Exploding Kittens

“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.”

“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…”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I would say 90%.”

“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 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.”

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

“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…”

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

“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, …”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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…”

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