“We were just too early for the technology to take off, but we stuck it through and I’m glad we did,” Yuen told his alma mater The University of Waterloo. It was the brainchild of Hong Kong-born entrepreneur Allen Lau and Malaysian Ivan Yuen. The pair say they were each working on variations of the idea before coming together to create Wattpad in 2006. The site says it reaches an audience of more than 90 million users, with content available in 50-plus languages, although stories are predominantly written in English. Readers can interact with the user-generated content, offering their opinions on characters and plots – they can even leave notes next to specific sentences – in a way that allows would-be writers to shape their content to better serve their readership. Wattpad is a website and app on which writers, both amateur and established, publish their stories. What is Wattpad?Īllen Lau and Ivan Yuen started Wattpad in 2006, one year before the iPhone and Kindle would see an explosion in the need for content that can be consumed on the go. Not bad from a content sharing platform you’ve likely never heard of.
Its author, 17-year-old Beth Reekles, went on to earn a three-book deal with publisher Random House.
The film, and its sequel, originated from a story posted to the storytelling app back in 2011, which had been read an incredible 19 million times before the streamer came calling. If you were one of the millions of people who enjoyed the gentle romantic entanglements of Elle, Lee and Noah in hit Netflix romcom, The Kissing Booth, you might not know it, but you're already a fan of Wattpad.