WARNING: this rant might sound like I hate you, but I'm really trying to help you. First of all I am a programmer. I understand your frustration at not being a

WARNING: this rant might sound like I hate you, but I'm really trying to help you. First of all I am a programmer. I understand your frustration at not being able to build stuff yourself. A lot of people (MBA students, engineering students) have come up to me and asked me to build "their idea." They want to act as the business/marketing/money guy, and I can be the slave. Fine. Unfortunately, these people don't understand just how time consuming building a webapp "exactly how I envisioned it." They think that I can just do some Ruby on Rails magic over a week and boom they're set for life. What you are basically asking of us to build you a web application for a $0 salary with a 49% percent share of nothing. The math is quite easy: 0 + 0*0.49 = 0. And now, let's talk about your idea, which would be a cool application if it existed. But there are a lot of problems. First of all, every single university is different when it comes to housing. A lot of students may stay in dorms at, say, NYU or Stanford, but where I'm at (UT Austin), most people don't live on campus. Every uni also has different policies, and sometimes a uni might have multiple policies (for say undergrad vs grad students). And why can't a Stanford student just use the official Stanford dorm finder. If you want to build an "apartment finder," forget it. There is so much nasty stuff in dealing in that market that I would never touch it. Mostly, no one will give you the data you need. So go back and think about your idea and just how difficult building your idea out really is. It's not just some easy magic fairy dust, though many people think so. And as a last thing, you said that you'd act like the marketing/business-research guy. I don't see any marketing or business research in this post! Have you talked to your university about if this would help or possible? Or would they even give you the data you need? Have you talked with realtors to see if you can somehow get data of all open apartments in an area? (hint: they don't want to; it would hurt their business).