StudentLinks

StudentLinks is a virtual marketplace designed for university students. Within the website, students can buy, sell, and trade items such as furniture, textbooks, or other miscellaneous items with fellow students. Additionally, Students looking for roommates before they move out of residence can make posts looking for roommates similar to the classifieds section in a newspaper or magazine. StudentLinks' target market, shockingly, is university students, more specifically, we forecast the biggest users of our website will be students moving into their first student housing (typically second year students) and those graduating and moving out of their university town (generally fourth or fifth year students). The value proposition for StudentLinks is that it is “Made by students, for students.” StudentLinks has a leg up on competitors like Facebook Marketplace, Kijiji, eBay, or Craigslist within the market we corner.
The advantages we have include niche items specific to students, like textbooks, or living supplies for a budgeted price. On top of that, we ensure that our platform is used by students only by partnering with the institutions to check a form of identification (university emails) to guarantee it is students only. By assuring that, we can promise a more
budget-friendly shopping experience for buyers because they understand ‘the struggle’ of balancing life with school on a more limited budget, which also reduces the number of potential scams and unsafe interactions with buyers and/or sellers. StudentLinks will generate revenue through a freemium model and local business advertising. Students can list their items for free, with the option to pay a small fee for premiumfeatures such as featured listings and boosted visibility.
To further sustain operations, StudentLinks will partner with local businesses like moving services to allow for their ads to be put onto the platform, which will be shown directly to their target audience. StudentLinks will work to continuously refine its sales approach by tracking user behaviour and the seasonal demand. This will ensure long-term growth and financial sustainability.
As for the financial aspects of the business, StudentLinks operated purely as a theoretical company, which means that we did not receive any funding and didn’t hit any milestones. But for the exercises over the course, we set a benchmark at ten thousand dollars. We decided to dedicate half of the funding, $5000, towards the development and design of the website. Our next decision was to spend $4000 on advertising, splitting it fifty-fifty on physical ads in and around the University of Guelph, as that is the first school that the website would support and the other half on advertisements on social media and other online outlets like Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), as well as google advertisements. That left us with just $1000 to maintain the platform, things like hosting the website and the domain name, Additionally, we had to look into some online security software, which would, in conjunction with the previously mentioned regular costs would leave us with about $800-400 to use as we would need it, an emergency fund of sorts.