Our customers aren't who we thought they would be

This website Get SMS Online has actually been around since 2016 under different ownership, but I relaunched it in May 2026. The idea seemed simple enough: buy phone numbers on a long-term basis and resell access to them as one-time numbers for receiving SMS verification codes.

I expected most customers to be ordinary people who occasionally needed a temporary number. So I kept the barrier to entry low, including a small minimum deposit, and accepted cryptocurrency because privacy seemed like an important part of the use case.

Then we started attracting a very different kind of customer.

Some people wanted numbers specifically for registering accounts with banks and other financial services. It quickly became obvious that this could create serious fraud and abuse problems. We ended up having to blacklist tons of services that could be used for fraudulent activity.

The hardest part is probably inventory.

We pay a fixed price for rented numbers, but demand is anything but fixed. One day everyone wants WhatsApp numbers and customers are willing to pay a premium because supply is tight. The next day, demand drops and we are left sitting on a pile of unsold numbers. There is no easy way to predict which service will suddenly become popular.

So I'm still trying to figure out the business.

At the moment I'm working on SEO, trying to understand where to get traffic on a tight budget, and experimenting with different ways to make the inventory and pricing work better.

Would appreciate any advice. What are your favorite methods for getting traffic and doing competitive intelligence in a niche where there's not much public information available?