Good morning,
What do you get when a YouTube celebrity puts a web cartoonist and a video-game designer on an island together?
Exploding Kittens.
That's not a punchline, it's a thriving table-game business--with games full of jokes (defuse an exploding kitten with a laser pointer or catnip sandwich), wordplay (one game is called Tacocat Spelled Backwards), and giggle-inducing images (a zombie cat munching its own eyeball). The company is the brainchild of video game designer Elan Lee and cartoonist Matthew Inman, who met through a mutual friend--YouTuber Matt Harding--while on vacation in Hawaii. Once the pair had a prototype for their first game, they launched a Kickstarter campaign to produce sets of cards.
Lee and Inman set a goal of raising $10,000--and met it in eight minutes. Within 24 hours they'd raised more than $1 million. By the end of the campaign, Exploding Kittens had raised nearly $9 million. Inman's adrenaline rush from the campaign even affected a date he went on that night, he says. "My date asked me if I was on cocaine," he joked, on this week’s episode of Inc.’s What I Know podcast. "I'm like 'No! I've got this Kickstarter.' That was truly [one of the] most amazing moments in my career."
Listen to the podcast episode to learn Inman’s top lessons from the shockingly successful campaign--like balancing marketing with creativity, and judging whether or not a wacky idea is actually a good idea. |
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