Bland is the failure nobody notices
A product people dislike at least gets talked about. A bland one fails without anyone noticing, including sometimes its makers.
The worst thing in the world is to be bland.
Ben Huh runs the Cheezburger Network, a group of humor sites that began when he and a group of investors bought I Can Has Cheezburger, a blog of captioned cat pictures, in 2007. The network now includes FAIL Blog and dozens of other sites fed largely by readers’ submissions, and it has just raised a large venture round. His first company, started after college, collapsed when the dot-com bubble burst.
In his business the line is close to literal. A humor site lives on being passed along, and nobody forwards something mildly amusing. The failure mode is not hatred, which at least generates attention, but indifference: a page read once, closed, and never thought of again. Blandness is hard to detect from inside because it produces no complaints. The numbers just stay flat.
The same logic applies well beyond cat pictures. Pitches, product names, landing pages and brands all compete for a moment of attention, and the safe version usually loses. A startup describing itself as a “platform for connecting people with solutions” has said nothing anyone will remember. A product with a clear point of view, even one some people dislike, gives the rest something to recommend. Early fans of a sharp product tend to defend it in arguments, and those arguments are often how new users first hear about it.
There are whole industries where the line is wrong. Payroll, banking, insurance, plumbing and infrastructure software sell trust, and trust is built by being predictable. Nobody wants an exciting accountant, and a bank that surprises its customers is usually in trouble. For those businesses, the worst thing in the world is a surprise, and a reputation for being dull and reliable is worth a great deal.
The other trap is confusing noise with character. A product can avoid blandness by being loud, provocative or strange while having nothing underneath, and that works only until people look closely. Read carefully, Huh’s advice asks for a distinct reason to exist, stated plainly. That is harder than being loud and lasts longer.