Ben Huh Talks Building a Business Founded on Lolcats

Do you think lolcats are silly? You may be right, but that doesn’t mean they can’t provide important business lessons (if you can get lessons from Justin Bieber, why not lolcats?).

At Google I/O a couple weeks ago, WebProNews spoke with Ben Huh, CEO of the Cheezburger network, which operates the hugely popular I Can Has Cheezburger? lolcats destination:

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Huh stresses how important the community has been to the success of the Cheezburger network of sites.

"There was no reason for us to reinvent the wheel, so we decided that we wanted to concentrate on what was really truly unique to us, which was the great community that was actually creating all this content," says Huh.

"For us, we felt that we didn’t want to break new ground. We didn’t have the resources to do so. We weren’t a giant corporation with a lot of R&D dollars, so we wanted to focus on something simple, and I think a lot of smaller businesses forget that," he adds. "If you’re focused on what your users want from you, you can continue to grow, which then gives you the ability to do things that are more challenging."

Huh acknowledges that he doesn’t know long every property in the Cheezburger Network will be able to sustain itself, but his mentality seems to be if he can keep enough "playgrounds" for users, they’ll be just fine.