Exploding Kittens

“And I said, 10,000 dollars. That seems about right. That's how much we'll earn off of it. And Matt immediately said, five million dollars.”

“Instead, we'd said, let's all own a third of this thing, and shake hands, and move forward, and that was it.”

“My whole principle behind the thing was, every card in this game should invite an interaction between you and another player. So, I really wanted this thing to feel like you are playing against players. You're not playing against the game. Everybody is playing…”

“If I contact a local card manufacturer, I was like, what's the minimum order? And he said you have to produce a thousand decks of cards. Like, that's the minimum here. I was like, cool, ok, fine. And I was like, well, how much does that cost? And he said, oh, …”

“Within the first 24 hours, we passed the one million mark.”

“We're 10 years later, and it is still, holds the record for the most number of backers of any campaign in history.”

“So 219,000 backers made means that because most people wanted more than one deck we had to produce 700,000 decks of cards for our very first print run.”

“And I think we ended up spending an extra million dollars just to produce that chip.”

“And so the campaign launched in January, we promised it would ship in July, and because of Cards Against Humanity and their help we shipped every single copy by July 30th of that year.”

“The first year, like, after Kickstarter, the first year, we pulled in about twenty million in sales just moving through retail.”

“We built a vending machine costume. And eight hours a day, our little team would sit inside this horribly cramped space, pushing watermelons and cantaloupes and hot burritos out the front of this vending machine to this crowd. And the crowd grew, and they love…”

“Every year, like, For the first few years, honestly, for the first, like, 10 years, Exploding Kittens is very consistent at hitting that.”

“It's to make cards, put them in a box. This comes out to like between one and two dollars based on the product. Right. And we're selling it for 20.”

“And that thing, I think its first year, it sold 500,000 copies. A normal game, its first year, will sell 30,000 copies. Like, this was just off the charts for a game, and every year since then, it's grown, because it keeps spreading.”

“And so it took a few months of negotiation, but we finally took an investment from them. They invested forty million in the company, and immediately they got to work at helping us expand, figuring out, like, alright, how do we build a TV show, and how do we bu…”

“The deal I kind of made with myself was as long as the core of this company is always Board games, tabletop games, things that inspire face-to-face interaction. I am okay exploring expansions in these other realms that feel like they are serving additional exp…”

“And we saw a 90% increase in revenue that year, just in 2020.”

“So, they're called Asmodee, and they purchased 55% of Exploding Kittens.”

“Shane left in Shane actually left in twenty-fifteen, the very first year.”

“We're over a hundred at this point. I, you're right, I can't say the exact number, but we have, we've now published more than a hundred games.”

“I would say 90%.”

“Brick and mortar is still about 60% of our business.”

“And the reason that we're doing that is because they have ultimate veto power over anything. So we could think it's the best game in the world, but if the marketing team cannot figure out how they're going to sell that thing, that game dies that moment.”

“We don't make entertaining games. We make games that make the people you're playing with entertaining.”

“Of the top five most popular games in the world, we make number one, two, four, and five.”

“So I think game creation from my perspective is really just three phases. You have to create a fun game. You have to come up with a good theme for that game, and then you have to sell the game. And those three phases, I think are really relevant to whatever yo…”

“And it used to take, you know, months or years. And with AI, I've actually been able to shorten that to sometimes just a few hours.”

“Then to figure out the theme, I take those instructions that I've spent weeks working with an AI to generate, and I feed them right back into the AI and say, become an expert at this game and tell me what it should be called to attract this target audience. An…”

“The game Exploding Kittens has been translated into 25 languages and sold in over 50 countries.”

“We hit that goal in seven minutes. By the first day, we had raised a million dollars. By the end of the second day, we had two million, and by the end of the third day, we had three million, and this thing was completely out of control.”

“I'm watching that thing go from 20,000 to 50,000 to a 100,000, and I am losing my mind because every one of those backers, I've got to figure out how to get a game to their front door, and I had no idea how, literally no idea how.”

“Our stretch goals were not based on currency. We said, show us funny stuff. One of the characters in our game is called Taco Cat. We said, show us 20 pictures of a real Taco Cat, and we will add 10 cards to the game.”

“I think what it really did was it turned something, an experience that was transactional, buying and receiving a good into something fun that you're involved with. Rather than, give me 20 bucks and I'll send you a card game in a couple months. Instead it was, …”

“700,000 copies of the game sold in 30 days, and that is truly just unprecedented in the industry.”

“What I've learned is pad your deadlines lie to them, and outlining the cost of what it's going to be if we don't execute by this date.”

“We had a cargo ship just lose containers into the ocean. We had a cargo ship catch on fire.”

“For six months, that's what we had to do to get those things out the door. And we were on time with every single one of those orders.”

“We don't make entertaining games. We make games that make the people you're playing with entertaining.”

“Traditionally, the way that game testing works is you hire a group. They do these blind tests. Everyone sits in a room. There's the one-way mirror. You watch people play the games. It's horrible. And I looked at that trying to figure out like, why are these te…”

“When you finished playing our games, there's one question on the whole survey, which is, do you want to play again? That's it. That's all I care about. When a game hits a hundred percent yes, we're gonna ship that game.”