Not formally, but I’ve talked to lots of people about my startup, and have obtained consensus responses.
My idea is to make college reviews better, by asking specific questions instead of general ones. See http://collegeanswerz.com for all the questions. For example, how does the workload impact the social life? Are the school sponsored events popular, or do they suck? Do kids go home on weekends? Are your professors generally fair? How social was this dorm? How difficult was this major? Is there a convenient place to get groceries?
A few people don’t think there’s much of a demand for that, but most people (>95%) think that there is a demand for that. The overwhelming criticism is that I won’t be able to get students to answer the questions. I’ve been experimenting a lot with methods of getting students to answer the questions, and I think I’ve arrived at something that works: $10 to answer 25 questions, or $25 to answer 50. At a $300 budget per school, this gives me about 10-12.5 answers per question (~60 questions per school), which seems pretty good. And $30 per school of targeted Facebook advertising has been successful at spread the word of the offer to students. This has worked for the 3 pilot schools I have.
From there, I’ll have to
1) Raise ~$100k from an investor to do this at the other 297 schools (cost is ~$330 per school to pay and advertise to answerers)
2) Spread the word of the website to current students. I think following the advice here will do that sufficiently. The main methods are internet ads, talking to guidance counselors (I know a couple who are interested), high schools, blogs and news outlets who talk about how to choose a college.
3) Bonus: raise VC money, and expand into things like video tours and live chat. (I call this ‘Bonus’ because I think that if I failed here, I’d still have a successful company, just not a wildly successful one).
What you posted is not a premortem, it’s the opposite of it. Assume that a year or two from now your enterprise has failed. What caused it to fail? E.g. insufficient cash flow, lack of school buy-in, lack of investor interest, regulatory obstacles, competing services, failure to execute… For the duration of the exercise you have to suspend your natural optimism and truly believe that bad things happened. Can you do that? If not, then the 90% failure rate statistic definitely applies to you.
I’m saying that those 3 things are the most likely bad things to happen. Other than that...
A competitor comes a long and outdoes me. Maybe by getting more reliable information by doing research instead of just asking students.
The government passes laws that sway you to just go to your state university, which would decrease the demand for a service that provides information about schools all over the country.
One of the big names sees what I’m doing and copies me.
Something happens that hurts internet advertising (that’s how I plan to make money).
I can’t raise my seed round because I can’t get over the chicken-egg hump of finding an investor.
Students don’t do a good job answering questions (they’ve done a good job for my 3 pilot schools, but maybe those were outliers, and the 297 other schools will have worse quality).
I violate some law unknowingly, get sued, and have to declare bankruptcy.
My site gets hacked because I’m a newb at web development, and I have some security flaw and this leads to my database of answers getting deleted (doubtful because I’m using Disqus to have people answer questions, and Rails to build the site).
Those are obviously only a fraction of the things that could possibly go wrong. However, I’ve disregarded most of them as so unlikely that they aren’t worth thinking about. Are there any in particular that you think I should be paying more attention to (other than the 3 I listed in my first comment)?
Without commenting on the larger article (I feel like a decent fraction of the negative comments to this post are just regurgitating cached thoughts about start-ups), the thing that worries me about your above comment is that a lot of the things you listed are pretty implausible. This doesn’t seem like the sort of list that would be generated if I was trying to generate the most plausible set of reasons something would fail. Instead, I would have listed:
lack of buy-in to the website (just because the people you asked say they would be interested doesn’t mean that people will actually use your website; the overall user experience is pretty crucial to determining that)
failure to convert a user base into revenue flow
lack of perceived legitimacy of the reviews (e.g. due to the small number of responses per question), possibly caused by push-back from more established places like the U.S. News & World Report rankings
I wasn’t sure what he meant by premortem. I listed before the 3 plausible things that could go wrong, and he said that that wasn’t a premortem, so I figured he was thinking more along the lines of “think of anything and everything that can go wrong”.
To your points...
lack of buy-in to the website (just because the people you asked say they would be interested doesn’t mean that people will actually use your website; the overall user experience is pretty crucial to determining that)
I’m highly confident that this will be something people want. I have a strong intuitive belief in this, and I actually have talked to lots (hundreds?) of people who say that this is something they do/would want. Still though, I should have mentioned this as a risk.
failure to convert a user base into revenue flow
I don’t see this as a problem. If I my website becomes the go-to place for college applicants (or at least one of the go-to places), it’ll get a lot of traffic, and the traffic will allow advertisers to target a particular audience (college applicants). From what I understand, on the web, traffic pays.
lack of perceived legitimacy of the reviews (e.g. due to the small number of responses per question), possibly caused by push-back from more established places like the U.S. News & World Report rankings
That’s definitely a worry, and is one of the main things I want to address. Once I get rolling and get resources, I want to invest heavily into getting the most reliable information as possible. Still though, all the other student review websites have the same issue of perceived legitimacy, and they’ve been around getting users for years.
people who say that this is something they do/would want
Why aren’t these people using the sites that already exist? You could just say “that’s because the questions/answers aren’t good enough,” but my guess is most of these people who say they would want it never got as far as looking at these other sites in order to see their quality of questions and answers.
They do, but they aren’t satisfied. I’ve had a lot of people say “I wish this existed when I was applying to college”, implying that they want something beyond what they already had. A lot of these people are people that I know looked through the questions (because a lot of them answered them, and because a lot of them were in the context of conversations where we either looked at the site, or I explained and gave examples of the questions).
I don’t think this addresses jkaufman’s comment. He asked:
Why aren’t these people using the sites that already exist?
These sites already existed when your friends were applying to college. So if they say “I wish this existed when I was applying to college”, the key question to answer is why didn’t they use any of the competing sites, which did exist when they were applying to college? Your response that “these people looked through your own website’s questions” does not address this question.
(As an aside, I would humbly suggest that you read through jkaufman’s—and a few other people’s—advice somewhat more carefully, as your responses indicate that you’ve misunderstood some of the key points, see also my earlier explanation of a premortem, which had already been explained to you once earlier in the thread.)
Apparently you suffer from poor reading comprehension (I explained the term) and are unable to google (it’s the top two hits). Given the way you react and the critique others give, I estimate that you have less than 1% chance of success. Much less. I wouldn’t take a bet on it, though, since the uncertainty is too high. After all, Facebook started as “Hot or not”. But you do not come across as Mark Zuckerberg.
I suspect that your time and money would likely be better spent attending one of the CFAR workshops.
You have to spend more on avertising to get a student to visit your website than that student makes for you in on-site adverts.
It turns out that the existing competition is better because having a large number of reviews in a dozen or so categories turns out to be better than having a small number of answers for a larger number of questions.
I think you’ve misunderstood what a premortem is. It is “assuming your startup fails, what is the most likely reason”? That is the context of Khoth’s comment.
Ignoring the general question of “should more people start companies”, some feedback from poking around at your site:
First impression: not a real site. I’m not sure what about it sets that off for me, unfortunately. Maybe the amount of white, the size of the main picture (too small), general non-glossyness, font of the title text, homemade appearance of the logo, and the broken aspect-ratio on the main picture? Hiring a designer can help here.
The focus isn’t that clear. As a visitor I can’t tell what I’m supposed to be doing. Am I supposed to search for a college? Click on “colleges”? I understand it’s about picking a college, but I don’t see what I’m supposed to do next.
The “get paid to answer questions” looks a bit scummy and isn’t generally relevant. Can you limit it by IP so it only shows up to people browsing to you from those universities? And then simplify it to something like “Answer Questions, Get Paid”? It’s also a weird width.
Most of the front page appears to be selling the site. Which you need to do if you’re charging for a service, but you’re not. Instead you want to get people into the flow of looking at colleges as soon as possible. Save the “what makes us better than everyone else” for an about page or a pitch deck.
Minor: having the questions in a monospace font is weird. As a programmer I love monospaced fonts, but most people don’t.
You have an audience issue with questions. You’re going for a site where people see answers to real questions, the kind the would ask someone in person if they were socially close and wanted the real deal on a college, but those questions aren’t the same for everyone. In particular, there are some questions which probably do matter a lot to some people but are irrelevant or even offensive to others. “How hot are the girls?” was the main one that jumped out to me here.
The comments take too long to load. They’re not way slow, but just clicking around some it was distracting having to wait for the spinning C each time. This limits the magic of clicking around and seeing people’s responses to questions.
Regarding the design things, I agree with you. I basically just started learning programming and design this summer and I’m definitely flawed in each of them. I would like one of my first hires to be a designer, but I do think that the current design satisfices (won’t wow, but won’t draw people away). Do you?
Also, there are some ways in which I think my design is much better than that of my competitors. For example, on http://www.unigo.com/, it takes 2 clicks to pull up a college page (College Guide ⇒ type in search) when it should just be a search bar on the top right. Also, my site lets you browse by question, rather than by reviewer. And another one, when you’re on a school’s page, you could toggle the information section rather than having to click it and leave the page you were on.
The focus isn’t that clear. As a visitor I can’t tell what I’m supposed to be doing. Am I supposed to search for a college? Click on “colleges”? I understand it’s about picking a college, but I don’t see what I’m supposed to do next.
I’ve heard this before, and am not sure what I should do. I figured that even if it isn’t immediately apparent, the user would end up proceeding to click on Colleges, and then figuring it out within seconds. But brainstorming this and redoing the home page is definitely on my to-do list.
The “get paid to answer questions” looks a bit scummy and isn’t generally relevant. Can you limit it by IP so it only shows up to people browsing to you from those universities? And then simplify it to something like “Answer Questions, Get Paid”? It’s also a weird width.
I’m not sure how to limit by IP, but that would be cool if I were able to do that.
Most of the front page appears to be selling the site. Which you need to do if you’re charging for a service, but you’re not. Instead you want to get people into the flow of looking at colleges as soon as possible. Save the “what makes us better than everyone else” for an about page or a pitch deck.
Good point.
You have an audience issue with questions. You’re going for a site where people see answers to real questions, the kind the would ask someone in person if they were socially close and wanted the real deal on a college, but those questions aren’t the same for everyone. In particular, there are some questions which probably do matter a lot to some people but are irrelevant or even offensive to others. “How hot are the girls?” was the main one that jumped out to me here.
I know they aren’t the same for everyone, and so I try to be comprehensive. But being comprehensive will inevitably lead to the presence of questions that some applicants aren’t interested in. I feel that being comprehensive is more important than annoying some people with some questions.
The comments take too long to load. They’re not way slow, but just clicking around some it was distracting having to wait for the spinning C each time. This limits the magic of clicking around and seeing people’s responses to questions.
That’s something I’ll need to address. In the short term, I’m already using Disqus, and I don’t think it’s worth the time to go back and rewrite the code to have my own users and comments and stuff so I could make it faster, but I think that I will eventually. Meanwhile, Rails 4 just came out with turbolinks, which should speed it up a bit (I still need to upgrade).
Before we get into more details, here are some higher-level thoughts on the business overall: how will people get to your site and how will you make money from them?
One strategy is to pay for ads. People doing this already are easy to find: search in an incognito window with questions like “college information”, “choose college”, or “college for me” (be imaginative). Click on the ads that don’t look like they’re for particular colleges. This drops me on a few landing pages:
You don’t know very much about these businesses, but you know they’re all making enough money on an ad click for it to be worth it for them to advertise here. (Looking in the AdWords keyword planner suggests they’re paying $5-$20 per visitor (CPC).) If one of these sites is doing something that seems weird to you, don’t write it off as dumb: they’re making money or they wouldn’t be able to afford to show up when you did the search. Maybe they have some low-hanging fruit in improving their layout, and they certainly don’t all look the same, but if in doubt they probably know something you don’t.
It’s also possible for people to come to you via searches. Do some searches yourself; see who shows up. This business model is harder to replicate because it’s much less clear how they got onto the front page for a search. SEO advice tends to be terrible, and for good reason: it’s an adversarial game where success is very lucrative and people are constantly pushing limits to see how scummy/profitable they can get without stepping over the line and getting banned (recent example: rapgenius).
Word of mouth and viral/social are also possible, but even less predictable. But then my bias here is for paying for traffic because I used to work in advertising and it all feels very natural to me. But however people get to your site, you want a good sized flow so you can experiment and test things and see what works. Iterating with no one watching is hard to get to go anywhere. (One nice thing about the non-ads flow is that focusing on making your users happy and have a good experience lines up with your incentives. If you go the ads flow every visitor is to a first approximation someone you’ll never see again and so you don’t care about their experience just how much money you can get from them. It’s like businesses that cater to regulars vs tourists.)
Once people get on your site, how do you get money from them? The simple strategy is to put up ads, like adsense. These pay very little, like $0.01 to $1 per thousand visits. Maybe somewhat higher because you’re in a vertical (education) where there are advertisers with a bunch of money to spend (colleges). There’s no way you can pay for ads at $5 per click and make your money back at $0.001/visit. So what are those sites like educationmatch doing? They’re collecting information from people and selling it to colleges. This is called “lead-gen” advertising. The most obvious form is when you land on a page and it immediately asks you for information about yourself. If you’re going to place search ads, you basically have to do lead-gen; nothing else is profitable enough per-visit. (When you start off you’ll sell leads to a lead-aggregator who sells them to the colleges. When you get big you negotiate deals directly with the colleges and get a bit more per lead.) If instead you want to make money by putting ads on your pages you need to go with cheaper but higher-volume sources of traffic, like being awesome, getting people to link to you and talk about you, and getting high up on search results pages.
Back to specific design notes:
I do think that the current design satisfices (won’t wow, but won’t draw people away). Do you?
To actually answer this question you need data from your site and competitors to compare bounce rates. You’re not going to get that, so the best you can do is calibrate retrospectively: when you do get a designer and redo your site you should A/B test the redesign so you can see it’s impact. This only works if you have enough traffic by then to get meaningful results.
My guess is that the appearance will make some people leave with “this looks unprofessional/fake” but this isn’t something I’m good at estimating. You should at least fix the aspect ratio on the main image; I found the vertical squishing very distracting. Cropping it instead of scaling it in the browser would work, as would using only one of height= and width=.
there are some ways in which I think my design is much better than that of my competitors … unigo.com
unigo looks more professional to me, though still not as polished as something could be. But polish isn’t everything; many of the sites I linked to above aren’t going to win any design awards. Many of them look kind of tacky and overly slick. They’re all making money, though.
I’ve heard this before, and am not sure what I should do.
Sit down with someone and watch what they do with your site. Then sit down with someone else. Look at your competitors and take the best ideas from many sources, then mock up a new front page design and sit down with another person. Repeat until you run out of fresh victims/friends. You’re too small for fully-automated a/b testing, so substitute quality for quantity and watch real users in person.
I’m not sure how to limit by IP
Many colleges have a contiguous IP range. For example, everyone browsing from on-campus at Swarthmore will be 130.58.something.something. Make guesses from looking at the IP of the college webserver, and if various departments that do their own webhosting (cs, math) all are in the same IP range you’re probably good. You can also look through your server logs to see the visits from people you know are at certain schools. It’s also possible that this can be looked up somewhere.
I feel that being comprehensive is more important than annoying some people with some questions.
It’s a balance. Trying to channel “teenage girl” I have the impression that “how hot are the girls” would be something I would find off-putting. But my mental model is pretty bad here, having never been one.
A final note: this all sounds kind of mercenary. My perspective is that’s what you have to do if you want to make money in such a tightly competitive market. That’s part of why I’m glad I don’t work in this industry anymore.
If instead you want to make money by putting ads on your pages you need to go with cheaper but higher-volume sources of traffic, like being awesome, getting people to link to you and talk about you, and getting high up on search results pages.
Ok; keep in mind that this means bringing in a lot of traffic. You’re talking about wanting to build a company you could sell for $5-10M, which means either something like $500k in profit a year or the expectation of even more profit in a few more years. Your costs might be $2M/year, so you’d need to bring in $2.5M/year in ad revenue. At a $1 CPM that’s 2.5B pageviews a year or 7M pageviews daily. That’s 1/60th the traffic Wikipedia gets, and Wikipedia is massive, so this is a very challenging traffic goal.
Instead, Prowler, which in 2013 one-quarter of graduating high school seniors created accounts on, according to Skurman, runs largely off of ad-based revenue, especially targeted advertising. It now has 21 employees (up from 17 last year), two-thirds of whom are engineers, Skurman says. The site also boasts engagement figures that stand out to advertisers, a boon Skurman hopes to duplicate with Niche. Prowler sees 1.2 million unique visitors a month, according to Skurman. Thirty-five percent of its visits come from logged in users, who are four times more engaged than non-registered users and spend 12 minutes on College Prowler. “What we need,” he says, “is more traffic, and the way we get traffic is through reviews and covering big life decisions.” That, and a name that doesn’t call to mind a creepy guy roaming campus. With Niche, Skurman may have found both.
It’s funny, now I’m arguing for the outside view instead of the inside view :)
If they “run largely off of ad-based revenue, especially targeted advertising”, and “have 21 employees”, I could too. My guess is that the numbers work because they have higher CPMs because they have such a targeted audience.
My overarching point though, is that it could be monetized, not that advertising is the best way to do it. My evidence is that all my major competitors are multi-million dollar companies, and that I think I could out-do them (more users, more engaged users, better information, more brand recognition...).
My overarching point though, is that it could be monetized, not that advertising is the best way to do it. My evidence is that all my major competitors are multi-million dollar companies, and that I think I could out-do them (more users, more engaged users, better information, more brand recognition...).
But you can’t put yourself in the same reference class as these companies, because it’s most likely that they started out with more resources, bigger teams, more experienced founders, and/or more connections than you.
Yes, it’s probably true that there are successful startups who began with less resources than the incumbents in their industries. Yet these companies may start out with more resources than you seem to have available.
There are many business models other than launching a multi-million dollar mass consumer website that monetizes from advertising. In my view, such a business is relatively risky and resource-intensive. It seems to me that you have chosen an especially challenging business model for your first startup.
Bringing a product to a mass market is a challenge; see the examples edanm and I raised of restaurants and movies flopping because they fail to resonate with the market. The wider the market it is that you are aiming for, the harder it is to make a product that resonates with them.
So, I did not intend to sound like I was making a fully general counter-argument. I want to specifically caution founders where there is a large gap between their current resources/experience, and the demands of their business model, especially when their business model requires targeting a mass market, and they have no experience marketing to even a small or niche market.
Sorry for the delay, but here’s my pitch: http://www.collegeanswerz.com/pitch . I think it’ll enable a more productive discussion of the viability of my website.
I skimmed the pitch. I think you are probably correct that there is a business opportunity in this area. Nevertheless, my main view is that a good idea or business opportunity is only a small part of building a business.
Consequently, your pitch seems a bit more like a theoretical paper on a business case, such as in a class project as school. That’s different from attracting consumers (who require good marketing and design, not spreadsheets) and investors (who need to believe that you in particular are capable of executing on your idea).
I will continue to recommend that you learn more about design and marketing, and ideally work with other people in those areas. Unfortunately, to fully argue this point, I would need to give extensive feedback, which would take me too much time and space to write up. I concur with the critical feedback that others have given in the thread.
A big challenge is the fact that if you are the type of person who posts on LW, then your mind is quite different from the average consumer, and you will not be very well calibrated to understand what they find attractive, usable, hearable, and valuable. Bridging this gap in perspective will take considerable work.
As for the article you link to, I agree with you there is a good expected value for you in a risky project. I will still emphasize the execution risks involved in this project. Ultimately, I think that even if you fail fast at making a successful business, you will still gain value from this project, as long as you don’t burn too much time, capital, or other resources. You can always go work at someone else’s startup and build skills and connections for a future startup of your own.
All “execution means”, is 1) raising the money I need to pay for people to answer questions at all schools on the site, 2) market this to high school students, 3) get enough momentum to raise a series A, and 4) hire the right people to help me expand. At least that should get me to be a player in the market.
I agree that I’m no expert in design/marketing, but I think I could do a good enough job at them to get me to a point where I could hire experts.
All “execution means”, is 1) raising the money I need to pay for people to answer questions at all schools on the site, 2) market this to high school students, 3) get enough momentum to raise a series A, and 4) hire the right people to help me expand. At least that should get me to be a player in the market.
Yes. And these are all challenges with significant risks. My claim is that is that it will be hard to build significant momentum prior to getting a level of design and marketing which is significantly beyond your current ability as someone with a programming background. Even if you pay people to provide your site with good content, your visitors will not appreciate that content if is housed in unattractive design, except perhaps for some viewers who find your content so compelling that they are willing to overlook the design.
I could be wrong about this, of course (and your analytics will tell you the answer), but if I am right, then you will need to get help with design and marketing prior to steps 2) and 3). Getting either training, or significant help, or contractors, or co-founders, would need to be incorporated into your plan sooner rather than later.
I agree that I’m no expert in design/marketing, but I think I could do a good enough job at them to get me to a point where I could hire experts.
This seems like an empirical question… and leaving it up to chance sounds like a risky prospect when your money and time is on the line. Given that you admittedly lack experience in design and marketing, it seems like you would be uncalibrated to estimate how much experience in those areas you need to attract funding and co-founders.
To give you some more background about why I emphasize marketing and design so much: in some deals where I’ve seen companies get funded, a big part of the funding was showing design documents and marketing strategies to potential investors. Also, I often see experienced and serial entrepreneurs worrying about the marketing success of consumer products they are working on. Being scared is a rational attitude given the uncertainty of the mass market and what people will respond to, which is why I’m trying to scare you a little bit about the risks you are facing.
Becoming good at either design or marketing (let alone both) coming from a tech background is at least 6+ months of work to produce non-amateurish work. Perhaps there is some way that you can get help or guidance in those areas in the very near future.
My claim is that is that it will be hard to build significant momentum prior to getting a level of design and marketing which is significantly beyond your current ability as someone with a programming background.
Ok, now I understand. (As an aside, I don’t even have much of a programming background! I taught myself Rails this past summer, and this is the first website I built.)
I disagree; I think there’s a very real need for more comprehensive student reviews, and the design of my website isn’t going to prevent people from using it. The design may not blow you away aesthetically, but I think it’s at least pretty straightforward and easy to use. Aside from my own intuition, a lot of people I’ve talked to said they love the site and would find it useful if it had reviews.
Regarding marketing, 1) I talked to a college advisor I know, and she said she likes the site a lot, and wants to tell all the other advisors she knows about it once I get reviews. So I think I could spread the word by doing more of this. 2) I talked to a guy on the school board of my town, and he said he loves it and that guidance counselors would be happy to spread the word, so that also seems like spreading via guidance counselors will also be effective. 3) There’s a lot of people writing about How to Choose a College, and I think it’ll be in their interest to spread word of my site, being that it helps people choose a college. 4) Social media advertising. 5) Word of mouth. Not to downplay the value of marketing, but from what I read, things that solve real problems tend to find their way to users.
You’re making a lot of outside-view arguments, but I’m taking an inside-view with my website (I think I have enough information to take an inside view).
It’s like the map and the territory—inside-view is like looking at a lower-level map. So it’s like we’re looking at two different maps. Your interpretation of your higher level map may be correct, but the lower level map might have more information that leads to a different answer.
Right now, I’m working on a big comparison of my site, to all of my competitors. Comparing what my site has to what they have. I hope to be done in the next few days, and I’ll let you know when I am and show you what I’ve got. I think it’ll make more sense once I could show it to you, and I think it’ll allow for a more productive discussion. (Note: I should have done this explicit comparison earlier on, like immediately. I’m very disappointed in myself for not doing so. Like this has been the most disappointed I’ve been in myself in over a year probably. Thanks for taking the time to discuss this with me.)
Sorry for the delay, but here’s my pitch: http://www.collegeanswerz.com/pitch . It should clear things up and enable a more productive discussion if you’re still interested.
“How hot are the girls?” on the front page of your site? Really?
Yes. Consider who my target audience is. I need to convey that this site provides answers to questions you normally don’t get answers for.
The fonts are unprofessional looking too.
I agree. Within the next week or so, I’ll get some good google fonts (just recently figured out how to do that). And if I raise a seed round, I’ll buy equity and concourse.
I understand what you’re trying to do, but have you considered that even those young women who aren’t “upset” by the inclusion of that question might straight away, on the front page of your site, get the impression that this site is not for them? I assume women comprise roughly half your intended target audience. (Not to mention—are there really systematic differences in “how hot the girls are” between colleges??)
Furthermore, would you agree that if you succeed, at some point you might be interested in developing a relationship on some semi-official level with colleges—for example, you have a student rep at the college who drums up people to provide answers for you? Student unions can be pretty touchy about discriminatory type stuff. (Edited to clarify that by use of the word “touchy” I don’t mean to imply disagreement with them.)
When I was applying to university a few years ago, I reckon the equivalent question that the “alternative” descriptions tended to include to demonstrate their alternativeness and focus away from academics was “How much does a pint cost?” Less likely to be found offensive. UK, not US, though; I guess your drinking age precludes the use of that one.
I understand what you’re trying to do, but have you considered that even those young women who aren’t “upset” by the inclusion of that question might straight away, on the front page of your site, get the impression that this site is not for them?
I’ve considered it, but I figure that the value of having it outweighs this. I don’t see it as something that is strong enough to draw too many people away from the site. Maybe it’d be a good idea to remove it from the front page though to be safe. What do you think?
I assume women comprise roughly half your intended target audience.
Yup, even more.
(Not to mention—are there really systematic differences in “how hot the girls are” between colleges??)
I don’t know. I don’t see how anyone would know without having access to a site like mine.
For the record, I don’t think it should be insulting that people care about appearance. I wish I didn’t care about it, but I do (it isn’t fair because it’s not something you can control. however, pretending that you don’t care is poor instrumental rationality). I get the sense that it’s human nature, and you can’t really help it. That’s not to say that you think someone has some sort of lower “worth” if they aren’t as attractive. It’s just to say that more attractive people ⇒ better chances of finding a girl/boyfriend, and more fun hooking up. It has nothing to do with respect or social/intellectual interaction, just romantic/lustful.
Furthermore, would you agree that if you succeed, at some point you might be interested in developing a relationship on some semi-official level with colleges—for example, you have a student rep at the college who drums up people to provide answers for you? Student unions can be pretty touchy about discriminatory type stuff. (Edited to clarify that by use of the word “touchy” I don’t mean to imply disagreement with them.)
I’m not sure. I’ll have to acquire more information and think about it. It does seem like something that is rather likely though (schools can help me get answerers, mentors, representatives). I would have to make sure that their involvement isn’t biasing my site though. As for the “discriminatory stuff”, it doesn’t seem worth trading comprehensiveness of my site for colleges involvement.
I’ve considered it, but I figure that the value of having it outweighs this. I don’t see it as something that is strong enough to draw too many people away from the site. Maybe it’d be a good idea to remove it from the front page though to be safe. What do you think?
Removing it from the front page could certainly get you a few visitors who stay longer than to read that, react with “huh, guess this is not a classy site” or whatever, and leave.
For the record, I don’t think it should be insulting that people care about appearance. I wish I didn’t care about it, but I do (it isn’t fair because it’s not something you can control. however, pretending that you don’t care is poor instrumental rationality). I get the sense that it’s human nature, and you can’t really help it. That’s not to say that you think someone has some sort of lower “worth” if they aren’t as attractive. It’s just to say that more attractive people ⇒ better chances of finding a girl/boyfriend, and more fun hooking up. It has nothing to do with respect or social/intellectual interaction, just romantic/lustful.
Of course it’s simply true that people are interested in the physical attractiveness of other people. Declaring that fact insulting is a nonsensical thing to do. It’s the choice (not on this one isolated occasion, of course, but in the context of millions and millions of other such choices constantly made in the media etc) of the “hot” and “girls” framing of your understanding of this point that rankles, and may well rankle with others. Of course it’s the women who are evaluated for their hotness, not the men. Of course hotness is chosen to evaluate them. Of course they’re referred to using the term “girls”. Because it’s that way all the time. You’ll tell me that it has to be like this, because that’s how college-aged men speak and think. Pity you’ll gain some people who speak and think like that and lose some who don’t, in my opinion.
I’ve considered it, but I figure that the value of having it outweighs this. I don’t see it as something that is strong enough to draw too many people away from the site.
I would caution you against the Typical Mind Fallacy and believing that other people will perceive writing the way you do.
In projects I’ve seen, the founders and marketing people worked on marketing copy, and spent a lot of time fine-tuning the messaging. As as programmer and a LW reader, it is unlikely that you are well-calibrated about marketing and messaging (similar to how the typical marketing person would be miscalibrated about web development). Getting feedback from others is important to avoid biases in this area.
You’ve said how you plan to spend money, but not how to plan to make money.
I’m pretty sure that back when I was choosing a university I’d have said that such a service would be good but wouldn’t actually pay for it. Paying for information on the internet is a weird and alien thing, especially if I didn’t know in advance how high-quality the information was (I’d just have to use heuristics like “most adverts on the internet offering information in exchange for payment are somewhere between not worth it and outright scam”, or “websites with a z in the name are shady”).
I agree about people’s reluctance to pay for things on the internet. For that reason, I think I’d make money via advertisements. Judging by the size of my competitors (College Prowler, Unigo, Cappex, Princeton Review...), that seems like a sufficient way to make a lot of money.
Regarding the ‘z’, I don’t like it either, but the guy who owns the ‘collegeanswers.com′ domain wanted $10k for it because it was “in development” (which is bs because since the summer when he told me, it hasn’t become a site). I don’t even have that much money. I’ve thought about a bunch of other names, but decided on ′collegeanswerz.com’.
I’m under the impression that ad revenue isn’t really considered a solid revenue strategy anymore. Am I mistaken or is there a reason it’s particularly viable in your case?
I’m not too sure. My logic is: my 4 competitors are multimillion dollar companies. I think I could be (much) better than them. Thus, I think I could be a multimillion dollar company.
But I should look into the viability of depending on ad revenue. I’ve tried googling around, but haven’t had too much success. I think I’ll try some more though, and also try to talk to the right people about it.
How much have you looked into how your competitors make money? My impression is that the Princeton Review mostly makes money by selling physical books.
I know Princeton Review makes money with guidebooks. And I get the impression that College Prowler and Unigo mix that with advertising, based on the articles I’ve read. Even so, I could get into that game too, and be better at it because my reviews are so much more comprehensive. I thought of the idea last night to make a big table comparing the information that my site provides with the information that Princeton Review, College Prowler, Unigo, Cappex, and College Board provide.
Not formally, but I’ve talked to lots of people about my startup, and have obtained consensus responses.
My idea is to make college reviews better, by asking specific questions instead of general ones. See http://collegeanswerz.com for all the questions. For example, how does the workload impact the social life? Are the school sponsored events popular, or do they suck? Do kids go home on weekends? Are your professors generally fair? How social was this dorm? How difficult was this major? Is there a convenient place to get groceries?
A few people don’t think there’s much of a demand for that, but most people (>95%) think that there is a demand for that. The overwhelming criticism is that I won’t be able to get students to answer the questions. I’ve been experimenting a lot with methods of getting students to answer the questions, and I think I’ve arrived at something that works: $10 to answer 25 questions, or $25 to answer 50. At a $300 budget per school, this gives me about 10-12.5 answers per question (~60 questions per school), which seems pretty good. And $30 per school of targeted Facebook advertising has been successful at spread the word of the offer to students. This has worked for the 3 pilot schools I have.
From there, I’ll have to
1) Raise ~$100k from an investor to do this at the other 297 schools (cost is ~$330 per school to pay and advertise to answerers)
2) Spread the word of the website to current students. I think following the advice here will do that sufficiently. The main methods are internet ads, talking to guidance counselors (I know a couple who are interested), high schools, blogs and news outlets who talk about how to choose a college.
3) Bonus: raise VC money, and expand into things like video tours and live chat. (I call this ‘Bonus’ because I think that if I failed here, I’d still have a successful company, just not a wildly successful one).
What do you guys think?
What you posted is not a premortem, it’s the opposite of it. Assume that a year or two from now your enterprise has failed. What caused it to fail? E.g. insufficient cash flow, lack of school buy-in, lack of investor interest, regulatory obstacles, competing services, failure to execute… For the duration of the exercise you have to suspend your natural optimism and truly believe that bad things happened. Can you do that? If not, then the 90% failure rate statistic definitely applies to you.
I’m saying that those 3 things are the most likely bad things to happen. Other than that...
A competitor comes a long and outdoes me. Maybe by getting more reliable information by doing research instead of just asking students.
The government passes laws that sway you to just go to your state university, which would decrease the demand for a service that provides information about schools all over the country.
One of the big names sees what I’m doing and copies me.
Something happens that hurts internet advertising (that’s how I plan to make money).
I can’t raise my seed round because I can’t get over the chicken-egg hump of finding an investor.
Students don’t do a good job answering questions (they’ve done a good job for my 3 pilot schools, but maybe those were outliers, and the 297 other schools will have worse quality).
I violate some law unknowingly, get sued, and have to declare bankruptcy.
My site gets hacked because I’m a newb at web development, and I have some security flaw and this leads to my database of answers getting deleted (doubtful because I’m using Disqus to have people answer questions, and Rails to build the site).
Those are obviously only a fraction of the things that could possibly go wrong. However, I’ve disregarded most of them as so unlikely that they aren’t worth thinking about. Are there any in particular that you think I should be paying more attention to (other than the 3 I listed in my first comment)?
Without commenting on the larger article (I feel like a decent fraction of the negative comments to this post are just regurgitating cached thoughts about start-ups), the thing that worries me about your above comment is that a lot of the things you listed are pretty implausible. This doesn’t seem like the sort of list that would be generated if I was trying to generate the most plausible set of reasons something would fail. Instead, I would have listed:
lack of buy-in to the website (just because the people you asked say they would be interested doesn’t mean that people will actually use your website; the overall user experience is pretty crucial to determining that)
failure to convert a user base into revenue flow
lack of perceived legitimacy of the reviews (e.g. due to the small number of responses per question), possibly caused by push-back from more established places like the U.S. News & World Report rankings
I wasn’t sure what he meant by premortem. I listed before the 3 plausible things that could go wrong, and he said that that wasn’t a premortem, so I figured he was thinking more along the lines of “think of anything and everything that can go wrong”.
To your points...
I’m highly confident that this will be something people want. I have a strong intuitive belief in this, and I actually have talked to lots (hundreds?) of people who say that this is something they do/would want. Still though, I should have mentioned this as a risk.
I don’t see this as a problem. If I my website becomes the go-to place for college applicants (or at least one of the go-to places), it’ll get a lot of traffic, and the traffic will allow advertisers to target a particular audience (college applicants). From what I understand, on the web, traffic pays.
That’s definitely a worry, and is one of the main things I want to address. Once I get rolling and get resources, I want to invest heavily into getting the most reliable information as possible. Still though, all the other student review websites have the same issue of perceived legitimacy, and they’ve been around getting users for years.
Why aren’t these people using the sites that already exist? You could just say “that’s because the questions/answers aren’t good enough,” but my guess is most of these people who say they would want it never got as far as looking at these other sites in order to see their quality of questions and answers.
They do, but they aren’t satisfied. I’ve had a lot of people say “I wish this existed when I was applying to college”, implying that they want something beyond what they already had. A lot of these people are people that I know looked through the questions (because a lot of them answered them, and because a lot of them were in the context of conversations where we either looked at the site, or I explained and gave examples of the questions).
I don’t think this addresses jkaufman’s comment. He asked:
These sites already existed when your friends were applying to college. So if they say “I wish this existed when I was applying to college”, the key question to answer is why didn’t they use any of the competing sites, which did exist when they were applying to college? Your response that “these people looked through your own website’s questions” does not address this question.
(As an aside, I would humbly suggest that you read through jkaufman’s—and a few other people’s—advice somewhat more carefully, as your responses indicate that you’ve misunderstood some of the key points, see also my earlier explanation of a premortem, which had already been explained to you once earlier in the thread.)
Apparently you suffer from poor reading comprehension (I explained the term) and are unable to google (it’s the top two hits). Given the way you react and the critique others give, I estimate that you have less than 1% chance of success. Much less. I wouldn’t take a bet on it, though, since the uncertainty is too high. After all, Facebook started as “Hot or not”. But you do not come across as Mark Zuckerberg.
I suspect that your time and money would likely be better spent attending one of the CFAR workshops.
I’d want to add at least:
You have to spend more on avertising to get a student to visit your website than that student makes for you in on-site adverts.
It turns out that the existing competition is better because having a large number of reviews in a dozen or so categories turns out to be better than having a small number of answers for a larger number of questions.
Well both of those things are yet to be seen. Why do you believe each of those things are true?
I think you’ve misunderstood what a premortem is. It is “assuming your startup fails, what is the most likely reason”? That is the context of Khoth’s comment.
Oh ok, thanks for clarifying. That was stupid of me.
Ignoring the general question of “should more people start companies”, some feedback from poking around at your site:
First impression: not a real site. I’m not sure what about it sets that off for me, unfortunately. Maybe the amount of white, the size of the main picture (too small), general non-glossyness, font of the title text, homemade appearance of the logo, and the broken aspect-ratio on the main picture? Hiring a designer can help here.
The focus isn’t that clear. As a visitor I can’t tell what I’m supposed to be doing. Am I supposed to search for a college? Click on “colleges”? I understand it’s about picking a college, but I don’t see what I’m supposed to do next.
The “get paid to answer questions” looks a bit scummy and isn’t generally relevant. Can you limit it by IP so it only shows up to people browsing to you from those universities? And then simplify it to something like “Answer Questions, Get Paid”? It’s also a weird width.
Most of the front page appears to be selling the site. Which you need to do if you’re charging for a service, but you’re not. Instead you want to get people into the flow of looking at colleges as soon as possible. Save the “what makes us better than everyone else” for an about page or a pitch deck.
Minor: having the questions in a monospace font is weird. As a programmer I love monospaced fonts, but most people don’t.
You have an audience issue with questions. You’re going for a site where people see answers to real questions, the kind the would ask someone in person if they were socially close and wanted the real deal on a college, but those questions aren’t the same for everyone. In particular, there are some questions which probably do matter a lot to some people but are irrelevant or even offensive to others. “How hot are the girls?” was the main one that jumped out to me here.
The comments take too long to load. They’re not way slow, but just clicking around some it was distracting having to wait for the spinning C each time. This limits the magic of clicking around and seeing people’s responses to questions.
Thanks for the quality critiques!
Regarding the design things, I agree with you. I basically just started learning programming and design this summer and I’m definitely flawed in each of them. I would like one of my first hires to be a designer, but I do think that the current design satisfices (won’t wow, but won’t draw people away). Do you?
Also, there are some ways in which I think my design is much better than that of my competitors. For example, on http://www.unigo.com/, it takes 2 clicks to pull up a college page (College Guide ⇒ type in search) when it should just be a search bar on the top right. Also, my site lets you browse by question, rather than by reviewer. And another one, when you’re on a school’s page, you could toggle the information section rather than having to click it and leave the page you were on.
I’ve heard this before, and am not sure what I should do. I figured that even if it isn’t immediately apparent, the user would end up proceeding to click on Colleges, and then figuring it out within seconds. But brainstorming this and redoing the home page is definitely on my to-do list.
I’m not sure how to limit by IP, but that would be cool if I were able to do that.
Good point.
I know they aren’t the same for everyone, and so I try to be comprehensive. But being comprehensive will inevitably lead to the presence of questions that some applicants aren’t interested in. I feel that being comprehensive is more important than annoying some people with some questions.
That’s something I’ll need to address. In the short term, I’m already using Disqus, and I don’t think it’s worth the time to go back and rewrite the code to have my own users and comments and stuff so I could make it faster, but I think that I will eventually. Meanwhile, Rails 4 just came out with turbolinks, which should speed it up a bit (I still need to upgrade).
Before we get into more details, here are some higher-level thoughts on the business overall: how will people get to your site and how will you make money from them?
One strategy is to pay for ads. People doing this already are easy to find: search in an incognito window with questions like “college information”, “choose college”, or “college for me” (be imaginative). Click on the ads that don’t look like they’re for particular colleges. This drops me on a few landing pages:
http://www.educationmatch.us/college_finder/
http://www.noodle.org/colleges
http://www.educationconnection.com/landingpages/programs-is
http://www.schoolguides.com/
https://www.plus-u.com/
You don’t know very much about these businesses, but you know they’re all making enough money on an ad click for it to be worth it for them to advertise here. (Looking in the AdWords keyword planner suggests they’re paying $5-$20 per visitor (CPC).) If one of these sites is doing something that seems weird to you, don’t write it off as dumb: they’re making money or they wouldn’t be able to afford to show up when you did the search. Maybe they have some low-hanging fruit in improving their layout, and they certainly don’t all look the same, but if in doubt they probably know something you don’t.
It’s also possible for people to come to you via searches. Do some searches yourself; see who shows up. This business model is harder to replicate because it’s much less clear how they got onto the front page for a search. SEO advice tends to be terrible, and for good reason: it’s an adversarial game where success is very lucrative and people are constantly pushing limits to see how scummy/profitable they can get without stepping over the line and getting banned (recent example: rapgenius).
Word of mouth and viral/social are also possible, but even less predictable. But then my bias here is for paying for traffic because I used to work in advertising and it all feels very natural to me. But however people get to your site, you want a good sized flow so you can experiment and test things and see what works. Iterating with no one watching is hard to get to go anywhere. (One nice thing about the non-ads flow is that focusing on making your users happy and have a good experience lines up with your incentives. If you go the ads flow every visitor is to a first approximation someone you’ll never see again and so you don’t care about their experience just how much money you can get from them. It’s like businesses that cater to regulars vs tourists.)
Once people get on your site, how do you get money from them? The simple strategy is to put up ads, like adsense. These pay very little, like $0.01 to $1 per thousand visits. Maybe somewhat higher because you’re in a vertical (education) where there are advertisers with a bunch of money to spend (colleges). There’s no way you can pay for ads at $5 per click and make your money back at $0.001/visit. So what are those sites like educationmatch doing? They’re collecting information from people and selling it to colleges. This is called “lead-gen” advertising. The most obvious form is when you land on a page and it immediately asks you for information about yourself. If you’re going to place search ads, you basically have to do lead-gen; nothing else is profitable enough per-visit. (When you start off you’ll sell leads to a lead-aggregator who sells them to the colleges. When you get big you negotiate deals directly with the colleges and get a bit more per lead.) If instead you want to make money by putting ads on your pages you need to go with cheaper but higher-volume sources of traffic, like being awesome, getting people to link to you and talk about you, and getting high up on search results pages.
Back to specific design notes:
To actually answer this question you need data from your site and competitors to compare bounce rates. You’re not going to get that, so the best you can do is calibrate retrospectively: when you do get a designer and redo your site you should A/B test the redesign so you can see it’s impact. This only works if you have enough traffic by then to get meaningful results.
My guess is that the appearance will make some people leave with “this looks unprofessional/fake” but this isn’t something I’m good at estimating. You should at least fix the aspect ratio on the main image; I found the vertical squishing very distracting. Cropping it instead of scaling it in the browser would work, as would using only one of height= and width=.
unigo looks more professional to me, though still not as polished as something could be. But polish isn’t everything; many of the sites I linked to above aren’t going to win any design awards. Many of them look kind of tacky and overly slick. They’re all making money, though.
Sit down with someone and watch what they do with your site. Then sit down with someone else. Look at your competitors and take the best ideas from many sources, then mock up a new front page design and sit down with another person. Repeat until you run out of fresh victims/friends. You’re too small for fully-automated a/b testing, so substitute quality for quantity and watch real users in person.
Many colleges have a contiguous IP range. For example, everyone browsing from on-campus at Swarthmore will be 130.58.something.something. Make guesses from looking at the IP of the college webserver, and if various departments that do their own webhosting (cs, math) all are in the same IP range you’re probably good. You can also look through your server logs to see the visits from people you know are at certain schools. It’s also possible that this can be looked up somewhere.
It’s a balance. Trying to channel “teenage girl” I have the impression that “how hot are the girls” would be something I would find off-putting. But my mental model is pretty bad here, having never been one.
A final note: this all sounds kind of mercenary. My perspective is that’s what you have to do if you want to make money in such a tightly competitive market. That’s part of why I’m glad I don’t work in this industry anymore.
That’s the plan.
Ok; keep in mind that this means bringing in a lot of traffic. You’re talking about wanting to build a company you could sell for $5-10M, which means either something like $500k in profit a year or the expectation of even more profit in a few more years. Your costs might be $2M/year, so you’d need to bring in $2.5M/year in ad revenue. At a $1 CPM that’s 2.5B pageviews a year or 7M pageviews daily. That’s 1/60th the traffic Wikipedia gets, and Wikipedia is massive, so this is a very challenging traffic goal.
via http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/10/10/a-website-for-rating-big-life-decisions/
It’s funny, now I’m arguing for the outside view instead of the inside view :)
If they “run largely off of ad-based revenue, especially targeted advertising”, and “have 21 employees”, I could too. My guess is that the numbers work because they have higher CPMs because they have such a targeted audience.
My overarching point though, is that it could be monetized, not that advertising is the best way to do it. My evidence is that all my major competitors are multi-million dollar companies, and that I think I could out-do them (more users, more engaged users, better information, more brand recognition...).
But you can’t put yourself in the same reference class as these companies, because it’s most likely that they started out with more resources, bigger teams, more experienced founders, and/or more connections than you.
You could make that argument against a lot of startups.
Yes, it’s probably true that there are successful startups who began with less resources than the incumbents in their industries. Yet these companies may start out with more resources than you seem to have available.
There are many business models other than launching a multi-million dollar mass consumer website that monetizes from advertising. In my view, such a business is relatively risky and resource-intensive. It seems to me that you have chosen an especially challenging business model for your first startup.
Bringing a product to a mass market is a challenge; see the examples edanm and I raised of restaurants and movies flopping because they fail to resonate with the market. The wider the market it is that you are aiming for, the harder it is to make a product that resonates with them.
So, I did not intend to sound like I was making a fully general counter-argument. I want to specifically caution founders where there is a large gap between their current resources/experience, and the demands of their business model, especially when their business model requires targeting a mass market, and they have no experience marketing to even a small or niche market.
Sorry for the delay, but here’s my pitch: http://www.collegeanswerz.com/pitch . I think it’ll enable a more productive discussion of the viability of my website.
Also, check out http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jmn/salary_or_startup_how_dogooders_can_gain_more/ .
I skimmed the pitch. I think you are probably correct that there is a business opportunity in this area. Nevertheless, my main view is that a good idea or business opportunity is only a small part of building a business.
Consequently, your pitch seems a bit more like a theoretical paper on a business case, such as in a class project as school. That’s different from attracting consumers (who require good marketing and design, not spreadsheets) and investors (who need to believe that you in particular are capable of executing on your idea).
I will continue to recommend that you learn more about design and marketing, and ideally work with other people in those areas. Unfortunately, to fully argue this point, I would need to give extensive feedback, which would take me too much time and space to write up. I concur with the critical feedback that others have given in the thread.
A big challenge is the fact that if you are the type of person who posts on LW, then your mind is quite different from the average consumer, and you will not be very well calibrated to understand what they find attractive, usable, hearable, and valuable. Bridging this gap in perspective will take considerable work.
As for the article you link to, I agree with you there is a good expected value for you in a risky project. I will still emphasize the execution risks involved in this project. Ultimately, I think that even if you fail fast at making a successful business, you will still gain value from this project, as long as you don’t burn too much time, capital, or other resources. You can always go work at someone else’s startup and build skills and connections for a future startup of your own.
Thanks for the response.
All “execution means”, is 1) raising the money I need to pay for people to answer questions at all schools on the site, 2) market this to high school students, 3) get enough momentum to raise a series A, and 4) hire the right people to help me expand. At least that should get me to be a player in the market.
I agree that I’m no expert in design/marketing, but I think I could do a good enough job at them to get me to a point where I could hire experts.
Yes. And these are all challenges with significant risks. My claim is that is that it will be hard to build significant momentum prior to getting a level of design and marketing which is significantly beyond your current ability as someone with a programming background. Even if you pay people to provide your site with good content, your visitors will not appreciate that content if is housed in unattractive design, except perhaps for some viewers who find your content so compelling that they are willing to overlook the design.
I could be wrong about this, of course (and your analytics will tell you the answer), but if I am right, then you will need to get help with design and marketing prior to steps 2) and 3). Getting either training, or significant help, or contractors, or co-founders, would need to be incorporated into your plan sooner rather than later.
This seems like an empirical question… and leaving it up to chance sounds like a risky prospect when your money and time is on the line. Given that you admittedly lack experience in design and marketing, it seems like you would be uncalibrated to estimate how much experience in those areas you need to attract funding and co-founders.
To give you some more background about why I emphasize marketing and design so much: in some deals where I’ve seen companies get funded, a big part of the funding was showing design documents and marketing strategies to potential investors. Also, I often see experienced and serial entrepreneurs worrying about the marketing success of consumer products they are working on. Being scared is a rational attitude given the uncertainty of the mass market and what people will respond to, which is why I’m trying to scare you a little bit about the risks you are facing.
Becoming good at either design or marketing (let alone both) coming from a tech background is at least 6+ months of work to produce non-amateurish work. Perhaps there is some way that you can get help or guidance in those areas in the very near future.
Ok, now I understand. (As an aside, I don’t even have much of a programming background! I taught myself Rails this past summer, and this is the first website I built.)
I disagree; I think there’s a very real need for more comprehensive student reviews, and the design of my website isn’t going to prevent people from using it. The design may not blow you away aesthetically, but I think it’s at least pretty straightforward and easy to use. Aside from my own intuition, a lot of people I’ve talked to said they love the site and would find it useful if it had reviews.
Regarding marketing, 1) I talked to a college advisor I know, and she said she likes the site a lot, and wants to tell all the other advisors she knows about it once I get reviews. So I think I could spread the word by doing more of this. 2) I talked to a guy on the school board of my town, and he said he loves it and that guidance counselors would be happy to spread the word, so that also seems like spreading via guidance counselors will also be effective. 3) There’s a lot of people writing about How to Choose a College, and I think it’ll be in their interest to spread word of my site, being that it helps people choose a college. 4) Social media advertising. 5) Word of mouth. Not to downplay the value of marketing, but from what I read, things that solve real problems tend to find their way to users.
You’re making a lot of outside-view arguments, but I’m taking an inside-view with my website (I think I have enough information to take an inside view).
It’s like the map and the territory—inside-view is like looking at a lower-level map. So it’s like we’re looking at two different maps. Your interpretation of your higher level map may be correct, but the lower level map might have more information that leads to a different answer.
Right now, I’m working on a big comparison of my site, to all of my competitors. Comparing what my site has to what they have. I hope to be done in the next few days, and I’ll let you know when I am and show you what I’ve got. I think it’ll make more sense once I could show it to you, and I think it’ll allow for a more productive discussion. (Note: I should have done this explicit comparison earlier on, like immediately. I’m very disappointed in myself for not doing so. Like this has been the most disappointed I’ve been in myself in over a year probably. Thanks for taking the time to discuss this with me.)
Sorry for the delay, but here’s my pitch: http://www.collegeanswerz.com/pitch . It should clear things up and enable a more productive discussion if you’re still interested.
Also, check out http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jmn/salary_or_startup_how_dogooders_can_gain_more/ .
“How hot are the girls?” on the front page of your site? Really?
The fonts are unprofessional looking too.
Yes. Consider who my target audience is. I need to convey that this site provides answers to questions you normally don’t get answers for.
I agree. Within the next week or so, I’ll get some good google fonts (just recently figured out how to do that). And if I raise a seed round, I’ll buy equity and concourse.
I understand what you’re trying to do, but have you considered that even those young women who aren’t “upset” by the inclusion of that question might straight away, on the front page of your site, get the impression that this site is not for them? I assume women comprise roughly half your intended target audience. (Not to mention—are there really systematic differences in “how hot the girls are” between colleges??)
Furthermore, would you agree that if you succeed, at some point you might be interested in developing a relationship on some semi-official level with colleges—for example, you have a student rep at the college who drums up people to provide answers for you? Student unions can be pretty touchy about discriminatory type stuff. (Edited to clarify that by use of the word “touchy” I don’t mean to imply disagreement with them.)
When I was applying to university a few years ago, I reckon the equivalent question that the “alternative” descriptions tended to include to demonstrate their alternativeness and focus away from academics was “How much does a pint cost?” Less likely to be found offensive. UK, not US, though; I guess your drinking age precludes the use of that one.
Those are better fonts.
I’ve considered it, but I figure that the value of having it outweighs this. I don’t see it as something that is strong enough to draw too many people away from the site. Maybe it’d be a good idea to remove it from the front page though to be safe. What do you think?
Yup, even more.
I don’t know. I don’t see how anyone would know without having access to a site like mine.
For the record, I don’t think it should be insulting that people care about appearance. I wish I didn’t care about it, but I do (it isn’t fair because it’s not something you can control. however, pretending that you don’t care is poor instrumental rationality). I get the sense that it’s human nature, and you can’t really help it. That’s not to say that you think someone has some sort of lower “worth” if they aren’t as attractive. It’s just to say that more attractive people ⇒ better chances of finding a girl/boyfriend, and more fun hooking up. It has nothing to do with respect or social/intellectual interaction, just romantic/lustful.
I’m not sure. I’ll have to acquire more information and think about it. It does seem like something that is rather likely though (schools can help me get answerers, mentors, representatives). I would have to make sure that their involvement isn’t biasing my site though. As for the “discriminatory stuff”, it doesn’t seem worth trading comprehensiveness of my site for colleges involvement.
Removing it from the front page could certainly get you a few visitors who stay longer than to read that, react with “huh, guess this is not a classy site” or whatever, and leave.
Of course it’s simply true that people are interested in the physical attractiveness of other people. Declaring that fact insulting is a nonsensical thing to do. It’s the choice (not on this one isolated occasion, of course, but in the context of millions and millions of other such choices constantly made in the media etc) of the “hot” and “girls” framing of your understanding of this point that rankles, and may well rankle with others. Of course it’s the women who are evaluated for their hotness, not the men. Of course hotness is chosen to evaluate them. Of course they’re referred to using the term “girls”. Because it’s that way all the time. You’ll tell me that it has to be like this, because that’s how college-aged men speak and think. Pity you’ll gain some people who speak and think like that and lose some who don’t, in my opinion.
I would caution you against the Typical Mind Fallacy and believing that other people will perceive writing the way you do.
In projects I’ve seen, the founders and marketing people worked on marketing copy, and spent a lot of time fine-tuning the messaging. As as programmer and a LW reader, it is unlikely that you are well-calibrated about marketing and messaging (similar to how the typical marketing person would be miscalibrated about web development). Getting feedback from others is important to avoid biases in this area.
Have you considered rephrasing as
and have immediately next to it the question
in order to keep things gender-neutral? Presumably this latter question would also be something your target audience cares about.
I ask the same thing about males. I don’t think that’s the phrasing that my target audience is looking for.
You’ve said how you plan to spend money, but not how to plan to make money.
I’m pretty sure that back when I was choosing a university I’d have said that such a service would be good but wouldn’t actually pay for it. Paying for information on the internet is a weird and alien thing, especially if I didn’t know in advance how high-quality the information was (I’d just have to use heuristics like “most adverts on the internet offering information in exchange for payment are somewhere between not worth it and outright scam”, or “websites with a z in the name are shady”).
I agree about people’s reluctance to pay for things on the internet. For that reason, I think I’d make money via advertisements. Judging by the size of my competitors (College Prowler, Unigo, Cappex, Princeton Review...), that seems like a sufficient way to make a lot of money.
Regarding the ‘z’, I don’t like it either, but the guy who owns the ‘collegeanswers.com′ domain wanted $10k for it because it was “in development” (which is bs because since the summer when he told me, it hasn’t become a site). I don’t even have that much money. I’ve thought about a bunch of other names, but decided on ′collegeanswerz.com’.
I’m under the impression that ad revenue isn’t really considered a solid revenue strategy anymore. Am I mistaken or is there a reason it’s particularly viable in your case?
I’m not too sure. My logic is: my 4 competitors are multimillion dollar companies. I think I could be (much) better than them. Thus, I think I could be a multimillion dollar company.
But I should look into the viability of depending on ad revenue. I’ve tried googling around, but haven’t had too much success. I think I’ll try some more though, and also try to talk to the right people about it.
How much have you looked into how your competitors make money? My impression is that the Princeton Review mostly makes money by selling physical books.
I know Princeton Review makes money with guidebooks. And I get the impression that College Prowler and Unigo mix that with advertising, based on the articles I’ve read. Even so, I could get into that game too, and be better at it because my reviews are so much more comprehensive. I thought of the idea last night to make a big table comparing the information that my site provides with the information that Princeton Review, College Prowler, Unigo, Cappex, and College Board provide.