Are you getting traffic? You'll need that to get sales.
Who is your target customer? Trying to imagine myself as a non-technical exec type looking at this:
"with AI enrichment of contacts" What does this mean? Sounds vague and scary.
Send a text message in 15 seconds with code? I can already send a text message in 3 seconds manually! Also, I've been reading this for 30 seconds and it sounds complicated and technical! Will I have to hire developers for this? In that case, why not just use Twilio? They have billboards! And at a glance their prices look a lot lower.
I dislike the "Y" over "Why" in "Y not trust us". Is this supposed to be cutesy text speak or something?
Why are there separate "Help" and "Support" links in the footer that go to the same contact form? This is frustrating. I was hoping the "Help" link would have more information. Consider an FAQ. Specifically, I noticed that you offer tracking on e-mail sends, which sounds valuable, and made me wonder whether you are either also supporting e-mail sends, or can somehow integrate with my other services that are sending e-mails in order to provide this logging, in which case I'd want to know how that works.
Note: I've never built a startup, but I've worked for a few.
> "with AI enrichment of contacts" What does this mean? Sounds vague and scary.
and
> I dislike the "Y" over "Why" in "Y not trust us". Is this supposed to be cutesy text speak or something?
I'm a former CTO of a startup and Senior Engineer at another now. I don't want to work with anything with spelling errors and I have ABOUT 30 seconds to investigate new SASS services and since I don't immediately understand what you offer, I'd just move on.
Could be because 2 seconds into loading, your crm.puretext.us sites crashes and tells me an error occurred. Maybe this is happening more often than you realize.
There is not nearly enough information in the question to get any kind of valid answer. I'd suggest adding:
* How long have you been at this?
* What have you got invested personally?
* Any third party investment?
* Are you learning stuff from it?
* What time commitment does it take?
* How many users do you have?
* What does it cost you to run?
* Do you still believe in the concept?
Startups are marathons not sprints. I haven't made a dime from JobHound (www.jobhound.io) but it helps people and it costs me about $20 / month to keep it alive (thanks Digital Ocean).
My first startup I didn't take a dime out of it for the first 3 years and then we crossed the chasm and ultimately sold it successfully. These things take time. We all love the myth of overnight success but that's staggeringly rare.
Note: I've done this a lot. If you want to talk founder to founder, my contact info is on my profile.
My perception is that startups require herculean effort with enormous risk. That "bet" may be worthwhile if it will make the world a proportionally better place - which reasonably includes compensation for that effort. Part of the effort of a startup is to estimate the potential market, the value of what you bring, the costs of producing it, and communicating that value to those who would gain from it.
Plug those numbers into a spreadsheet (numbers which will express your biases and values) and make a decision. In a different framing: evaluate your business plan.
Folks on HN will not be able to advise you without access to those kinds of details. Some will have experience and insight that may allow you to adjust those numbers; be grateful for the advice they provide.
Marketers view: the website has lots of buzz words, so it’ll probably do ok with gaining organic search traffic. However, I can’t really tell what the product does? Is it a CRM or is it a way to send messages to my clients?
I think you need to review what your product is, determine what your features are, then work out what your points of difference are. Feature Advantage Benefit model is a simple way to start this.
It’s hard to tell what you do. “Try it now”, to me at least, is a step after looking at screen shots and feature lists. Puretext looks like it has a narrow feature set - this might be an advantage in certain use cases, but you don’t tell me anything about what the product does, how it works, and who would benefit most from this product.
Also, you need to match your language to you clients. If you’re aiming for enterprise customers, don’t use colloquial language. Use simple, concise and clear language. I dislike the use of “Y”. Reading your other comments, I get the impression that this might be your personal style, and that’s great, but your product needs a different voice.
Finally, your prices are high for what appears to be a messaging service. There might be benefit in looking at your competitors (not necessarily the established, bigger players) and review your price strategy.
Thank you for that perspective, In the case of puretext, we offer more than just an API - an interface to send and receive texts immediately after signup, a contact address book, bulk texting using the interface and we'll be adding more
I noticed your website has all kinds of fun little bugs. Presentation is important. Specially if you are trying to sell me on a web app. If your website is the first impression make sure it is polished and functional.
Thank you for your valuable feedback. There is a free trial but reserving a VOIP number and send texts we still have to pay the carriers etc. So we'll definitely take a loss plus the freeloaders always find a way to abuse the system. e.g. Write a bot to create an account and use the new API key to send 10,000 texts and repeat that. Cannot explain how much spam we receive with people trying fake CC numbers from different countries or behind proxies
Yeah, you need a good way to screen the muck of the internet pond before doing expensive (time/data/cycles/money) queries. But you need more customers to tell you what they want -- you're trying to make the most delicious moose food. You don't know what moose want. I don't know what moose want. Cover yourself in blueberries. Go lay in a field. Did the moose come?! Is she licking your foot! Oh gosh write it down! More blueberry sauce! Startups are a bicycle made of science and users
After checking your website I have made some points:
What are you exactly offering? Sending sms from the website? That's great - I need it. But.... Why would I choose you and not an established company in this domain? What can you offer me better than existing ones?
Presence in multiple countries? That's awesome. I would like to contact people from UK, Spanish and Italian numbers. Can I do it with your product? It's not clear.
Contact Management? I use my (insert name here) CRM. Why would I switch? Just because it integrated nicely with sending texts from the web?
As a customer, I don't understand what is your product. Is it contact management, is it text sending, is it global numbers?
There are no screenshots, no videos, just text. I won't be filling in 6 fields just to "see" what is your product. Show, don't tell.
My advice is that you should focus! What exactly is your product? Show me what can I do with it and what can it do for me. Raise my curiosity so that I will click "Free trial" (btw, merge first name and last name, remove confirm password).
Keep up the good work. You are on the right track just need to focus and polish your product demo.
>As a customer, I don't understand what is your product. Is it contact management, is it text sending, is it global numbers? There are no screenshots, no videos, just text. I won't be filling in 6 fields just to "see" what is your product. Show, don't tell.
Exactly my impression, I had a hard time to understand (maybe) what is the actual "scope".
But I would say "Show, besides tell", right now not only the "show" part is missing, but also IMHO a clear, simple "tell" part (a small text describing what is offered would be enough).
As a customer, I find of little (actualy no) use the paragraphs about sending a text message in 15 seconds with this (or that) scripting or programming language and I sincerely don't care about Mr. Hanselman's opinion on .Net 5.
As a side note, being not a native English speaker, I could not understand quite a few things on how your "Plans" work, I had to look on a dictionary for "Overages" (and even after having read the exact definition I am not too convinced it is the right term to describe what you charge for each message exceeding the included amount).
As well, probably it is a language barrier, but I would much better understand "Text messages" than "Texts".
I'm starting something and your service could be useful but your website don't feel "corporate" or "serious" to me. Maybe it's the image you want to promote but the "Y not try us" sounds childish. And your big plan called "boss" seems like a joke. Maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker.
Also, I don't like time limited trial. What about a free account with maximum 15 or 25sms total? I can take 2 or 3 weeks to try your system at my own pace because I can only work on it during evening and weekends.
Who is your target customer? Trying to imagine myself as a non-technical exec type looking at this:
"with AI enrichment of contacts" What does this mean? Sounds vague and scary.
Send a text message in 15 seconds with code? I can already send a text message in 3 seconds manually! Also, I've been reading this for 30 seconds and it sounds complicated and technical! Will I have to hire developers for this? In that case, why not just use Twilio? They have billboards! And at a glance their prices look a lot lower.
I dislike the "Y" over "Why" in "Y not trust us". Is this supposed to be cutesy text speak or something?
Why are there separate "Help" and "Support" links in the footer that go to the same contact form? This is frustrating. I was hoping the "Help" link would have more information. Consider an FAQ. Specifically, I noticed that you offer tracking on e-mail sends, which sounds valuable, and made me wonder whether you are either also supporting e-mail sends, or can somehow integrate with my other services that are sending e-mails in order to provide this logging, in which case I'd want to know how that works.
Note: I've never built a startup, but I've worked for a few.