I just sent an e-mail to you. There might be other people contemplating starting a service like this, so as somebody who also considered it, I'll post the important parts here:
1. Most teachers are willing to help out students. Why would a student
pay for your service?
2. An obvious answer to the above is "we'll focus on the students that
have teachers that are unwilling to help". From my experience, that's
a small market.
3. You also have to consider that the ones who would be interested in
this service are ones who really want to have a good essay (I'll come
back to this later); the union of the two sets is even smaller. I'm
not entirely sure you would be able to churn profits from just this
subset.
4. Moving beyond teachers, how will you compete with EssayJudge? They
offer an amazing service for nothing. The quality of their service is
hard to beat already, and their price impossible to overcome.
5. How will you vet the quality of your "teachers"? If a student isn't
happy with the response, will you refund the money? What if your
customers are immoral? (I've found that the union of immoral people
and students is quite large.) Looking on HN, I see somebody mentioning "chargebacks"; that would indeed be a big problem.
6. What is your target market? Are you aiming for people who want to
buy ghostwriters, or are you aiming for people who simply want to get
a good grade (from "Doing well on essays is part of doing well in
school, and doing well in school leads to a better life!", that seems
to be your target audience), or are you aiming for people who really
want to improve their writing?
It seems that you're focusing on the penultimate, but is that really a
good decision? Why wouldn't they just hire a ghostwriter instead?
7. An easy answer is "they're pretty good writers already, they just
need that little bit of editing". If so, it looks like you're focusing
on the last group. That's where the money lies, but your advertising
doesn't seem to be targeted towards them.
This is by no means a complete list of the problems you'll face. You should probably have answers to many of these before starting/going forwards though.
Thanks for your kind words about http://www.essayjudge.com While it's true that our service is free, it does come at the cost of the publication of one's essay. I had several (<15) requests last semester for private essay reviews (which I did) for a fee (which I turned down). Since I'm reaching a relatively small number of students (<20k/month), there may still be a viable market for OP's service. Whether OP has the price point right, I don't know. I don't see how cost of advertising/teacher pay/etc. doesn't outstrip profit at $12/essay. Perhaps it could work if OP is an seo magician. In any case, I applaud jjets for not just creating another cheater site. I can share some experience and maybe stats with you (jjets) if you are interested; you can email me at bbquigley using google email.
To add to point #1 above, not only are most teachers willing to help out students, but do you really want to be recruiting reviewers who are trying to make $10 a pop?
My gut feeling would be that people reviewing student work because it means something to them would do better work than those who are in it for a token amount.
1. Most teachers are willing to help out students. Why would a student pay for your service?
2. An obvious answer to the above is "we'll focus on the students that have teachers that are unwilling to help". From my experience, that's a small market.
3. You also have to consider that the ones who would be interested in this service are ones who really want to have a good essay (I'll come back to this later); the union of the two sets is even smaller. I'm not entirely sure you would be able to churn profits from just this subset.
4. Moving beyond teachers, how will you compete with EssayJudge? They offer an amazing service for nothing. The quality of their service is hard to beat already, and their price impossible to overcome.
5. How will you vet the quality of your "teachers"? If a student isn't happy with the response, will you refund the money? What if your customers are immoral? (I've found that the union of immoral people and students is quite large.) Looking on HN, I see somebody mentioning "chargebacks"; that would indeed be a big problem.
6. What is your target market? Are you aiming for people who want to buy ghostwriters, or are you aiming for people who simply want to get a good grade (from "Doing well on essays is part of doing well in school, and doing well in school leads to a better life!", that seems to be your target audience), or are you aiming for people who really want to improve their writing? It seems that you're focusing on the penultimate, but is that really a good decision? Why wouldn't they just hire a ghostwriter instead?
7. An easy answer is "they're pretty good writers already, they just need that little bit of editing". If so, it looks like you're focusing on the last group. That's where the money lies, but your advertising doesn't seem to be targeted towards them.
This is by no means a complete list of the problems you'll face. You should probably have answers to many of these before starting/going forwards though.