Taweed, your service looks fantastic, it must have taken a lot of development and refinement. It certainly looks polished from the youtube video. I don't know

Taweed, your service looks fantastic, it must have taken a lot of development and refinement. It certainly looks polished from the youtube video. I don't know your numbers but based on the fact that you are continually overhauling your pitch I am going to assume that you are struggling to gain traction, so with that in mind I'll do my best to give my opinion on why that is. Again no offense intended, service looks great! I think you are struggling to develop a direct, refined super simple, super clear focused message to a specific niche customer. For some reason I have you on my google buzz thing (we exchanged some emails a while ago) so I feel like I'm pretty up to date with your iterations. Your message has never been ridiculously simple and focused. You should pick a specific niche and go after it like a starving dog. Is it for micro startups? for freelancers? for families? for college group projects? for enterprise? for red-haired left-handed moms born in Idaho? Get specific, answer EVERY SINGLE ONE of that niche's questions and concerns, and then hit it out of the park. I watched all 7 mins of your video, I've read all your copy (I agree that the grayed mockup is very non-user-friendly and thus a turn off) and I can't get excited about it because it's too vague of a proposition. I get that its private and its a communication platform, but customers less savvy than myself understand that there is an ocean's worth of online collaboration products. It's not a question of how great your product is (it does look pretty nice) its more a question of whether your target audience understands the benefits of your specific product and how you solve their specific problems. This is why it hurts to be vague, you end up trying to be all things to all people (whether you intend that or not) and you get brownie points with zero of them (because you don't specifically address any niche pain points other than privacy). Get tiny - get narrow - get focused. Seems like your competition is 37signals. They started by focusing on freelance web designers (because that's what they were). They focus on the tech-savy freelancer who needed to collaborate with his client - nothing more. Oh yeah lastly, the whole philosophy page is extremely self-serving. No one cares about your company, they care about what your company can do for them. It's fine to talk about yourself just so long as it's in the context of how your helping ME. I think you meant well with what you wrote, but for us HN'ers it's blatantly obvious that you are talking about internet startup related things - your customers dont care! No one cares about your business model, they don't care about the legitimacy of freemium, they've never heard of 37signals, they-don't-care! It's 4:30 am, I'm going crazy, best of luck to you my friend! HTH!