

Ask HN: Rate my "startup": A university student website - meric

It's a website for Australian students to post textbook listings. Other students can look up those listings and organise a meeting with the listing owner for the transaction (No sign up needed if you're not creating a new listing).<p>I put startup in quotes because I'm not actually a company, just a software engineering student.<p>Can you give me tips on the landing page, the presentation of the listings, the "obviousness" of things you can do at my website?<p>I've spent a whole day at uni today giving out pamphlets and sticking up paper ads and gotten a whopping 1 new user. How do I market it effectively? There's only half a dozen users so far and I connected maybe 4 buyers to 4 sellers. It's been open for over a week now. I've also setup a facebook page and invited all 262 of my friends. One of my friends also invited all 600 of her friends, but there are only 30 people at the page so far... I'm also buying $1.40 worth of facebook advertisements a day, which equates to 14,000 impressions and maybe 2 clicks.<p>This is proving harder than I thought when I was just programming.<p>I may expand to other countries later when I've built up some customer base in Australia first.<p>URL: 
http://www.textbookcentral.com.au<p>Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/TextbookCentral/140405375982617?ref=ts
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photon_off
Here's how I would make it. No guarantee that I know what I'm doing...

When you arrive there is a very brief 1 or 2 line summary of your service. "A
place to buy and sell used university textbooks". Below there are two options
(perhaps use an accordion type thing to expand the option when clicked)

Sell your books: When clicked, show a friendly looking form: text book title,
description, book ID (ISBN or whatever it's called), asking price, etc. Let
them fill it in right then, and when they submit, _then_ ask them to login
(make it very painless).

Buy cheap books: When clicked show the following options: search by name,
ISBN, whatever. Or, browse. (Though I doubt browsing would ever be effective
for this type of thing, but whatever)

Now, words on how the site currently is:

What am I looking for drop down... what is this? Am I looking for university
textbooks? Duh, of course I am... What is this option even for? There are two
things I'm looking to do: buy books, or sell books. No need for a dropdown
here.

I couldn't for the life of me figure out what I would do if I wanted to post
my book for sale. I clicked "show all" and then saw a button to "add a new
listing" which should really read "sell your book". Back at the frontpage, I
realized that the top area is actually a link. This is not at all obvious
because it just looks like header text and not a call to action. Add a button
that says "sell your books" or something like that.

And, final words that are probably the most important:

Your sites needs user to be useful, and nobody will join if it's not useful.
It's a chicken and egg problem, so you're going to be facing a very steep
uphill battle to get enough people using the site in order for it to be
useful... and frankly it's not that original of an idea so it's likely
somebody is doing it better than you are already. Perhaps this place exists in
real life, such as the university bookstore?

Ideas to boost chances of success: Target your specific university ON the
website.

That's all I've got for now.

Check out my idea here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1574127>

~~~
meric
Very good points. :) Working on it. EDIT: And yeah, At the moment my marketing
efforts are only focused on one faculty in one university. :)

------
pbhjpbhj
Your header links wrap, I think it's grid5 (960gs right?) is not big enough to
contain them (I browse at +2 font-size).

On the homepage I'd move the books-on-a-shelf graphic alongside the title
"TextbookCentral" then bump up the listings to be alongside the black box.

Could you use Amazon (or similar) to grab an image for each book and maybe
link as a "buy new" option. You could then check your logs for most searched
for books and add listings for those as buy links with a call for action of
"have this book, why not sell it here" or whatever.

If you have long summer breaks between "years" as we do in the UK then I think
you missed the boat. You need to catch the exiting students to build up
listings and have advertising going out with info for freshers.

------
DanielStraight
Your web page doesn't answer the one obvious question, "Why wouldn't I just
use Amazon Marketplace?" So, why wouldn't I? If you have something to offer
than Amazon doesn't, highlight it prominently on the main page. If not, then I
don't see how you're going to compete.

~~~
meric
I've never heard of Amazon Marketplace and you're the first person to bring it
up. There is however an existing competitor
"<http://www.textbookexchange.com.au> and I just totally avoided bringing them
up on my website. (I hated using that website so that's how I got the idea to
start my own, better one.)

People in my university doesn't even know they exist even though their market
share is 25% across Australia's universities, in terms of number of "active
members"... So apparently they're ignoring my university at the moment and I'd
like to keep my fellow classmates ignorant of them also...

~~~
DanielStraight
I should have done a little more research before posting. Amazon is probably
not the relevant competitor in Australia. Nevertheless, there is a probably a
go to place for used books. If you wanted to buy just some random novel used,
where would you go? Do they also deal in text books? I was just trying to say
that there is probably some big competitor out there who will be the go to
source of used books of any kind unless you have something unique to offer.

~~~
meric
I have a bunch of "unique" features that most of them nobody seems to use.
Listings can be commented on by other people. Listings can be closed so you
don't get continually spammed after you sold your book. You don't need to
login to browse listings or message the listing's owners. You can upload an
image of your book to your listing. You can search listings by course code.
You can add a "Request" listing instead of the normal "Sale" listing. You can
add additional details to your listing. The website is also compatible with
Google Chrome. You can clearly see how long ago the listing was made. Listings
are sorted by time submitted by default.

None of the features I've mentioned are available at Textbook Exchange. They
can't even make the website compatible with chrome, blaming it on:

'Having problems clicking on the "more" button? If so, you are probably using
the web browser Chrome. Textbookexchange has been around a long time - way
before Chrome existed, so we're still sorting through this issue.'

There is only one thing left that their site can do my site can't - send an
sms to the owner of the listing. I will get that up as soon as I have enough
economy of scale.

As you can see, because textbookexchange is a website that isn't even
competent enough to maintain compatibility with a major browser, I don't think
they deserve to be the largest textbook classifieds website in Australia. They
hire 15 full time staff to put up a piece of <insert expletive here>. I can do
better with just me, and I haven't even graduated yet, let alone have had any
"software engineering job experiences".

Well, long story short, every time I tried to contact a book seller from their
website, the book is sold already but the listing is still there. I'm just one
really pissed off customer. :D

