Trade Me - buyers sending money to people they've never met for goods they've never seen? It'll never catch on! Produced by Justin Gregory.

"It was the Wild West."

Trade Me: buyers sending money to people they've never met for goods they've never seen.

It'll never catch on.

It kinda did, though. But not without a few obstacles in the way.

"Go back 20 years and the advice was don't trust people online and don't get into cars with strangers."

This is Jon Macdonald, who today runs Trade Me, reflecting on how much things have changed since the company launched in 1999.

Back then, you flicked off your unwanted stuff in newspaper classifieds or in Trade and Exchange magazine.

Homes that actually had internet connections felt lucky to run at 56KB per second. Nowadays, most urban dwellings cruise at 5-6 megabytes.

So; dialup internet at slow speeds and very low levels of trust around online transactions. Sounds like a great time to launch an online auction site.

The legend of Trade Me is that founder Sam Morgan was struggling to find a second hand heater to buy in his local classifieds and thought: bugger this.

Jon Macdonald worked alongside Morgan back then and remembers he also had a vision of how things could be done better online.

"You could post an ad and people would see it immediately as opposed to waiting for the paper to come out on Saturday. You could post photos and a long description (of the goods); make it a far, far richer experience."

There was a more prosaic reason, too.

"(Sam) wanted to learn how to code."

Trade Me went live in March 1999 with a homepage that Jon describes as "distinctly hobbyist. "

"But it worked and it was fast and that was enough back then."

Growth was slow initially but by 2001, 100,000 people had signed up and the site was profitable. Jon joined Trade Me in 2003. The company was four years old by then and Jon says they often acted like it.

"To some degree we ran around a bit like a kid's hockey match."

"We were all young and total management experience across the company was reasonably light, as well. But having said that, we did get stuff done."

The next few years were hard graft but growth began to be exponential. Trade Me started listing cars, then property, then jobs and, by 2004, they were the fastest growing company in the country.

At one point, visits to the site accounted for nearly 3/4 of all internet usage in New Zealand and by 2005, 50% of all Kiwis had visited or used the site. …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details