The online used book retailer

Barry on the genesis of his business idea...

Whatever book you next want to read, you know it’s sitting in someone’s spare room somewhere and it’s already been read. So I thought about creating a website that encourages people to share those books because everyone obviously recycles their newspapers and bottles, but books and paperbacks are not the sort of thing people even think of recycling. So the website came from that. 

I wanted to share the books I had read with my friends and swap, creating a community and encourage more reading.

On his productive period of unemployment... 

Because we didn’t borrow any money, we never needed to do any business projections or cash flow

I’d just been made redundant so I had lots of spare time on my hands, and it  was also a way to occupy my time. I hadn’t enjoyed my previous job so I didn’t want to go straight into another one, and it just went from there really. 

Because the sites then became quite time-consuming to continue developing, I never got around to job hunting and Green Metropolis became my full-time job – and has been for the past five years!

On financing the venture...

We were quite fortunate because I had my redundancy money, which I used to get the business going, and from then on we just reinvested any money the company made, so we never actually needed to ask the banks for cash.

On growing organically, without a precise plan...

There wasn’t anything that we could compare against. It’s not like opening a shop, where you can say that over the road there’s a shop with ‘X’ number of customers. There wasn’t really an online recycling bookstore where we could say this is the sort of traffic we could expect.

Because we didn’t borrow any money, we never needed to do any business projections or cash flow. We just said let’s just see where it goes, and fortunately for us members joined, they loved the site, they would tell their friends...

Why banks are suspicious of dotcoms...

We’ve approached them to keep them informed with what we’re doing. They always think the website is fantastic, but the odd time where I’ve wanted to borrow money to do ‘X, Y, Z’ they’ve always been willing to lend but purely secured against the mortgage on my house, never based on the internet.

If I was running a shop selling books I don’t think there would be a problem, but I think they are always very wary. I think they believe the internet bubble’s been and gone. Lots of companies borrowed money and couldn’t pay it back so they’re always very cautious with internet firms.