Hub account — if you need to change it, update your account email in profile settings and notifications follow.

Most sellers should keep email on for at least Security & account and Payouts & ledger even if they have Telegram or Slack connected. Email is the most durable record and the channel least likely to silently break. For high-frequency categories like Direct messages or Order updates, the cost-saver toggle (above) lets you reduce email noise once Telegram is doing the real-time work.

Setting up Telegram

Telegram is the fastest channel by a clear margin and the one most active Zinners use as their primary alert path. The connection process from your notification settings page:

1. Click Connect Telegram in the Telegram column header
2. Follow the prompt to start a chat with the Zinn Hub bot
3. Confirm the link from inside Telegram
4. Return to your notifications page — the Telegram column should now be active

Once connected, tick the categories you want routed to Telegram. For most active sellers that’s Order updates, Order lifecycle, Direct messages, Cancellations, Revisions and Reviews at minimum. Save preferences and you’ll start receiving alerts on Telegram immediately.

Setting up Slack

If your team or business already runs in Slack, the integration lets you route Zinn Hub events into specific channels of your workspace — not just into your DMs. Order alerts can land in #zinn-orders, marketing fires in #zinn-marketing, ledger and payout alerts in a private finance channel only certain people can see.

The connection process:

1. Click Connect Slack in the Slack column header
2. Authorise via Slack’s OAuth flow on your workspace
3. Pick a default channel for Zinn Hub messages
4. Optionally configure per-category overrides — orders to one channel, payments to another, etc.
5. Save and you’re live

Slack is a great fit for agencies and small teams where multiple people need to see different categories of alert. It’s overkill for solo sellers who already have Telegram — if you don’t use Slack daily for actual work, skip it. Connecting a workspace you don’t monitor just routes alerts into a black hole.

The in-app bell

The in-app notification bell sits in the top-right of your Zinn Hub account header. It’s always on and can’t be disabled — that’s by design. When you’re actively logged into Zinn Hub, the bell is the catch-all that ensures nothing slips past, even if a configured external channel had a delivery hiccup.

The bell shows recent activity across every category — orders, messages, reviews, wallet, security, the lot. Click any item to jump straight to the relevant page. Think of it as the master log of what the system has flagged for your attention; the other channels are how those flags reach you when you’re not actively on the site.

Recommended setups by use case

No two sellers work the same way, but three patterns cover most of them. Use these as starting points, then tune to fit.

CEO advice

Keep them connected, keep them active — silence costs orders

The biggest mistake I see new Zinners make with notifications is treating them as noise to escape rather than infrastructure to tune. They get a few alerts, find them annoying, and turn everything off. Then a week later they notice they missed a Project match worth $500 because nothing fired. Don’t do that.

Don’t disable everything to make it quiet

Notification overload is a real thing, but the answer isn’t silence — it’s tuning. Reduce email noise by routing time-critical alerts to Telegram and turning on the cost-saver toggle. Mute the bot overnight if you need sleep. Disable categories you genuinely don’t care about (a solo seller probably doesn’t need Ambassador programme alerts on every channel). What you don’t do is kill the channel that tells you when an order arrives, because that’s the order you don’t respond to and lose.

Don’t connect channels you don’t actually monitor

A Slack workspace you joined for a project two years ago and haven’t opened since is worse than no Slack at all — it routes alerts into a digital void you don’t check. Connect channels you genuinely use every day. If your work pattern changes and a channel goes dormant, disconnect it and update your routing. Active channels only.

Don’t rely on a single channel only

Every channel has its bad day. Email gets blocked by an over-eager spam filter. Telegram has occasional regional outages. Slack workspaces lock you out for OAuth re-confirmation. A two-channel setup — typically Telegram for speed plus email for durability — gives you redundancy that catches the rare moments when one channel drops alerts.

Don’t ignore the security and financial alerts

Critical events are locked-on for a reason. Even if every other notification is annoying you, never try to work around the security and money alerts. If something’s wrong with your account or your earnings, you need to know first — before a buyer, before support, before anyone. The channels for those alerts exist precisely because the cost of missing them dwarfs the inconvenience of receiving one occasionally.

Don’t set it once and forget it for a year

Your work pattern changes. You scale from solo to small team. You move from side-hustle to full-time. You switch your primary chat tool from Telegram to Slack, or back. Every six months, open your notifications page, look at what’s configured, and ask whether it still fits how you actually work today. Five minutes of tuning saves hours of missed opportunities over the months that follow.

Speed compounds

The seller who responds to a buyer message in three minutes instead of three hours wins more orders, gets more 5-star reviews, ranks higher in search, gets more impressions, gets more orders. The compound effect is real, and it starts with notifications routed to a channel you actually watch. Spend the ten minutes setting it up properly and reap the next five years of compound. That’s the trade.

Common notification mistakes

• Disabling everything because notifications “are annoying”
• Connecting a Slack workspace you don’t actually monitor daily
• Setting up Telegram but not enabling the cost-saver toggle, then drowning in duplicate email
• Relying on email alone and missing the speed advantage Telegram offers
• Not muting the Telegram bot overnight when you need sleep, then deciding the whole thing is unbearable
• Ignoring the bell when actively browsing the site — it’s the safety net
• Trying to work around critical event alerts (security, payouts, suspension) — you can’t, and shouldn’t want to
• Setting up notifications once and never reviewing them as your work pattern changes
• Disconnecting a working channel during a quiet week, then forgetting to reconnect when business picks up
• Connecting personal Telegram or Slack to a business that has multiple team members — alerts disappear into the founder’s phone instead of reaching the team that needs them

Step-by-step playbook

The eight-step rhythm for getting notifications set up properly the first time:

1. Open your notification settings page

   Zinners go to the dashboard URL; buyers use the my-account URL. Bookmark it — you’ll come back occasionally.

2. Decide which channels you’ll actually monitor

   Honest assessment. Email is on by default. Add Telegram if you’re responsive on your phone. Add Slack only if your team or business genuinely uses it daily.

3. Connect Telegram for fastest alerts

   Click Connect, follow the bot prompt, confirm. Pin the bot to the top of your Telegram chat list once linked.

4. Connect Slack only if you use one daily

   OAuth into your workspace, pick channels for each category. Skip if you’re a solo seller who already has Telegram routing the same alerts.

5. Walk through every category

   All 18 of them. Tick the channels you want for each. Pay extra attention to the time-critical ones: Order updates, Order lifecycle, Direct messages, Cancellations, Revisions.

6. Enable the cost-saver toggle if Telegram is connected

   Suppresses email duplication for non-critical events you’ll receive on Telegram anyway. Critical alerts still hit email regardless.

7. Save preferences

   The save button at the bottom commits the configuration. Notifications start routing per the new setup immediately.

8. Review every six months — or when your work pattern changes

   Set a calendar reminder. Five minutes of tuning then prevents months of missed alerts later, especially as you scale or switch tools.

Frequently asked questions