jamesroseman

A friend from college and I have been talking about starting a project, but are unsure if we're overly optimistic with how it would fit in the market today. I imagine there must be a better way than cold-call e-mails to network contacts and blind surveys in small pools to figure out the potential of our product.

What tools have you found useful to find product viability in the market? What techniques have worked and not worked for you personally?

- - -

The idea:

We'd like to host programming challenge events in tech companies to help foster feelings of ownership and creator culture. The events would be centered around writing AI against relatively simple games. Competitors would work on their AIs for a week before competing against one another. We'd organize and arrange logistics for the event as well as write the SDKs, games, and infrastructure.

A way to get the ball rolling would be to host events at colleges for free to iterate on the process and see what goes well. This will help us refine the core product as well as see what goes wrong -- but it doesn't help us discover the want for such a product before building it.

I'm graduating from a top-50 college not particularly well known for its CS department in CS and Business.

I have this business with a few friends. We act as middlemen to redirect college students to the cheapest ways to get their books. We're at a few locations, and this past year sold about $80k worth of product through Amazon (of which we're affiliates) and an average of 10k traffic at our heaviest site on season (textbooks are seasonal). You can check out the site (for all its coding mishaps and horrors) at www.tuftstext.com .

I've worked for a small start-up after freshman year, a large web company last year, and working at a top tier tech company this summer doing software development. For all intents and purposes, I might be able to have a career in software development post-graduation.

This business with a few friends is beginning to grow in idea and in scope. We're looking at expanding the suite of tools we have available, bringing in an additional developer and designer over the summer, and starting up hardcore inbound marketing efforts to really drive up traffic. It excites the hell out of me.

As job offers will likely be made this summer (we're all graduating next year), the big conversation is approaching about continuing or not. In my wildest fantasies we'd all move into a shitty apartment for at least 6 months, work the hell out of the business and see where it goes. Nothing would make me happier than to work on this full-time, but I'm unsure if it's just my young over-estimation of our abilities pushing me in that direction.<p>Have any of you been in similar positions? If so, what happened? Do you regret your choice, whatever it was?

Thank you so much for your time, even if you just skimmed it.

EDIT:

Just wanted to clarify the business itself, as I didn't anticipate the generosity of HNers to extend to analyzing my particular situation in detail.

We currently occupy the textbook referral space, connecting students and the cheapest ways to get their books. We also offer the ability to schedule courses for students, a valuable tool most campuses don't offer. In the immediate future, we hope to extend to the geographically-based marketplace space. By that I mean college students selling textbooks, furniture, homeware, cookware, etc. to other college students on their campus. No shipping hassles. Craigslist on a smaller scale of a community you trust by association.