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I know that I would have loved to have a service like this that functioned when I was in school. Can't quite tell how you are going to go about it, but it seem

I know that I would have loved to have a service like this that functioned when I was in school. Can't quite tell how you are going to go about it, but it seems like this type of venture might have the best shot of working by focusing on a single campus at first. A lot of groundwork marketing to social organizations, academic clubs, whatnot in order to try and build a local community whose needs overlap to prove the model and then scale out. Focusing on a single campus or two would make the "ball rolling" phase much more achievable as well. Also getting going before finals week when everyone is selling books for beer money so you have an "inventory" for the next semester or investing some money in common textbooks yourselves to lend out to get the ball rolling couldn't hurt. Site wise I can't really see much as everything seems to route back to the home page. I'd say your tag line could use an edit - "Cheap college textbook rentals just got better" isn't really a call to action or very descriptive of what the service the site preforms. Good luck!

jmathai 17y ago
Thanks for the feedback. We've thought about starting out at one university or even at a specific college at the university. We're racing to have it ready for Winter semester but are not sure if we'll make it. As far as the links and the call to action goes, we threw that up while we relaunched the site. We're focusing a lot on the call to action once we really launch. We're targeting December 14th.
- mschwar99 17y ago
  Right on. If you are going to focus on a single community I'd suggest branding the site (or at least a corner of the site) that way. When trying to build your first community I think it would earn more trust from people if they knew that this service was being focused at them.
  - jmathai 17y ago
    Just curious. We were thinking of doing a college in the bay area and another in Cincinnati (proximity of myself and co-founder). Do you think this would be better received at an elite school like Stanford or a community college like DeAnza?
    - mschwar99 17y ago
      Personally I think it would work better at which ever school you were able to be more engaged with and / or knew better. There might be some benefit to focusing on a more technical school in terms of the student's willingness to trust a web site. However, I really think the key to getting your first community would be personal knowledge of the school and ability to market on the ground.

jmathai 17y ago

Thanks for the feedback. We've thought about starting out at one university or even at a specific college at the university. We're racing to have it ready for Winter semester but are not sure if we'll make it. As far as the links and the call to action goes, we threw that up while we relaunched the site. We're focusing a lot on the call to action once we really launch. We're targeting December 14th.

mschwar99 17y ago
Right on. If you are going to focus on a single community I'd suggest branding the site (or at least a corner of the site) that way. When trying to build your first community I think it would earn more trust from people if they knew that this service was being focused at them.
- jmathai 17y ago
  Just curious. We were thinking of doing a college in the bay area and another in Cincinnati (proximity of myself and co-founder). Do you think this would be better received at an elite school like Stanford or a community college like DeAnza?
  - mschwar99 17y ago
    Personally I think it would work better at which ever school you were able to be more engaged with and / or knew better. There might be some benefit to focusing on a more technical school in terms of the student's willingness to trust a web site. However, I really think the key to getting your first community would be personal knowledge of the school and ability to market on the ground.