Left school to start a startup, Atila, with no users. Any advice?

Do you have any proof points / success stories you can highlight? Social proof is an important element of what will get other people to sign up for your service.

For instance, maybe one of your friends used the service and got a scholarship? Or maybe you used your own playbook and got 3x more scholarships than someone else who didn't?

Good luck!

I remember speaking to advisors in college that told me a large number of scholarships aren't given out every year simply because NO ONE APPLIES for them.

That blew my mind. A service that makes it easier to find & apply to scholarships would be very useful to my younger self.

Good luck!!

Good luck with Atila and congrats for taking this big step. I'll answer some of your questions that I think I have some helpful insights.

• I will now have a lot of free time, what strategies help you use your time efficiently and remain productive? - Stay ruthlessly focused by making a simple priorities list for the month, week and day. My list has 5 priorities for each timeframe. Everything else that isn't related to accomplishing those things doesn't get done.

• When you are constantly thinking about your project 24/7, and have doubts about if you made the right decision on something. How do you clear your head and take care of your mental health? - For me it's exercising outdoors. I make it a priorrity to go for a walk or run daily. Usually at least once a week I take a longer bike ride or hike in the woods.

• I'm a big believer in organic growth and not relying on ads, what strategies do you use to grow your business organically? - My businesses haven't grown that much so take this with a grain of salt...but I focused on a product hunt launch and then lots of outreach to journalists/bloggers that cover the segment I'm targeting.

• I'm also a big believer in bootstrapping, any tactics on how to minimize expenses and earn money on the side while the business is pre-revenue (e.g.government grants, freelance work etc.) - One strategy that keeps my expenses low is that I review them monthly with my wife. Find someone outside of the business that you can review your expenses with on a regular basis to keep you honest on what is or isn't vital.

Cool project! I hope you took the leap. How is it going? Were you able to overcome the challenges listed above?

Redesign your website. The text fields for "Get Your Education Funded" are obscured by background image. You're hiding the most important feature of your website.

Also, not "Get my scholarship" but "Find available scholarships". Even if "get" might sounds better, it sets bad expectations and doesn't accurately describe what your website does.

In general, you have a business model problem.

To make your website popular, you need to provide value. In your case, the value would be listing all scholarships and allow ways to filter them by geography, type of school, type of degree, for free.

But you also want people to pay you for access to that data, so you only show a subset of data.

Also, you have plenty of competition. Those are top in Google:

• https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/scholarship-search#!searchresults
• https://www.fastweb.com/
• https://www.scholarships.com/

On one hand it shows there's demand.

On the other hand, this is a SEO business and the competition has much more of it.

woah, you've made a bold decision, congrats and good luck! I have several feedbacks for you.

1. Do you think this is something people would pay for? If not, how can I give my users more value to make it worth monetizing?

I am not sure since I am not the one who looking for a scholarship as your target audience, but maybe for the first step, you should prioritize the content because that's how you give the value to your audience, you help them to find the best scholarship, right?

Only one questions, people look for a scholarship because they need money for their tuition, do you think they are able to pay you in front? No need to answer, just ask your self... :)

1. I will now have a lot of free time, what strategies help you use your time efficiently and remain productive?

Before sleeping at night, I usually create a simple list of what I'll do tomorrow. Stay focus on top 5.

1. When you are constantly thinking about your project 24/7, and have doubts about if you made the right decision on something. How do you clear your head and take care of your mental health?

When I start to battle with self-doubt, Sometimes just say "F*CK IT, I'll just take a nap..." kinda works for me.. :P

1. I'm currently the only employee so I'm doing almost everything myself. When everything seems important, how do you prioritize and measure the most important tasks and what actually matters?

I'll prioritize any tasks that will generate money soon... like shipping the product faster, emailing a lot of people and more

1. I'm a big believer in organic growth and not relying on ads, what strategies do you use to grow your business organically?

I am not sure since I also struggle, but currently, I focus on learning and writing a good blog and guest post. Try to give more value to the community.

1. I'm also a big believer in bootstrapping, any tactics on how to minimize expenses and earn money on the side while the business is pre-revenue (e.g.government grants, freelance work etc.)

Since I am not married, I'll stay at my parents' house while building the product, it will save a lot of my expenses.

1. Since I'm still just a student I feel overwhelmed by my ignorance sometimes and the amount of stuff I need to know. Any good strategies for finding information quickly and learning new skills quickly?

Before I execute my project chatkoo.com, I have no idea how to code, I learn how to code while making the project, the first month, I can code the backend using Python, second month, I can code using Javascript/React, etc, I found that learning by doing is the fastest way to master new skills

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This comment was deleted 7 years ago