Exploding Kittens

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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, …”

“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.”

“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…”

“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 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.”

“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…”

“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…”