This recently released book is a great history of one of New Zealand’s most successful businesses – Trade Me.
Originally I planned to read this on my flight from Auckland to San Francisco on Sunday night, however I ended up sitting next to Sam Morgan and almost felt embarrassed! We did share a joke about it and as it turned out I mostly slept or talked to Sam about one of his new ventures, Pacific Fibre (which incidentally is turning from an idea into realitiy very quickly!)
I ended up reading the book on my flight from San Francisco to Houston and thoroughly enjoyed it. The book has been well thought our and Michael “MOD” O’Donnell has done well to provide insights into how different aspects of Trade Me developed. The chapters on the purchase by Fairfax were especially interesting, not only from the point of view of the $ involved, but how Fairfax dealt with Trade Me after the purchase. You just need to look at the numbers since 2006 to see that to a large extent Trade Me have been left to do what they do best.
That said. it was interesting to read the current CEO’s (Jon MacDonald) take on what has internally been called “Trade Me’s Secret Sauce” Originally ten principles that Sam developed in 2005 for the company, Jon has updated these 5 years on, the underlying theme remains the same, however with staff numbers having increased by 87 (from 60 to 147) since 2005 it is not surprising the principles are a little more ‘corporate’ – in a good way!
If you are interested in the original principles you can jump over to Rowan Simpson’s blog where he wrote extensively about this topic – though don’t use that as an excuse not to buy the book!
At the end of the book Michael outlines a series of statistics about Trade Me on the assumption the book took the reader a week to read. I managed to read it in less than 3 hrs but even still during my flight from San Fran to Houston the following would have happened:
27,000 Items have been listed on Trade Me
5,000 Items have sold to some of the 72,000 people who visits the site
250,000 Automated emails have been sent to members “on everything from confirming buyer addresses for an iPod to automatic searches for twin carb Fiat manifolds.”
5,800,000 pages have been served to New Zealanders
In 3 hrs! In Micheal’s own words “That’s a lot of love in anyone’s language“
PS: For additional reading on my current trip also keep an eye on http://blog.cadimageworld.com