Trade Me Manifesto

September 16, 2007

What is it about Trade Me that makes it so successful?

Is there a secret formula? And, if so, can we bottle it?

The success of Trade Me is a simple combination:

The first two are difficult to replicate (but not impossible).

Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to focus on the third part.

I’m calling this the Trade Me Manifesto.

There will be 10 short posts, based loosely on an internal document written by Sam a while back which was itself based on Google’s Corporate Philosophy (as an aside, this is where their famous ‘Don’t be evil’ motto comes from). And also incorporating a bunch of the material pulled together for various presentations we’ve done about Trade Me over the last few years, starting with my presentation at the first Webstock conference.

These are not trade secrets.

All of the ideas are very sensible and obvious, although not as common as they might be.

A lot of this was written when I was still working at Trade Me, so I say “we” rather than “they”. I figure that the audience who will probably get the most value from this are Trade Me staff, so it seems appropriate to leave that as is. I hope this doesn’t cause any confusion.

Many of these ideas are things I’ve posted about previously, so where appropriate I’ll include links to those posts too.

It’s probably not an exhaustive list, but hopefully you can apply some of these things to the ideas you are working on.

See also:

The Trade Me Manifesto