Ben Huh on the Importance of Laziness

I Can Haz Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh told attendees at Mediabistro’s UGCX conference Tuesday afternoon that his site’s success is due to a laser-like focus on one mission: “Make people happy for five minutes a day.”

Discussing some of the strategies the company used to build the user-submission humor site, which now has more than 1 million Twitter followers, Huh talked about the importance of seeing the site from a user’s perspective.

“I ask myself, ‘If my users had 40 seconds on my site, what would they want to do?’ Huh said. What they want to do, he said, is laugh.

“We had to give them what they wanted, which was a chuckle. On a reliable basis, every single day,” Huh explained.

In a humorous aside, he discussed sitting in his pajamas in his apartment after he bought the site, enjoying his free time while learning that trying to work just four hours a day taught him a valuable business lesson.

“Being lazy was one of the best training tools I ever had,” Huh explained. “I had to only work on things that I knew were vital to the success of the organization.”

Spoken like a true post-modern slacker.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.