Get SMS Online
Get a temporary phone number and verify an account online
Something interesting happened recently.
A guy who claimed he had worked for one of our competitors showed up in our inbox with a price list. He said he had access to their confidential supplier and client information and wanted to sell it to me. He also claimed the competitor was making around $100k in net profit every month. Among the things he offered were:
Confidential supplier information
Confidential client information
"Niche edits" targeting auto-registration software clients (not really sure what he meant by that)
Contacts of bulk buyers, especially ones who use auto-registration software
Access to Chinese marketing websites that could supposedly be used to attract customers
Now I'm curious. If I don't want to buy someone's allegedly stolen/internal data, how would you legitimately figure out this stuff?
Where a competitor gets its customers (SEO is an obvious reply, but what else)?
How do you identify niche websites where their target audience hangs out?
How do you estimate whether a claim like "$100k/month net profit" is remotely plausible?
How do you identify these "Chinese websites" where their target audience hangs out?
The guy may have genuine information, or may simply be trying to sell me a very expensive fantasy. Either way, I'm not paying for it.
I'd rather figure out how to reverse-engineer the same information legitimately.
What would you investigate first?
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?
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