I agree they're not an ideal target but I've been surprised to hear indie projects that succeed with students as customers.

Mitchell Hashimoto created a service that students at UW could use to find out when registration slots were open for high-demand classes and made $160k/yr from it.[0]

Aaron Francis sold a study guide for an accounting class at Texas A&M[1] and made a lot from it, though I can't find a public source on it.

[0] https://youtu.be/vMzToDQPgH4?feature=shared&t=1720

[1] https://acct229.com/

> Not sure how long this person has been out of school, but students are notoriously cheap.

If you aren't in the US, you wouldn't know, but law students aren't your standard student, and they aren't notoriously cheap. My law school had an overpriced café in the basement that targeted only students, and it was packed with us every day. We're paying for an education well in excess of $100,000 in tuition alone.

My journal kept our office stocked with tons of treats, just like a dot com startup. We were on the top floor of the building, had a good view, had lots of privacy and quiet, a ton of floor space, couches, a TV, etc.

My journal charged $60/yr and had a circulation of around 1500.

I can't remember what the printing cost was, but that's $90,000 in revenue and zero labor costs. Law students do this work for free because it's the second best thing you can have on your job applications aside from graduating at the top of the class.

So yeah, law students could afford a few subscriptions. :)

> students are notoriously cheap

if you're going to law school you're already spending a gazillion $ to get through school, and are willing to pay a bit more for a tool that actually saves you time and your sanity

Yeah, explored options like that. The schools and teachers that teach legal writing don't think about giving students experience with the tools they'll have in the workforce - they think that every student needs to learn how to do things by hand. It's an unfortunate way of thinking that I wasn't able to get them out of the mindset of.

First mistake was trying to market to _students_

And yet there's something to it. Of course it's a nothing market, from the standpoint of immediate revenue. But the students will become professionals in just a few years, and if you can get them to not only use your tools, but to be thinking "this is just how its done" -- that, in theory, can help you establish your market.

This was Venmo's strategy, apparently -- there's was a completely different vertical, of course, but they went for the "long game" in this regard, and it seems to have paid off for them.

> Haha. This is a classic newbie founder mistake thinking all you need is a % of the market. We all have made it. Now you know. Market estimate should be made bottom up, not top down.

dang, my goal was 3% of my market. what should i be doing instead?

Thank you! Glad you found it interesting and it resonated with you.

You can find out more about the next thing here - https://mura-website.notion.site/Founding-Engineer-at-Mura-1...

tl;dr - helping commercial HVAC providers accelerate and automate their order-to-cash cycle. Big and interesting market with a lot of opportunities for efficiencies

It's targeting the self-styding people the same? Like tools to learn by themselves?

I’d note that most U.S. law journals work very differently from what you describe. Strict Bluebook compliance is their raison d'être, much more than legal scholarship. I am not exaggerating that. (And authors are not generally expected to get it right themselves, fleets of law student editors do the checking and correcting.)