Lau: Free products with 1,000 users after one year lack PMF
Allen Lau · How to Launch a Marketplace | Allen Lau, Founder of Wattpad · PMF Show · Mar 8, 2024 · at 12:00
Wattpad co-founder Allen Lau reflects on evaluating early traction and determining true product-market fit for free consumer products.
0:00 / 0:12exact quote · 12.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“When you think about this for a free product, when you have only have a thousand users after a year it's not something that you should celebrate. It means you don't really have a real product market fits.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Allen Lau
Wattpad took two full years to get its first user-uploaded story
“Two years after we started, we finally saw the first upload to our platform. It took two full years, even though the upload button was, has always been there.”
Lau: Scale supply first because supply waits, but unmatched demand churns
“You cannot scale the demand first because the when there's no supply, there's, Absolutely will be serious retention on your demand. That's why you have to scale the supply first. And supply can wait for the demand, but not the other way around.”
Lau: Wattpad seeded content with classic books and solved discovery through SEO
“The, what was intentional was the classic book strategy. We imported that on day one, but how we get it discovered, it was a big problem. And discovery on mobile was even worse. So we tried different experiments and it turned out SEO at that time, ah, was the …”
Lau: Early Wattpad Generated $2 Monthly from Ads Against $5 Hosting Cost
“We had some banned ads on our website, and we generate two dollars in a month from Google. I wish I kept that check. Good thing to post in the background. But I the point is Because of the usage was so low, our hosting cost was only five bucks.”