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Wattpad - Stories On Your Mobile Phone
By Jason | April 4, 2007
Wattpad, a Toronto based startup, was founded in 2006. They officially went out of beta on Tuesday, announcing its 100,000-user community open to the public.
“In January 2007 we introduced the service for mobile users worldwide to discover, read, and share stories on their mobile phones” said Ivan Yuen, Founder of Wattpad. “Since Wattpad’s beta launch we have attracted over 100,000 users who have contributed tens of thousands of stories. We would like to thank all those who gave us valuable feedback during this beta period. With our new release, Wattpad’s story sharing community is ready for the next phase of growth.”
All you have to do is download the client, pick one of 25,000 stories to check out, and read online of offline.
It is interesting to see the adoption of mobile applications in the startup rings. Some reports say that only 5% of cell phone users stay connected. With the number of people launching mobile based startups, you would swear that there is a more widespread adoption.
I just hope these mobile companies have a way of attracting enough cashflow to stay afloat while the rest of the world gets used to the idea of being truly mobile.
Topics: Startups |
April 4th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
You bring up a great point in relation to cashflows. Unlike ‘traditional’ internet companies that witness cost pressure mainly on the hosting and bandwidth side (costs which have gone down significantly), mobile delivery overhead is still very high.
I was very close to starting a service that relied heavily on SMS for content distribution. Me and my partner had to pull out because the business model couldn’t survive the high transaction costs.
I don’t think most people realize how extreme some of these costs can be with this distribution method. It becomes a major challenge to run any business model with SMS that does not explicitly charge customers. Free, advertising reliant strategies will have a very difficult time as a result.
Until these transaction costs are normalized, companies in this space will have to: (1) Have a clearly thought out business model that includes monetization from launch or (2) Have VC funding to support a cash burn.
Like you, I hope the innovation that is happening with mobile technology can sustain itself beyond the high variable costs.
April 10th, 2007 at 12:12 am
Fantastic points Adam. I’m sorry I didn’t catch these earlier! And we all know the difficulties facing startups that have cost structures from the first day. Either the marketing needs to be top notch or their service needs to be perfect!