- You are assuming direct consumers of your service. Think of indirect consumers too. Other startups who can piggyback on your offering to add value to their own product.
- Give an api where I can tell you the email message, sms message, various escalation options, option to repeat email/sms/phone after some delay if nobody responded. Also consider an SMTP api interface too. Not much of an effort for you if you already have the http api present.
- The api should also accept email addresses, mobile numbers and phone numbers. I might be signing up paying customers and using your app to send them alerts. I should be able to do this without having to register each of these email/phone numbers to you. Think of your pricing in this scenario.
- People mentioned ticketing system integration. Great idea. Extend it further. Also have an option where u will send the response back to the originating application.
- Lots of tech support happens from India. You are too expensive for this market. I would find it hard to sell your service as an addon to my app.
- Telecom is quite cheap out here. Figure out some alliances to bring down the cost (e.g. local SMS gateway, most of them use http api, but there are some SMTP based ones too).
- Additional SMS @ $0.15 translates to ~INR 7. SMS in my mobile phone plan would cost me ~10 times less. Not a correct comparison, but thats the language buyers use (enterprise buyers use it a lot) :)