Well, that story is going to sound super unlikely, but sure. So, to begin with it was just me, but Andrew (arathalion) joined me after about the first 2-3 weeks of me working on it. Neither of us had ever played Go before. I was interested in AI, and wanting to develop a chess engine at the time, as I was a reasonable club player. However, thinking that was a bit of a steep initial dive into AI, I looked around for something easier to start with (but harder than something like tic-tac-toe). There was an interesting article on chessbase about one of the Laskers saying that the existence of Go would be the proof to an alien race that humans were sentient life forms, and I decided “right, I’ll do a Go AI then, that sounds like a good starting point” (to think I thought this would be easier than chess, oh the naivety!).
Andrew was my first wife’s younger brother, and I was sort of acting as a big-bro-mentor into the world of programming projects and what programming would be like as a job as a taster, and he enjoyed it enough we worked on it together for some time, with me mostly doing the backend work and more complicated systems for the tournaments, and him doing a lot of the javascript, client side, interface and graphics side of things.
So the first thing I started doing (as someone who had web application development as part of my professional responsibilities at the time), I thought I’d start there to create an easy mock up board with basic game rules. As soon as it was working (sort of … the scoring rules were … ahem, not very well developed at the time), I ended up playing Andrew a fair bit for debugging, and then realised that the game was a lot of fun and I wanted to play a bit more. So I found DGS, played a couple of games, and other than realising how bad I was, was really very disappointed in the lack of organised competition play (when I played correspondence chess, I tended to play tournaments, leagues, ladders, knockouts … all sorts of things, but always some form of competitions)
So, at that point I decided to build OGS around creating a correspondence platform for tournaments, minitournaments, and scoring and seeding systems for them. I designed the group McMahon seeding system that was used - as far as I know it’s the only real effort made to create a hybrid of the normal real life MacMahon system into a format that would work well for correspondence Go (and it mostly transferred on the merge, although the developers never correctly implemented the top group seedings, leading to quite a few “group of death” issues, but pretty minor issues).
Initial site growth was very slow, as you’d expect when there are other places to play (in general there was always a "why would we play somewhere else when DGS works fine?), but of course Andrew and I were still terrible (maybe 15-20 kyu?) so there was some interest in single digit kyu players being able to come in and dominate a new scene. It wasn’t until it hit around 50-100 players that it suddenly really started to self-sufficiently grow, and having titles that people could hold and defend seemed to be pretty popular (as well as the ladder format, which I didn’t come up with at all, but works very well for correspondence games as it “naturally” encourages a reasonably fast play speed).
Other correspondence servers didn’t really exist other than dragon. KGS and IGS were the primary “western” servers - or at least the ones I knew about and heard about most often from people in real life - and CyberOro and Tygem the better known predominantly Eastern servers.
I got to 10-12k after about 6 months, 6 kyu on the year mark, 2 kyu the following year and ended up around KGS 1-2 dan after about 5 years of playing and studying fairly actively. Andrew stopped at around 8k after a year or two and doesn’t play any more. I still play on and off, but much less regularly, much less seriously, and have for obvious reasons stopped improving really. I still enjoy playing from time to time though