My startup is not attracting paying customers. Should I shut it down?

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.

* 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.

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.

Good luck, you’ve got some good ideas here!

this market is so saturated. can you use your tech for something similar?