A few weeks ago I started asking people in my WhatsApp contacts one simple question:
"When was the last time you lent a book and actually got it back in good condition?"
The answers were brutal. Books coming back damaged. Books never coming back at all. People who stopped lending entirely. One person has 300 books she wants to pass to her children — she won't lend a single one because she's lost too many.
But almost everyone said the same thing: "If I knew it would come back, I'd share freely."
So I built BookSwap Kenya.
It's a neighborhood book lending and swapping platform. You list books on your shelf, find readers nearby, and either permanently swap or lend with a return deadline. There's a trust system, condition tracking, in-app chat that unlocks when a swap is accepted, and a book trail that shows you where your book travels after you share it.
We're 28 readers in, mostly Nairobi but we've had signups from Mombasa, Kisumu, Nakuru, Eldoret — and somehow Uganda 😅
The thing that surprised me most building this: the problem isn't that Kenyans don't want to share books. They do. The problem is they've been burned before and have no system to protect them. Once you solve that, the shelves open up.
If you're a reader in Kenya — or anywhere honestly — come check it out. We're small, scrappy, and building in public.
Happy to answer any questions about what we built or how the interviews shaped the product