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?
"How hot are the girls?" on the front page of your site? Really?
The fonts are unprofessional looking too.
My motivation behind this post stems from Aumann's agreement theorem. It seems that my opinions on startups differ from most of the rationality community, so I want to share my thoughts, and hear your thoughts, so we could reach a better conclusion.
I think that if you're smart and hard working, there's a pretty good chance that you achieve financial independence within a decade of the beginning of your journey to start a startup. And that's my conservative estimate.
"Achieve financial independence" only scratches the surface of the benefits of succeeding with a startup. If you're an altruist, you'll get to help a lot of other people too. And making millions of dollars will also allow you the leverage you need to make riskier investments with much higher expected values, allowing you to grow your money quickly so you could do more good.
A lot of this is predicated on my belief that you have a good chance at succeeding if you're smart and hardworking, so let me explain why I think this.
Along the lines of reductionism, "success with a startup" is an outcome (I guess we could define success as a $5-10M exit in under 10 years). And outcomes consist of their components. My argument consists of breaking the main outcome into it's components, and then arguing that the components are all likely enough for the main outcome to be likely.
I think that the 4 components are:
The Idea
Your idea has to be for a product or service (I'll just say product to keep things simple) that creates demand, and can be met profitably. In other words, make something people want (this article spells it out pretty well).
What could go wrong?