Blippy, the social purchase sharing service where consumers can automatically share their credit card purchases, has failed, after $13 million in funding and more-than-enviable enviable media coverage. Many theories have sprouted out in an attempt to explain why it failed, from the fact that it did not solve a problem to baked-in privacy issues. It is always easy to judge and rationalize why a company failed after it has failed; our take is that Blippy deviated too much from prevailing user model.

Blippy probably did not fail because it did not solve a problem. Many companies do not solve a “problem” but are considerably successful: HotOrNot.com, FMyLife.com, and countless game and porn companies. Too many analysts tend to strain the definition of a “problem” and try to fit successful companies into the problem-solution model (e.g. “Game companies solve the problem of consumers lacking a channel for escapism”). Blippy also probably did not fail because it tried to solve a real problem incompetently. They had a great team.

We believe that some ideas do not need a problem to solve. They just need to not deviate too much from prevailing user model. It is arguable that one of the reasons that Facebook succeeded is that it resembled preceding social networking websites quite a lot, just with a cleaner user interface and more AJAX; people were familiar with how social networking websites worked and caught on quickly. Twitter was way too different from what was already out there in 2006/2007, which might explain why it still has not truly gone mainstream. Google is just a better search engine. YouTube is just a better video-sharing website. Groupon is just a better group-buying coupon website., etc.

The problem is that Blippy was just too sexy. It got media attention not because of revenue, profit, or traction success, but because of how radical the idea was. To be radical means to be different – and not just incrementally so – from what is already out there. Blippy wanted users to share how much they spend and where to everyone by surrendering sensitive credit card information in exchange for nothing valuable in particular. However, nobody shared their credit card information for nothing good in return, online or offline; practically nobody shared all of their purchases to random people either, online or offline. Blippy required consumers to dramatically alter their habits and go against their usual instincts and, worst of all, there was no value proposition to support this switch in behavior.

Blippy was too abnormal. Normal sells. Sexy gets media attention, but little else. A similar trend can be observed in the entertainment industry, particularly in talent shows like Britain’s Got Talent. The mainstream media features those who are not necessarily the best talents; social media natives similarly tend to want to share the outlandish, overly-eccentric acts instead of the established types of acts that are nonetheless good. Yet the winning acts (and, more relevantly, those who go on to succeed in the industry) are almost always the same old boring singers, dancers, actors, comedians, circus performers, etc. Different does not seem to go very far even though people want to talk about them.

Perhaps the lesson for all of us is not to be fundamentally different but to differentiate by simply being better – faster, easier to use, more useful – within existing frameworks that are already successful.