I built what startups say they need, but they won't sign up

Founders will rarely admit this, because admitting that the idea sucks would hurt their egos. It's easier to just say that the startup would've succeeded if they only had someone good at marketing.

I say this as a technical founder myself, who made this mistake.

Also, from a brief look, your product just seems fake. The AI voice and video, the promises of offering incredible benefits, lack of focus on a particular use case.

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I thought through every pain point I experienced and addressed them. I validated the idea by talking to dozens of founders who all said "I need exactly this." But here's what's driving me crazy: people won't sign up. I get traffic, positive feedback, "this looks great!" comments... then nothing. Maybe 2-3% convert to even trying the free tier. I'm starting to question everything. Maybe the problem isn't as big as I thought? Maybe founders prefer struggling with marketing over using tools? Maybe I'm solving a "nice to have" instead of a "must have"? I've been building products for years, but this disconnect between expressed need and actual behavior is breaking my brain. When people say they desperately need help with marketing but won't try a free tool that addresses their exact complaints, what's really going on? Has anyone else experienced this gap between what people say they want and what they actually do? How do you tell the difference between real problems and problems people just like complaining about? I'm genuinely lost here and could use some brutal honesty from this community.

Scrap the current positioning and start over with customer interviews? Focus on just one specific use case instead of trying to solve "marketing" broadly? Give up on the product and treat this as an expensive learning experience? Double down on finding the right communities/channels I haven't tried yet?

I'm torn between "keep iterating" and "cut losses and move on." The hardest part is I genuinely believe this solves a real problem because it solved MY problem, but maybe my problem isn't as common as I thought. Any advice from founders who've been in similar situations? How do you know when to pivot vs. when to persist? And if you pivot, how do you figure out what direction to go? I'm at the point where I need concrete next steps rather than more analysis paralysis.

However I tried to try your product.

1. Personal pricing makes it sound like I am going to pay more than I should

2. 'Failed to save brand. Please try again.' and no error message is where I went stuck. After you IMO already asked way to many questions for a onboarding

1. I really admire you posting here looking for feedback and taking it with an open mind, without getting defensive. Not an easy thing to do!

2. You've built and launched something, which is way more than most people. Be proud of yourself.

3. The majority of successful startups were once where you are now. This is what it looks like to be pre-PMF.

4. I agree with most of the other feedback here: there's something that's off about your overall visual design. I know that's vague, but to me it feels like a template design, which isn't a bad thing, but parts of it feel like the boilerplate copy on a template that you didn't bother to change. My advice: go look at 100 homepages for B2B SaaS companies in your space, and get a feel for which ones are good and which ones aren't. This is more art than science tbh.

5. There's way too many animations going on for me. You've got the page title that's changing the browser tab constantly, that annoying chat thing in the nav bar, your typing animation in the headline, etc.

6. Social proof is powerful, but can backfire. "7 people signed up this week" is not comforting to me. Nor is a list of startups using the app that I've never heard of.

7. Too many calls to action. Do you want me to put in my email? Click that chat thing? Click to meet June? Schedule a demo? Calculate my pricing?

8. I don't like the personalized pricing thing. It just feels like work, and an immediate signal that this is going to be expensive. Plus the pricing flow has 8 steps! I'd be shocked if hardly anyone finishes it, especially since step 3 has a scary empty text box that wants to know about my business. Why do you need that to figure out how much this costs? My advice: just do two pricing tiers and have a "enterprise: contact us" tier as well to cover anything else. I still have no idea what your pricing is, but my gut would be that this should cost like $29-99 / month on the starter tier, and around 2-3x that on the higher tier.

9. This product feels like it's trying to do way too much. You've got eight features listed there, and most of them are competing with entire huge startups. I'd really figure out what your core differentiator is, and just focus on that. The rest of these features should mostly come via integrations, imo. I don't feel super strongly about that though, maybe these features are fine, but the marketing here makes this product feel complicated. Make it feel super simple.

10. Who is your target audience? Startups? Way too broad. Pick a niche. This ties into #9 below. What single core feature can you offer a hungry niche audience?

11. The "from the founder" section...sorry man, but you should rethink this. That picture isn't great for this (weird expression and wearing a tux?), and why are there five stars shown? That's what I mean when I say it feels like a template where the default content hasn't been fixed.

12. Your domain name and the "frederick@buzzchat.site" email both scream red flags to me. Smarketly isn't the worst startup name I've ever heard, but you need the .com (or .ai or something else that legit startups are using right now), and your email should be "support@smarketly.com" or whatever. Similarly, it's not fair, but unless your target market is startups in Ghana, that phone number is doing you more harm than good. I'd drop it entirely; your target audience is unlikely to call you.

13. Drop all those footer links that go nowhere. They just make this seem unfinished or something.

So, if it were me, what would I actually DO at this point?

1. It sounds like you've had some conversations with your audience, so that's good. Keep doing that.

2. Drastically simplify this homepage. You should end up with about a third as much as what you have here. Make it super simple, get rid of all the stuff I mentioned above that is hurting the initial impression, and make your call to action super clear and singular.

3. If your target audience is companies that would already have a website or social media (which I would think they would), then I would consider having your CTA be letting them drop in their website or social media accounts, and then you crawl that in the background and build them some demo content. Not easy to execute, but it makes it super easy for them to immediately see the value of your product. You could do a thing where you generate five pieces of content, show them the first two, and blur out the last three unless they drop in their email for a free trial.

4. Make it dead simple to understand this product and get immediate value from it. You're selling automation, but right now your landing page just makes it seem like figuring this out and setting it up is going to be MORE work, not less. What would it look like if I could spend literally 60 seconds setting this up, and then never touch it again? That might not be feasible, but it might be useful as a brainstorming exercise.

5. Remember that what you're trying to do here is HARD. Creating a product like this is not easy, and getting actual customers to enter their credit card and give you money is even harder. Adjust your expectations, and decide if this is something you really want to grind on for months.

OK, that was a lot! I hope some of it helps. You can drop me an email if you want to chat more, my email is in my profile.

Good luck!