About a year ago, I started http://www.collegeinsideview.com/. It provides in-depth reviews of colleges. Instead of asking generic questions like "What's the social life like?", it asks specific component questions like, "Are people intellectual?". See https://www.dropbox.com/s/p75pspbd5suzz19/Questions%20Comparison%20pdf.pdf for a comparison of my questions to the ones that are currently being asked.

For this to be valuable, I think I need to surpass a critical threshold of reviews. Ie. once I have x reviews per school for y schools, this'll be valuable.

I've tried a bunch of ways to get people to answer questions, and it seems that I have to pay $1 per answer. I just finished a pilot program where I paid current students at Ivy league schools to do that, and I got over 4,000 answers. They all thought that this would be a really useful resource for college applicants.

To succeed I need a critical threshold of answers, to do that I need money, to raise money I need traction/proof of concept. So now I'm at the point where I finished the pilot program, and need to get proof of concept. A week ago, I emailed thousands of college counselors at college prep schools (these are the people who advise students on where to go to college and how to get in). I told them about the site and asked them to sign up if they wanted to be notified when I get more reviews and more schools. Only 14 of them have so far.

I need proof of concept to raise money, but I don't know what else to do. I reached out to college counselors, and that didn't work. It would be great if I could get high school students to sign up, but I don't know how I could reach them. I tried posting on Facebook and Reddit, but the posts have been completely ignored. This is confusing to me, because I'm still very confident that this would be something lots of people would use if I could reach the critical threshold of content.

What should I do?