How to grow your product by being the odd one out: Dave Harland’s interrupt, intrigue, convert framework

When every landing page, launch email and pitch deck can be generated from the same playbook, being distinctive becomes a growth lever. Here’s Dave Harland’s interrupt, intrigue, convert framework from How to Web Conference 2026, plus a 15-minute check to run before your next launch.

Imagine this: you’ve just shipped the thing. The product works, the landing page is live and the launch email has gone out, and somewhere between your outbox and theirs, it quietly disappears into the 10,000 or so marketing messages the average person is hit with every day. 

Building has never been faster, especially with AI doing a fair share of the heavy lifting, but getting people to actually remember what you’ve built is a different story altogether.

Dave Harland, Managing Partner at Copy Or Die, who took the How to Web Conference stage in October with a Scouse accent he warned even his fellow Brits struggle with, put forward one rather unusual idea: if you want to grow, you need to be a little bit odd. 

A mixed grill, with clapping, please

Dave’s case starts in a Wild West-themed restaurant in Łódź around twenty years ago, where the menu offered a mixed grill for 45 złoty or, for five złoty more (roughly a euro), the mixed grill with clapping. He had no idea what that meant, so naturally he ordered it, and just as he took a first bite of the kebab, eight members of staff, the chef and the manager included, gathered round the table and gave him a round of applause.

He’s still telling the story two decades later, and the restaurant got an extra euro out of him in the process, which is rather the point. Dave’s name for it is “in odd we trust”, and it comes back again and again throughout the talk, from a stranger at a car boot sale who tried on his dad’s old tracksuit bottoms right there on the field to the rusty little box his nan found at a bus stop with “Don’t open” scratched into it.

Why do we remember the odd ones?

It turns out there’s science behind it all – the von Restorff effect, a behavioural principle first described in the 1930s, shows that when we see a group of similar things, the one that’s different is the one we remember. 

For founders and go-to-market teams, this matters more now than it ever has. As Dave put it, anyone can press a button and get a copy that sounds like their nine closest competitors, so the companies that grow will be the ones willing to sound like nobody else.

Interrupt, intrigue, convert: Dave’s three-step framework

So how do you put oddness to work without turning your brand into a comedy act? Dave wraps it up in three steps, and each one below comes with an example from the talk and something you can try on your own work this week.

1. Interrupt: people aren’t sitting around waiting for your message. Take the first thing people see from you, whether that’s a subject line, the opening slide of your deck or the top of your homepage, and put it next to your competitors’ versions. If you swapped the logos round, would anyone notice? 

2. Intrigue: once you’ve got their attention, give them a reason to lean in. Leave one question open, whether it’s a strange name, an unexpected claim or a detail that doesn’t quite add up, so people want to read the next line.

3. Convert: and then, in Dave’s words, you go in for the kill, because people are drawn to something different. The how behind it? Make sure your odd idea leads somewhere – be clear on what your demo, reply or sign-up is before you start being weird.

Seven ways to be odd on purpose

Dave’s talk was full of brands using weirdness deliberately, easily validating that a little oddness can work almost anywhere in what you build, from your sales emails to your onboarding. Here are seven places to start:

Use it to break the ice – add a small quirk to your booth, onboarding or sales emails that people can’t help asking about and you’ve started a conversation without having to pitch.

Use it to be distinctive – write down the colours, phrases and imagery everyone in your category relies on, then see what happens when you go the other way on just one of them.

Use it to make people laugh – humour works in B2B too, especially in the places nobody expects it, like a confirmation email, an error page or the small print at the bottom of an invoice.

Use it to challenge convention – pick one piece of boilerplate, such as your About page, a job ad or your release notes, and rewrite it the way you’d actually say it out loud to a friend.

Use it to show rather than tell – instead of describing the problem you solve, find a way to let people experience it for a second, whether that’s in a demo, a visual or the first line of a pitch.

Use it to challenge formats – if every pitch deck, newsletter or landing page in your space follows the same template, try changing the shape as well as the words.

Use it to speak to your audience – count how many sentences on your homepage start with “we”, then rewrite a few of them to start with “you”, so the story becomes about the people you’re building for rather than about yourself.

Remember though: oddness works best in moderation

Being different doesn’t mean being different everywhere at once. As Dave put it, “You don’t have to go full out weird.” The pink trainers stood out because they were the only pink pair in the line-up, and the same goes for your brand: pick one thing to do differently, whether that’s your tone, a format or a story only you can tell, and keep everything around it clear and easy to act on. Try it on one email, one landing page or one slide first, see how people respond and build from there.

The part AI can’t do for you

Dave closed with a thought for the age we’re all building in, where we’re expected to produce more and faster than ever, and AI makes that easier by the day. The catch, as he put it, is that AI isn’t odd. These tools are built on predictability, which makes them brilliant at plenty of things but not at drawing on a lifetime of strange, lived experiences and those experiences exactly are the one part of your marketing that no competitor and no model can replicate.

Steal this: the 15-minute oddness check

Before your next launch, pitch deck, sales email or landing page goes out, work through these five questions:

What do my competitors all say? Write down the phrases you’d find on all their websites, decks and sales emails. Five minutes, no judging.

What’s my one difference? It could be tone, format, who it’s about, or a story only you can tell.

Does it interrupt? Would a busy customer, investor or new hire actually stop?

Does it intrigue? Is there a reason to read the next line?

Does it convert? Once they’re curious, is the next step (a demo, a reply, a meeting) obvious?

And if an idea still feels a bit too weird after all that, Dave’s advice is to share it anyway. Somebody, after all, once pitched the name of a Netflix show far stranger than anything you’re likely to come up with, and it still got made.

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