Ask YC: Feedback on my startup | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Feedback on my startup

4 pointsdkokelley7 comments

Please take a look at my startup from two different angles: 1. You're a college student who has just been told to go to cocunderground.com for your textbooks. COC is the name of your college (College of the Canyons is the school's actual name). You have no other information. (I want to simulate a potential user's actual experience. Feel free to register too! Just put YC at the beginning of your name or username and I'll remove you after a week.)

2. You're yourself and evaluating the site's concept, navigation, ease of use, aesthetics, everything.

Let me know what you think. Thanks!

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OK... so this functions well as a demonstration of something you built, for applying to YC or a job at another startup. And free book exchange sites are definitely good for the community of students.

But the word startup implies a business that can scale rapidly. You've got a nice project here... I wish you the best of luck in expanding this to every college in the nation, but it's going to be hard as hell. Even then, your only way of making money is advertising and it takes a whole lot of users to make decent money advertising. And college students as an audience don't exactly attract high CPMs either.

Yeah, to piggyback here, you'll never make money on a college book exchange site. I tried it. Tons of other people have, too. It's even made "bad business idea" lists: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/8-stupid-frat-boy-...

A student book exchange strikes me as a tad seasonal, like selling Christmas trees.

Retool it to porn and you may have yourself a viable web business. Otherwise? Nice portfolio app.

I liked the nifty drop down menus!!

Decent concept and execution but you may want to change the name, so it's less let's just say... confusing

cocunderground ~= backstreet ~= hole in the wall

o yeah you may want to check out your competition: http://pazap.com/

It doesn't seem open anymore but this guy had a pretty cool ui for a college text book search site

Yeah I am planning on changing the name sometime soon. This was our concept site, to see if it would work and how to get it to work. At one point we were stuck with what domain to register for the site, and I had to pick one to move forward.

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