-
Login and Registration page
-
The full home page
1. What is my startup idea?
Answer: The Peer-to-Peer Textbook Exchange platform addresses the problem of expensive educational materials and the inefficient use of textbooks after a semester ends. We plan to make a proper use of it and save money.
2. What problem am I solving?
Answer: The problem we are trying to solve is that students who faces the problem to buy expensive books or who doesn’t know what to do with the books after the semester ends. They can connect here and solve the problem together. This a one place that keeps collection of all the books or study material that the students doesn’t needs any longer. Also, they can save up some money.
3. Why is this problem important?
Answer: The idea comes from my own experience. For studies I need to buy many books or study material. But after end of a semester or year they becomes kind of useless for me. I need space for my new material. So, to get rid of them is kind of hassle. Like locally selling them takes too much effort. Now comes to the selling them online. Well, there are many sites but I don’t think there are many established site that only focuses on the old books. Also, about buying new books if I could buy them second hand straight from other students it will be less expensive and less wasteful. As a student I don’t think it’s a light problem. I mean we need to deal with for years.
4. What is my solution?
Answer: So a CS student myself I decided to build a simple website to solve this problem. It’s nothing fancy now. And to be honest I don’t even want to make it an overboard website in future. I am talking about the design aspects. I want to keep them minimal but useful. We already have to many distractions so I went for a simple working website. That is only limited to students to sell, buy and exchange books with each other. The key features of it are that after opening a simple account with your email you can just upload you book or study material for sell. It will have an image option and you don’t even need to describe much with writing. Also, you can buy or exchange in the platform. For contract the user can decide to contract with phone number or WhatsApp too. If you ask why, it’s different form other existing platforms, this one is only made for the students and educational material, rather than being a general marketplace. We don’t need middlemen just easy to use interface and students can buy, sell or exchange books here. Its effective cause students can save money with quality second hand textbooks. Sellers can recover part of the money they spent buying that book at first. It will also create a trusted student focused marketplace.
5. How does my solution work?
Answer: You just need an email and a phone number. That’s it. (I do have a plan to add id access in future) After that they can just provide info about their materials or just search for the books they need. I do have a filter search option, like by subject or author. That’s it finds you match and contract.
6. Who are the target users or market?
Answer: Without saying our target users are students They can range between 16-28. I mean this is the age range mostly students need books frequently. Well for now it needs be stay in local. Like the country will be hosting this website. In future we could make it global with proper development. If we estimate the market size there are millions of students enrolled in study institutions. And they all need books. So, it’s a huge number. Though for now we are targeting university students but with plans to expand to junior levels too.
7. What is my business plan?
Answer:
Phase 1: Development
The development phase is 80 percent complete. Like I have a website that is simple but work. It needs more work if we really plan to do business with this. But right now, it has a foundation.
Phase 2: Testing
We need to test the platform with real university. We will collect feedback through surveys and improve the platform based on users’ opinions.
Phase 3: Launch
We can launch to the country we plan to host this business from. We can promote through social media, student communities and campus ambassadors.
Phase 4: Growth
Expand to junior student levels. We can add features like mobile app, book requests, id access etc.
Revenue Model
• Premium book listings
• Small transition fees
• Educational ads
• Optional premium subscriptions features
Additional Information
Answer: It’s just my opinion but I don’t want to gatekeep this website with paywall. Like we can earn from small fees or ads. It’s like we should target more students instead of giving it a paywall and losing out users. Like the more users we have even if we keep a small profit margin I believe we can still get much more profit gaining more users.
Also please take my apologies if my tone sounded rude or informal. I just wanted to describe my idea more comfortably so maybe many places I sounded too informal. Due all respect I hope the team will look at my idea.
