Amazon Whisperer

My idea is for an app called TextSwap. This app will connect college students and allow them to exchange textbooks much easier and cheaper than before. My current revenue driver is through advertisements. I think companies that appeal to college students would want to advertise on my app. I talked to someone who had built an app though and he explained to me how it's difficult to survive solely on ads unless I have millions of users. I'm currently thinking of charging a fee to use the app or taking a percentage out of each exchange. I'm not sure what I want to do as this was brought to my attention recently but it's good to know.
I think the next thing my customers are going to want is another service that will help them get better grades and I have a few ideas. Using my idea of connecting college students together, I could create a tutoring service within the app or I could allow students in the same class to form study groups. Online textbooks have become really popular recently so if I found a way to incorporate that into the app, that would be great. Although this idea would change my target audience, I could change my app from textbooks to just books in general. People could exchange books and eliminate the need for a library. Obviously this idea would take a lot of thinking through and might not work so for now it is just an idea.
I think whatever I do next, it will take my app from a textbook app to a college survival app. There could be more benefits than there are currently and it could become an app that people use all the time rather than once a semester. This would probably attract a lot more college students if they found that the changes were giving them higher grades. I think the higher grades would be enough to keep my customers loyal.
After doing some research on the App Store(since Amazon doesn't work in this situation), I think I found my next idea. When I looked up textbook apps, the number one result was Chegg. It has a ton of users and some pretty great reviews. It's main uses are for textbooks, studying, tutoring, and homework solutions.

Chegg has an overall rating of four out of five stars. People really like Chegg because it saves them money, helps raise grades, and it makes renting books easier. One of the features on Chegg or at least based off my understanding of the service is that there are online textbooks people can look at. The biggest problem that Chegg users seem to have is with these online textbooks. Apparently this part of the app is glitchy, hard to read, and overall just not user-friendly. 

Since I don't have actually use Chegg and can't see how it works, it's hard for me to say specifically what I would change. I know that based off these reviews, I would like to incorporate an online textbook feature into my app TextSwap. The main difference is that I would like to spend a lot of time and effort into making sure this service is better than Chegg's. There are so many complaints about this part of Chegg that if I was able to make the service very accessible and easy to use, I think I could gain many more users. I think I would mainly do this through a Beta service where people could test the service and point out any of the issues they might be facing. For now, I only know that I want an online textbook service but I think there are several directions this could go. I could simply allow people to rent online textbooks, or pay more money in order to get detailed solutions, study guides, or homework help. Hopefully I'll get more ideas the more I think about this. 

I think this would be a good addition to my app based off some feedback I got in my "Growing Your Social Capital" assignment. I talked to a family friend, Jim, who used to work in the textbook industry. His biggest criticism of my app was that there are so many publishers who are switching to online textbooks. If it got to the point where physical copies of textbooks were no longer being used, my app would have no use. By incorporating online textbooks into my app, I can make sure TextSwap will be used by college students for decades to come.