After a little coffee break we were entertained by Ben Huh of icanhazcheezburger.com which talked about the evolution of memes and the humor that can be funnier with the use of social media and the power of community. If you haven’t ever checked out that site or the original LOLCats.com with captions under funny pictures you are missing out on a core part of the funny side of the Internet. I love good presentations and his slides used the eras of grow for the site in one word formats like the site, for example “icantgetanysleep” or “programmatica” eras. He used lots of pictures and few words which made his talk funny and impactful. These are good lessons for any business person that has to present a topic that is left of center and needs to be recieved by everyone.
Be Prepared for Scale
Within in two weeks (Feb 2007) of starting the site, they had 2TB of storage to deal with and then they had to move to an easier content system. In this case it was WordPress.com to host and handle this type of system. They did it the following month. Every business should have a provider growth plan in place in case your growth plans outpace your predictions.
Your Weekend “Project” might become a business
Ben thought this would be a fun thing do as a weekend project but as the traffic grew from 0 to 15 million page views a month within a six month period he quickly realized that this is going to be a real business and not side weekend project.
Good Solutions are Simple Solutions
Ben commented that even though they tried complex solutions for some things they always found that the good solutions are the simplest. Complex content management system? No. Use a Blog. Big Content Delivery Network for our site? No. Host it on Wordpress.com
Leverage Your Success and Branch Out if you Can
Since the success of the site was rising and everything was scaling well, so he thought it would be a good time to leverage the success of a scalable model like this and branch out. This is how iHasAHotDog, FailBlog, GraphJam, PunditKitchen, TotallyLooksLike and EngrishFunny were born and are seeing the same success.
If you can learn to scale your business, there is no limit to what it can do over the long term. You just need to prepare for it and tune it along the way.
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