How to validate an idea/mvp with the audience being solely students? (i will not promote)

So, I am building a student start-up made solely for students to use. It is a C2C business model where students will need to interact with each other to make money, and our starting revenue will be a transaction fee. The idea is to help students make an extra income (won't go in too many details). I spoke to a few students, as I am student myself, and they like the idea, but this is the only validation I made so far. I am a techincal founder too so built the mvp by myself so no money or equity wasted here. I see everyone saying I would need to validate the mvp or idea with advertisement across social media and join the waitlist, but one issue I see here is that a lot of students, yes they are very active on social media, but i feel like if they see a post of a service they like but notice they have to subscribe and still not ready to use it will let them down and maybe not even subscribe to the waitlist and forget about it. Please correct if im wrong, but i feel like the best approach is to finish the mvp completely, and get a small investment from VC or even partnering with univesities for small equity, and launch a hard marketing campaign using influencers and traditional advertisement to promote the business. I think having well known infleuncers but also niche specific influencers with the majority of their audience being people around the age of 18-23 and most people of this age being at university would be the best approach to gain traction. Please let me know what you think, i will take any feedback on how to approach this. Thank you. (i will not promote)