Ask HN: please review my website (textbook reviews)

[needthebook]

http://www.needthebook.com/

The idea is to use peer reviews to find out if you really need to buy the textbook(s) for a particular college class. (I've had a few classes in which I never used the textbook at all, and I suspect most others have too.)

I would appreciate your opinions about the site's functionality and the idea's feasibility.

There is clearly a "chicken or the egg" problem, which I am struggling with. Most visitors do a quick search for one of their classes, see that there aren't any reviews yet, and immediately leave. Suggestions for incentivizing the review process would be excellent.

[graphene]

I would say you have a harder chicken and egg problem than most social networking sites:

Normally, the value of the site to a new user increases with the number of their friends use the site, because those are the people they interact with.

On this site, the value to a new user is determined more by the number of higher-year students of the same school that use it, and those people are less likely to be in that user's social network. This makes your site inherently less viral (although I hate to use the term) than, say, facebook.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of a solution to this problem, but maybe some relentless resourcefulness on your part can do the trick :-)

[teeja]

I added a current course and instructor from a college website; when the system didn't know about either (it knew the school), I typed in the 'verify text' captcha number and it went to a new page asking for all the info again.

The design is fine; the concept might help many students, if you can get the traffic.

[az]

very good idea although I believe I've seen a copy of it on HN before. (i tried looking for it, can't find it)

I agree, you need to be hooked up with some social media or maybe even on college bulletin boards and e-boards online.

i tried adding my school, but i need to add the class prefix and number also? what are you going to go course by course (as everyone adds them)? I would suggest getting the list from http://www.ratemyprofessors.com and crawl the site for all the courses.

good work though, keep it up!

[dzlobin]

/facepalm

This was my first idea that I was working on when I started reading HN about a year and change ago. Decided to drop it

[needthebook]

http://www.needthebook.com/ clickable

[ddemchuk]

Your best bet for survival with this is to connect it to facebook and give your users some sort of points/leveling system to use. That way, there's at least something to earn (even if it doesn't go to anything) and you can rely on the already existing network of facebook to grow the app.