Controversial is Good
On monday evening I made soup for 25 people. It contained broccoli, zucchini and other vegetables. To make the soup more special I added a little Truffle oil just before I served the dish. Truffle smells delicious and makes almost any dish special. Brillat-Savarin called the truffle “the diamond of the kitchen”. Other people describe the pungent scent of truffle as similar to the scent of unwashed underwear. It has a sharp acrid scent to it and you either love or hate it.
Michael Arrington* (Techcrunch editor and serial entrepreneur) has been described as arrogant, a hypocrite or just ‘an asshole’. He can be extremely critical about companies, even the ones he invests in or is friends with, and without ever holding back. Despite, or because, of this Techcrunch is THE technology blog in the world with more than 500.000 feed subscription. Both Wired and Forbes have named Arrington one of the most powerful people on the internet. You either love him or hate him. But you can’t ignore him.
Being controversial is good. It means you are different. It means that you will attract fans and enemies but at least you will garner attention. Being bland is boring and won’t make you the subject of the conversation at any dinner table. It also means that you will have to live with people hating or disliking you.
If you find out someone really hates your stuff (project, company, looks, product, girlfriend, car, song) than that might be a good thing.
In fact, if nobody hates it it will be harder to get people to love it. They can love you or hate you but they won’t be able to ignore you.
* = Just so you know: I love Michael Arrington.
So true, Boris! I hate you for writing down my vision on this subject matter! ;)
only people with no opinion have no enemies
Boris, would you mind if I translate this into french and reblog it (giving you full credit of course)
Hi Gonzague: sure, go ahead!
I think we both agree, but I’d phrase the idea differently. I think it’s important to know hate comes with success so that it doesn’t confuse an entrepreneur when they encounter it. If no one hates it, you are likely doing something wrong. But, if everyone hates it, you’re still likely doing something wrong. Hatred of your offering isn’t a valuable metric of success.
The goal is to create a product that speaks so strongly to one group that they love it. With that success comes some hate, but the love you get is what’s important. Focus on the love your product gets as your important metric, and just know hate is a side effect and accept that it’s there and move on.
I think I get your point Boris, and I agree to some extent. It’s an attractive idea because it sketches a very simplistic picture of success. And while I understand that one cannot be a writer without simplifying stuff, I think in this article you took the simplification too far.
I agree with Tyler more. It’s not the hate that is relevant, it’s the love. And very often the hate comes with the love, but not necessarily in significant quantity and many times only after a rather long period of time. Take Google for example. Even today, after years of huge success, there is not much hate towards Google. Controversial is definitely not a term that comes to mind when describing the company. The vast majority of people simply love Google, and the ones that don’t either work at Microsoft or took Orwell too serious.
Hey Tim,
I think Google definitely fits the “garnered some hatred” model. You don’t have to rift a majority (like Scion for example) to fit.
I remember lots of talks about “those idiots with no business plan” and I still hear lots of people calling them one trick ponies. Early googlers have suffered plenty of headaches at the hands of naysayers.
My assumption is that they simply tried their best to ignore the naysayers and focus on the important thing: users.
Hey Tyler,
While I agree that “you don’t have to rift a majority (…) to fit.”, I would argue that at least a significant amount of hatred is needed to counteract the love before the term ‘controversy’ comes to play. And controversy is what Boris’ article was all about as far as I understood.
Returning to the example of Google; I personally do not consider and have never considered Google controversial, due to the simple fact that the group of naysayers was and is so small compared to the group of enthusiasts. All of this of course isn’t hard science, it’s just my perception of things.
At the end of the day I think we agree, which is that you need users that love you. In the process of making people love you, you suffer a high risk of provoking hatred, in which case you should not panic nor should you take pride from it.
professional juggler and street philosopher.
i like it.
keep m coming.