How Exploding Kittens built a co-creator empire from a card game

Executive overview

Most founders protect their idea — wrong instinct. The real competitive advantage comes from giving people a stake in what you're building, early and often.

Elan Lee co-founded Exploding Kittens by deliberately opening the game to co-creators at every stage: a webcomic artist who named it, a Kickstarter crowd that shaped it, a production partner who saved it, and eventually his five-year-old daughter who reinvented it.

The fastest path to a loyal audience is making them feel like they built it.

From Xbox to card games: why Elan changed direction

• Visiting family, Elan found his niece and nephew ignoring him — playing a game he designed
• Realised he had been building games that isolated players from each other
• Resigned from Microsoft within two weeks of that moment
• New goal: build games where the players — not the game — are the entertainment
• Every card in Exploding Kittens is designed to create an interaction with another player

Finding the first co-creator: Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal

• Elan met Matthew in Hawaii while still prototyping; they played for two hours straight
• Matthew suggested the name "Exploding Kittens" and created all the artwork
• Key criteria beyond skill: enthusiasm and commitment to drive the idea forward
• Fear of judgment almost stopped Elan — Matthew had millions of followers; Elan had none personally
• Shaking hands and committing was the founding act of the company

The Kickstarter campaign: flipping crowdfunding on its head

• Goal set at $10,000 — the minimum for a print run of a few hundred copies
• Hit $10,000 in seven minutes; raised $1 million on day one, $9 million total
• 700,000 copies sold in 30 days — unprecedented in tabletop games
• Most campaigns focus on the funding; Elan focused entirely on the crowd
• Stretch goals were community challenges, not money milestones:
  • 20 photos of a real "Taco Cat" → 10 extra cards added to the game
  • 10 Batmans in one hot tub → unlocked another reward
  • Videos, poetry, creative submissions posted back to backers as a mirror of what they made
• Turned a transactional purchase into a participatory event

Onboarding the counterweight co-creator: Carly McGinnis

• 700,000 orders needed fulfilling in six months — Elan had no supply chain experience
• Called his former Xbox assistant Carly, who was still at Microsoft
• What won her over: Elan trusted her judgment and didn't micromanage
• Carly's rule for working with creatives: pad deadlines and make the cost of missing them explicit
• Tapped the Cards Against Humanity network to find manufacturers, freight partners, and fulfilment
• Delivered every order on time despite a cargo ship losing containers and another catching fire
• Elan later made Carly president of Exploding Kittens Inc.

Scaling the game library: the Kitty Test Pilots

• Major retailers (Walmart, Target, Amazon) require multiple bestselling games before they'll list a new supplier
• Traditional game testing — one-way mirrors, hired strangers — produced no useful signal
• Elan's replacement: send prototype games free to Kickstarter backers, ask them to film themselves playing
• Hundreds of families participated; reduced instruction sheets from six pages to one
• Only question on the post-game survey: "Do you want to play again?" — ship only when 100% say yes
• Games released: Throw Throw Burrito, Bears vs Babies, and others — each debuted at number one
• Test families became the marketing team: they posted, told friends, and lobbied stores to stock the games

The unexpected co-creator: his five-year-old daughter

• Off-the-shelf children's games (Candyland) frustrated Elan — no skill, no decisions, no point
• His daughter noticed and said: "Let's fix it"
• Spent a year building games together at the dining room table — she taught him what appealed to kids; he taught her game mechanics
• Created four games: I Want My Teeth Back, Hurry Up Chicken Butt, The Best Worst Ice Cream, My Parents Might Be Martians
• All four went through the same Kitty Test Pilot process — no special treatment
• All four are now sold in Target, equally fun for parents and children
• Insight: children see obvious flaws in the status quo that adults have stopped noticing

Principles of co-creation

• Open your product early — co-creators can emerge at any stage, not just ideation
• Be discerning: enthusiastic co-creators don't automatically set the direction; you still curate
• Find counterweights — the skills you lack are often the most valuable thing a co-creator brings
• Make co-creators feel ownership: they market, advocate, and demand stockists without being asked
• Relationships outlast any product; human connectivity is the underlying competitive advantage