I found an old book stashed on my bookshelf a week or so ago. I picked up the book many years ago because it was a book about an e-tailer which crashed after the dot com boom. Given that I was interested in online business at the time, I thought it would be an interesting, and informative read.

‘boo hoo’ is written by Ernst Malmsten, one of the founders of boo.com back in 1999/2000. The book outlines how the company began: the idea, the development, the situation, the investments, and then goes on to outline how it crashed and died under its own weight.
It is an interesting read, and well worth reading if you want to know what not to do.

The book outlines how hundred of millions of dollars of investment from some extremely infamous names were obtained.
This money was spent on developing the technology, and infrastructure to run an online fashion, and sportswear retailer, as well as for advertising, staff salaries, contractors etc

Some extremely interesting bits include:

The server which they bought from Sun Microsytems. It cost a measly $1.3 million dollars, and housed 64 processors. Amusingly the biggest worry was that it would crash through the floor of the data center under its own weight !

The fact that they spent millions of dollars on their website which I could have developed for a few thousand bucks !

The fact that they bought boo.com in 1999 for $3,500 !

What I found stunning about this book is the apparent ‘by-the-book’ attitude of companies within the corporate world. If you have an idea, you do not need to get significant investment from banks. boo hoo outlines how their first big trial was getting millions of dollars of investment based on an idea. In reality you do not need this. Some of the most well known start ups in the world started with nothing, and crucially flourished: see facebook !

The book essentially portrays a story of 3 somewhat naive businessmen/women who wanted to build a global brand the easy way. They got lucky with an early investment but failed because they wasted their money. Rather than develop their website in house for a small amount, they outsourced to Ericsson at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. What a waste.
Furthermore the attitude the book portrays is that when something small needed fixing, they would hire a new employee. After all they did have the money. Only once all the money was gone did they have to fire most of their staff, and concede defeat.

Success, and arrogance will never be found in the same sentence. Success, and easy will never be found in the same sentence. This book outlines this perfectly, and is well worth the read.

The best thing about this book is the fact that it was written by one of the founders, who in hindsight realized their mistakes. An honest, and informative insight into the logistics of running a business. 7/10