Allen Lau built Wattpad after realizing flip phones finally had screens big enough for reading. He launched in 2006 with co-founder Ivan, combining mobile reading with user-generated stories. Today the platform has 100 million monthly users and 1 million uploads per day.
2006.
Roughly 100 million monthly users.
About 1 million uploads every day.
You know, take us to the point where you start to conceive of wattpad. Wattpad is an online platform for people to read and share fiction. If you look at my media consumption, I read and I read and I read. So the idea over the weekend was, well, perhaps I could write an app on the Nokia phone or the, well, even the Motorola Flip phone didn't exist back then on the Candy Bar Nokia phone, can I write a mobile reading app? I did that and I like it. But to read a sentence, you have to scroll like three times because the phone's like this. Screen size was so tiny. So I didn't pursue the idea for that reason. And then fast Forward to year 2006. The most popular phone was the Flip phone, the Razer phone, and modestly bigger screens of the Razer phone. Yes. But I was silly enough to convince myself, well, it's no longer three lines of text on the screen, it's 10 lines. It's good enough. So I resurrected that idea and then want to give the audience a little bit more context. It was 2006, so YouTube was one year old. Facebook was, I think a 200 person company. So user generated content was also a brand new concept at that time. Of course, now everyone is doing it right, but at that time it was pretty nascent. And Ivan's idea was to combine mobile reading and a UGC platform so that people can freely share what they write and consume on mobile. Today it has roughly 100 million monthly users, a million uploads every day.
