Allen Lau: Leadership and Entrepreneurship

Chapter 2: The Story of Wattpad

'Watt' - electricity, 'pad' - book

At the time of starting up Wattpad, Lau realised that the app would never be able to reach its full potential with the cell phone technology at the time. Then, the Motorola Razr was the most popular phone, but only let you read 8 lines of text at a time. Lau took the strategic decision to wait out the launch of the app until cell phone technology could provide the perfect platform for using a mobile reading app. In the meantime, Lau and Yeun started a consulting business on the side and worked on perfecting the app and establishing the company (Baldwin, 2015).

Luckily, the mobile phone industry radically changed with the introduction of Apple's iPhone in June 2007. This phone offered the perfect user experience of a mobile reading app. However, this didn't lead to Wattpad becoming an overnight success. One of their initial challenges was encouraging writers to publish books on an app that had little to no readers. At one point the app was only receiving 10 to 20 visitors per day and the company was making $2 per month. It was discouraging work and Lau was nearly ready to throw in the towel (Landau, 2014).

In an effort to save the company, they seeded Wattpad with public domain novels provided by Project Gutenberg and this helped attract a couple hundred users to the app (Sprouter, 2012). The team then noticed that one user, who called herself Red Flame, was gaining attention from her original Victorian-era vampire novel called Blind Truths. The user had encouraged all her friends to join the app and read her book, helping it gain popularity. It was the first original content that had been produced on the app since its inception (Landau, 2014). Now, Wattpad has over 40 million monthly users (Khandaker, 2015) with over 70 million published stories (Landau, 2014).