This weekend the Standard is hosting and sponsoring Toronto Start-Up Weekend, a three-day incubator in which developers, marketers and entrepreneurs come together to share ideas, form teams, build products and maybe even launch new companies.
For the occasion we’re profiling five recent Toronto-based start-ups (and by start-up we mean within last five years) that have caught The Standard’s attention.
Company: Wattpad
What is it: Wattpad is a social digital entertainment platform for readers to explore original fiction and connect with their favorite writers. Writers can share what they have written on Wattpad – a novel, a short story or a poem – with readers and fans from around the globe on www.wattpad.com and through apps available for over 1,000 different mobile devices including iPhone/iPad, Google Android, Windows Phone 7, Nokia, BlackBerry, and Samsung. Wattpad users spend over 1 billion minutes on Wattpad every quarter and download the Wattpad app over 1 million times a month.
Year launched: 2006
Founders: Ivan Yuen and Allen Lau
Number of employees at launch: 2
Number of employees now: 12
Notable achievements: Quill & Quire Digital Innovator 2011
How did the company start?
The name Wattpad comes from watt for electricity, and pad, suggesting paper or books. The original concept was to create a YouTube for eBooks that could be accessed on any mobile device. Writers could share content through a companion website that readers could access at any time online and through their phones. Wattpad was started before the Kindle or even the iPhone, and readers were initially slow to catch onto the idea of reading on your phone. But within about a year, Wattpad’s usage started to pick up and today we see our usage doubles every six months.
What was the hardest part of getting Wattpad off the ground?
Starting a business in your basement is always difficult; low cash flow and with only two of us, it was challenging to get the word out. Because of the low barrier to entry, writers added content quickly, but attracting readers took more time. In part because devices only had small screens and data plans were quite expensive. It takes time for new habits to reach critical mass and fiction was one of the last industries to be affected by the digital revolution. Today, the concept of reading a story on your phone is quite common, but when we first created Wattpad, no one was reading fiction on screens.
Would you say you made mistakes early on, or had to adjust your original plan?
For any startup, the founders have to try a million things. Half the ideas will work, the other half won’t. The key is to fail fast and fail cheap. By sheer luck or gut instinct we are quite fortunate that 80 percent of the things we built worked. That said, there are two things that we didn’t anticipate – the time it takes for a consumer service to reach critical mass and readers’ desire to incorporate social media with reading. Originally, Wattpad was focused on providing a platform for content (the stories) but then we realized part of the entertainment was the social component – the comments, votes, fans, etc. Once we saw this behavior take place, we added features to better support it and now it is an integral part of Wattpad.
Could government or the banks be doing more to nurture start-ups?
It is not realistic to find investors until a startup gets traction; but without external funding, sometimes it is hard to get traction. It is a “chicken and egg” problem. For Wattpad, it meant bootstrapping the operation ourselves initially. Unfortunately, one can only bootstrap for so long without going bankrupt. It is a race against time; if the government can provide more tax breaks, it will give entrepreneurs more time to take their products or services to market.
How important is technological innovation to what you do?
Right now we are in the midst of a number of major technological changes all happening at the same time – social, mobile, eReading, cloud services and global services. Wattpad is at the intersection of these megatrends. Our innovation will help us to create a new form of entertainment that is more immersive than traditional books and more platform agnostic. Writers can upload images and video content and interact with readers in real time through our apps and website.
What’s the next step in the company’s evolution?
Our growth is accelerating. We are seeing more and more people accessing Wattpad using different connected devices from around the world. We want to grow our user base to hundreds of millions of readers. To achieve this, it will require considerable effort, but we believe the market is here. We’re currently seeing over 150,000 stories a month shared on Wattpad and our readership continues to grow. We are working with more and more publishers and professional authors who are looking to connect directly with Wattpad’s readership.
