Ask HN: Who is my customer? Alumni Business / Product Directory.

I have a pet project I've worked on for a while and would love some thoughts about validating how to find customers.

The site is a directory of alumni products and businesses.

We have launched private sites for small liberal arts colleges harvesting launch data from publicly available sources, and advertising to alums. We have some decent traction of traffic, email list signups and user submitted alumni businesses / authors.

Many colleges are proud of, and feature these types of listings in their alumni magazines and websites. A handful have un-maintained sites with some of this data.

I'm interested in anyone's thoughts about how to - Sortfolio Model - Free listings, pay for premium. - Ads (same businesses that would advertise in an alumni magazine) - Sell to college advancement / alumni offices. (Most that we've talked to aren't interested in profiting off of their alums, and definitely don't have the resources to build and maintain this themselves)

What could we offer the universities as our potential customer? Research of their alums? Just hosting of the site?

Any thoughts or ideas are appreciated!

Thanks!