The Idea

I’ve been pitched “Craig’s List for students” or a “book swap” idea many times. Maybe even 10-15/year.

Students are tired of paying lots of money for books. Even worse is that Craig’s List sucks. It’s got a terrible UI and it’s hard to trust users on the other end of the transaction.

A book-swap or student-swap website built for each campus could:

(1) Help everyone save money + lower the cost of buying books

(2) Bring the campus closer together

(3) Help students get rid of stuff before they move

And on and on and and and on and on….

But here’s why it won’t work

(1) College students have low lifetime values. They are only on campus for 4 years, and assuming they make 10 transactions (that’s a lot) and you charge a $1-3 transaction fee the lifetime value is no more than $30.00.

(2) It’s expensive to market the idea. There is no network effect beyond campus borders. No one at Columbia would be better off if this existed at Cornell—so going viral is not an option. This means a new marketing campaign would have to be launched at every single university. It might be easy to market it on a campus you know well, but how would you find campus leaders at Florida Atlantic? Or at Sacramento State?

You’d likely need one full time staff manager handling no more than 10 schools at a time and a pretty serious game plan. Sounds tough. Below is my idea of what the marketing budget per school would look like.

(3) Students would use the site to find people, and then execute transactions offline. Why would they pay your site a transaction fee at that point?

(4) It’s an incredibly seasonal business. It would be hard to run full speed ahead only 2-4 times per year at most. For a cash-strapped startup it would be a killer.

(5) Students may not even be the customer! Since they’re typically not the ones buying their own books (their parents are) they don’t really care about saving money yet.

SOME DO! MANY DO! But lots don’t…

The Broader Issue

This speaks to a broader problem. Students at universities don’t understand the real problems of the world yet. They haven’t been exposed to industry, so instead they build products that serve themselves.

There are simply too many startups that solve mediocre problems for affluent university students. We don’t need more.

Plus—college students are bad customers because of their turnover, because they’re broke, and because half of the time the money they’re spending isn’t even theirs!

So… that’s all I’ve got to say about that.