"Progress is chugging along but I have no one to guide me" "I've razed the project and rebuilt it half a dozen times after finding some fatal architectural flaw"
Sounds a lot like you're designing a system to have a good design by your internal metrics, then measuring it by how much money it's bringing in, which is giving mixed results.
Your guides should not be some idol programmer person but your customers. What do they need? What do they want? What value can you/your site add so they can't not use you? What deals can you work towards - e.g. getting your site in the freshman handout literature, getting it endorsed by the student union, finding which textbooks are needed for which courses, adding amazon links for textbooks for particular courses that you don't have used copies of, buying the textbooks yourself and reselling them? Escrowing the transaction somehow? Are you solving this as a problem which scratches an itch for yourself?
Your architecture will always have flaws - leave them alone. Go find some people wanting to trade used text books and put some adverts up around you (not on the site).
Sounds a lot like you're designing a system to have a good design by your internal metrics, then measuring it by how much money it's bringing in, which is giving mixed results.
Your guides should not be some idol programmer person but your customers. What do they need? What do they want? What value can you/your site add so they can't not use you? What deals can you work towards - e.g. getting your site in the freshman handout literature, getting it endorsed by the student union, finding which textbooks are needed for which courses, adding amazon links for textbooks for particular courses that you don't have used copies of, buying the textbooks yourself and reselling them? Escrowing the transaction somehow? Are you solving this as a problem which scratches an itch for yourself?
Your architecture will always have flaws - leave them alone. Go find some people wanting to trade used text books and put some adverts up around you (not on the site).