One afternoon last week I met R Sunder Rajan, the founder of Just Books at N S Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL), IIM, Bangalore, where the two-year-old startup is incubated.

Rajan belongs to a new generation of entrepreneurs, who has slipped into something totally different after years of working in IT firms.  Rajan spent 15 years at the IT firm IFlex, after joining them as a fresh graduate from Regional Engineering College, Trichy. The soft spoken and mild-mannered Madurai native in his late thirties says, “My father says I am the first in the family to ever handle a cash box.”

R Sundar Rajan. Pic: Chetan Boray.

Rajan started a book library near his Whitefield home in mid 2008, since he couldn’t find a good library close to his home. So was the case for a lot of other Whitefield residents. He was surprised to see the tiny operation gain a thousand members in a couple of months.

The response prompted him to take a break from his job around the same time, and he felt he had an entrepreneurial streak; this was a creative pursuit different from his normal work. He explains, “Books looked like an easy thing to handle.”

140000 books, 60000 titles, ten branches and 10000 members, reports Rajan as he describes the growth of Just Books in a short time. One can visit the library to rent, read and return, or do the same online, with books door delivered. Just Books is positioned as a family centric, open to all library, with plans starting at Rs 150 a month, without a pay-per-book charge. They plan to focus primarily on books without getting diverted into coffee shops and movie rentals.

Rajan’s vision is that every neighbourhood has a Just Books store, and the book base is large enough so that every reader finds his or her book, and every book finds its reader. I talked to Rajan for a little over an hour about his journey.

What is innovative about Just Books?

It’s (mainly) the packaging. We had picked up retail industry concepts, like good ambience, good flooring, false ceiling, throwing technology – RFID, self service, and kept the library functioning at the core: take books, read and return and pick up.

How did the firm grow?

I took a break from work, spent a few months at the library, lot of people asked if I can do something like this in their neighbourhoods. Why are you only here (in Whitefield), can you do something in Indiranagar? Essentially (it was) leading to franchises, so I read up on franchise (model)…didn’t want to go against natural momentum.

At one of the Franchise conferences, I bumped into a team from NSRCEL. So I went and gave them a presentation.  We formally got incubated in May 2009 (NSRCEL supports startups with incubation facilities and mentoring help. Just Books got incubated there and NSRCEL helped Rajan firm up the franchise model. The JP Nagar branch opened early 2009, followed by many other franchise branches over the months. Just Books now has 30 employees in all, divided into the retail, technology and books teams.)

At the same time (January 2009), I though it’s good to experiment and look at another branch. I looked at JP Nagar and consciously looked at a different kind of neighbourhood such as more traditional ones to find out if there are still takers for a library. Then the outline fell into place

Instead of one big library, there should be lots of small libraries, and connect them and let people know they could walk into any library.

How did you hire people?

We initially looked at people with library science background, but they were looking for corporates/schools and couldn’t connect to this. Most of them wanted to work from 9am-6pm. Most of them wanted to join IT companies and handle the libraries there. We ended up drifting to guys with retail industry background. They were quite okay with spending long hours, shifts, working Saturday and Sundays.

Meera K is a co-founder at Citizen Matters.

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