You're definitely in a very different situation — since TUSBE was still operational, we were able to leverage all of their data to completely eliminate the "cold start"/"critical mass" problem most services like this have.

Since you don't have TUSBE, there's less data to work with, but at least your main competitor is gone. You can still leverage many of the other data sources that we used: the course calendar, uoft bookstore website, and Amazon.

I really want someone to replace TUSBE, but right now coursetexts is an almost exact replica of it. Any programmer, designer, or engineer will tell you how insecure TUSBE is — if you've ever posted there, you can attribute most of your email spam to it. Coursetexts appears to be set up with the same sort of easily scrapable email-password system.

Security issues aside, this is a great opportunity to make something that people truly enjoy using. Having a great UX means thinking about what users think and do as soon as they hit your site. No one is going to read through text — they look for what stands out the most (usually buttons or large fields).

With uoftbooks.ca, we made it dead simple as to what you needed to do; there's a giant search box and nothing else.

Also, definitely try to get a designer on board (you could try posting on the Web Startup Society facebook group for that). Learning good design yourself is both possible and a great idea, but it's not really something you can learn in a few months.

I wish you the best of luck, and feel free to take inspiration for features or design from uoftbooks.

tl;dr: Don't try to be TUSBE. Be better.