If more founders memorized the basics of customer development the startup world would produce 50% more successes. Get outside the building, product market fit, etc are phrases not enough entrepreneurs live and die by. Can't stress enough how smart and underutilized Mr. Blank's work is.
The site looks good, one thing I'd call out on the main page is if/how you segment. Can you get the right demographic for a given site or is it just whoever signs up? For more user acquisition I'd try some verifiable claims - "80% of sites who do user testing and iterate on it see an increase in site signups" etc. Also try reaching out to VCs and incubators to get in front of their companies. You might be able to send their email lists an offer for the first 3 companies to get free testing and then all the other companies that respond hoping to get a free test can be upsold to buy. Also attend meetups where startups are presenting and ask about how they use user testing and hand out business cards with a discount code on the back. Set up a twitter and quora search for relevant terms and respond to people's questions/threads and make sure to mention that user testing is a service you provide. Those are all good starting points, if they're not working then the problem is probably the sales person.
Agreed completely. Not showing or telling a first time user in clear, concise language why the $&*% they're on the site is a great way to have a sky high bounce rate. If you worry about boring existing users employ tools like "don't show this again" buttons, cookies to know when they're returning users and present them their dashboard(tumblr does this very well) etc but don't alienate first time visitors if you want new users.
Hmm, it's not an attractive site - if you need/want to go minimal and not show pictures of the items I'd look at a more elegant black and white layout like http://www.net-a-porter.com/ or http://www.thegridsystem.org/ even. The most compelling point of difference to me is the 'make an offer' so i'd include that more prominently.
I was trying to accent the difference between purchases and sales with both the left/right division and the blue/green color difference. Do you think that this is clear enough without the color difference?
The most common advice is to think about pain points: what in your day to day life or the life of those around you is an annoyance and how could you code something to fix it? The main problem with this approach is that the fix might not be worth a significant amount of money to people. Assuming this is only for a school project that aspect shouldn't matter and you might find some great ideas. A couple resources that might help: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2010/08/05/how-to-get-good-ide... and http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html
I'm a girl with the most opposite personality type imaginable but my suggestion is to find someone like that - who you share a lab or elevator with - and try to find some common ground. Once you do that person can become your "social conduit" and when you do need to meet people or give a speech or go to a party they can help out. Most outgoing people love making more friends, even if they have little in common on the surface and if you program you can always repay their social skills by designing a webpage for their latest party or social networking profile. Hopefully if you have one solid link to social skills you can spend 99% of your time listening to metal and coding in peace and the other 1% socializing without the stress!
