The idea for the Bookmooch came to fruition when John paid special attention to the "stacks of books on his shelves that have been read once, but will never be read again." When researching used books and how to donate them, he noticed that it was surprisingly difficult not only to sell most of his books to book stores, but to donate them to libraries as well. He wondered how he could create a way online that readers could take a peek into each other’s unused and usually neglected book collection.

To create the Web site, John spent weeks visiting various San Francisco indie comic shops. He wanted to find the perfect illustrator for the home page. His visual aesthetic vision for the Web site was to be inspired by and appear as a "demented Dr. Seuss" design.

John’s Bookmooch Web site is experiencing steady growth since its launch with over 452,000 books listed, 54,000 members, and almost 21,000 books successfully mooched.

He encourages aspiring entrepreneurs or Webpreneurs to make themselves as financially responsible for their ‘start up’, and to start it with no debt. He also warns that it will take them 2 or 3 companies and ideas to get to a point where they understand what ideas are good and how to execute them.

In retrospect John explains that he was "really happy knowing nothing when I started. I just did what I thought was cool, and was pretty clueless about business". He further explains that what was important was that he was motivated by the fun and the challenge and so every day for him was easy. What makes it not always easy?

"It wasn’t until I started hiring workers, that I realized I didn’t like managing people, especially trying to manage unmotivated employees." According to John, "the #1 tip for any new entrepreneur: never, ever hire your friends. It always seems like a good idea at the time, and always ends badly."

Expanding into other forms of media such as CDs and DVDs is on John’s long term agenda, "Including other types of media, like movies or music is a possibility for future expansion, but for now the focus is on physical books". Eventually, we "might see CD-mooch and Video-mooch." His plans also include, a possible book swapping functionality for social networking sites such as Facebook . His philosophies are not limited to just the Internet but old fashion "libraries, which have to live on diminishing budgets and are regularly discarding books."