business idea good? / good domain name?

i had an idea i hadnt acted upon yet. i figured i might take a look into it. its for a website that allows users to put their old textbooks into a database and for every textbook they put in, they can take someone elses out. basically free textbooks (since you only need them for a quarter anyway). i figure this could save people thousands of dollars in college.

i would charge them x amount for taking a book out of the pool and free of course to put your book in the database.

there are 16 million kids in college in the us alone (US Census Press Releases). say they all have 4 classes per quarter and each class has one book. they save a few hundred dollars on books and give me $1 per book for my services.

$1 x 16,000,000 students x 4 quarters x 4 books = $256,000,000

the problems i see so far:

• there are new editions schools require (possible solution: give the students their books from the pool then for books i dont have, give them a referral link to amazon and make 5% or so on their purchase)
• there is no way in hell i'm getting a warehouse to put the books in. they all hold their books until someone demands them. this makes it so i need to work out shipping. does anyone have any experience with giving customers free/cheap prepaid envelopes?
• say schools are quarterly, i only have 4 times a year money comes in. possibly expand website to include nontextbook literature?
• outsourcing: anyone have any good experience with people that develop/maintain websites?

last question: the only good domain name i could find was textbookswapping.com. what do you guys think (i'm hesitant because its long and it limits my market to textbooks). should i spend some big $$$ to buy a quality domain name?

appreciate the help in advance guys. my last BIG idea turned into me being "too busy". someone took that idea and turned it into redbox. there is now one in front of every gas station, supermarket, walmart, etc in california. i dont want to let this one get away

First of all I admire your initiative. As a recently joined member of the fastlane I am very impressed by the motivation of everyone on these forums.

I am a university student myself and I feel I could help by providing a view from my perspective. I hope my comments are helpful and I don't mean to offend!

- The smallest textbook I have is still over 200 pages - It weighs a huge amount, let alone my 600+ page calculus book. I assume if you are only taking $1 per trade that you won't be paying for potentially expensive postage? My gut reaction as a penny squeezing student is that this isn't a free book.

- If the end user is required to pay for postage (and they are happy to pay it) what sort of secure payment infrastructure is required to manage reliably transferring the postage cost from the user to the sender? Is the cost of this sort of system within your startup budget?

- Although this doesn't mean there is no market for your idea, personally I sell my used books on noticeboards at half price (the standard at my uni) and make the transaction in person. Almost always I can find books I'm after (at half price too), and I usually roughly break even.

That said, I really think the foundation of your idea is good and that there is a market for a better way for students to trade books. I recommend reading (or re-reading) Do You Have a Successful Entrepreneurial Premise? as I think a key to your sucess will be finding a solution that accomodates the extremely low budget that students almost always aim for.

Hope this has helped,

jportz

It's a good idea that is being done. That does not mean you should not do it. I think it means if you are going to do it you need to find a way to be better then the current websites out there. Maybe offer something they are not? Here are a few of them to reseach.
Campus Book Swap

BOOKSWAP TEXTBOOKS - Used Textbook Classifieds

Sell Used Textbooks + Buy Used Books = Swapbooks.com

TextSwap: Buy/Sell/Trade Used TextBooks Online.

Thought of going local first and justing doing the universities in your locale first? There's no shipping, and you can see the interest.

With the risk of being considered a pessimist here, but:

1) I am not sure every student available will go for it. Calculate 1% of those 16 Million students instead and you will have a fair and a rather conservative estimate (I don't really belive in estimates though).

2) Best way to test your idea is to do some adwords marketing, put up a simpler website (a non-expensive one, just for testing your theory and for getting people to sign up as members or something).

Nothing personal, but all new entrepreneurs look at how many potential customers there are out there and believe they can get all of them interested. Will never happen, that is the ugly truth. 1% of the total is more realistic even if that is just an estimate (something that might happen, that is. Many times the actual conversion is less than 1% of the total unfortunately).

I think you should test it. You could even contact your local high school or university and test it almost cost free. A website is really not that important at this stage anyway.

i hear ya. pessimism is healthy and helpful because there are a LOT of kinks that i have to work out.

my point about the 16 million college students wasnt that i was going to get everyone of them to use the service, it was just showing that the market was pretty big. i would be ecstatic to even have 1% of it. also i probably wouldnt charge $1 either. price is another thing i would have to work out because i would probably be providing shipping for the customers.

i saw all of those sites while doing a little research, rocksolid. i think where my idea would differ is that you are essentially trading not buying and selling at a loss. it would be free except for the small cost of operating the service in the form of a fee per book traded. i liked this idea because i was used to buying books from the bookstore or online for 100% then selling it back for 75%. on top of that, when i bought the books, i was dishing out a few hundred dollars. with my service you only pay a few dollars and you get a few hundred dollars in books where as the competitors in the links up the price of selling then short you on buying it back. basically my service organizes resources that students already have and cuts out the middle man (bookstore) for a fraction of the cost.

the real thing i have to look at now is the difference in prices between the traditional bookstores selling and buying back as compared to a cost for my service (which includes shipping costs)

jsportz, i think i found a partial solution for shipping costs. either media mail (which is slow but cheap... i'm kinda iffy on this) or a standard flat rate shipping that i would have to work out with the post office. this is another kink i need to iron out in the next few days

fanocks, i usually agree with the low/no cost startup locally and expanding when i find out it works. the problem i see with this idea is that this is a web based user focused website. when students search for the books they need, they probably wont find the books if they are a part of the first few customers because no one would have their currently owned books registered with the site. my workaround for this is to have referral links to amazon to cover books i dont have "in stock".

i'm trying to think of a way to start up the site at low costs without a site. maybe just post a flier in school hallways with my phone number and then putting available books on an excel spreadsheat? would you have any better ideas that you can think of? maybe posting a flier for "FREE Textbooks" and doing a workshop sort of thing for free just to see how much interest there actually is.

what about setting up a test site with amazon links and i can fill in the database manually for the time being. then i can advertise heavily on facebook 2 weeks before local universities start. the cool thing about facebook is most people in college have one and it was designed for college kids. if i post advertising, practically everyone would be a target customer.

sorry for the long post. i appreciate your guys' help

callmelucid, I was going to suggest a rent a book service instead. The domain RENTABOOK.COM is gone but the .mobi is still available. Many if not most people use their mobile phones, so you could try to corner that market. You can buy BookRental.com for $73,800 (ouch!). Good luck!

These are available @ GoDaddy.com;

BOOKRENTALSITE.COM $9.99*/yr

BOOKRENTALONLINE.COM $9.99*/yr

BOOKRENTALSHOP.COM $9.99*/yr

The problem I see with this is that people usually take lower level courses first and then take higher courses towards the end. It might be difficult to find people who can directly trade with eachother since one side will likely need a higher level course's textbook, and they will have traded a lower level text.