I'm glad you are at least aware of how ridiculously obtuse your homepage is. The signup form (in this case) seems very very unwelcoming. To answer your questio

I'm glad you are at least aware of how ridiculously obtuse your homepage is. The signup form (in this case) seems very very unwelcoming. To answer your question, why don't you just list the schools? I assume you are only marketing to them anyway so you can even have school specific landing pages. It's a much easier sell when you are talking directly to your niche audience. "Hey Ucla student, 500 of your peers are sharing their notes from __ucla_class___ wanna take a look?" Next, doesn't the value of your site depend on how many active users you have? Hence, chicken/egg. In this case, depending on your resources, my advice would be to cut every single school except for one, and prove it there. Do this literally at only one school , the school you can market directly to the most. If you have concerns that you need a lot of users from multiple schools, I don't see how that makes sense because your site, as it stands, is a very unattractive (to outsiders like me) walled-garden. So if it's a walled garden, make it a walled garden (one school only) if not, open it up, pick one! This is definitely a space where many have failed, I'm not saying you will, but I think something novel is needed. And since I've done some brainstorming in the space once upon a time, I have reasoned it would be most effective to dominate one and only one school, prove it, and then leapfrog. Hey "it worked for facebook" =]