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.
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:
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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?