How Exploding Kittens grew from a $10k Kickstarter to a global games company

Executive overview

Elan Lee spent two decades building digital entertainment — Xbox, Halo, alternate reality games — before realising screens were corroding the thing he valued most: people enjoying each other. He left Microsoft for the second time with no plan, met a cartoonist in Hawaii, and scribbled a card game on a poker deck with a Sharpie.

The game raised $8.7m on Kickstarter when the goal was $10k. Today Exploding Kittens has sold ~60 million games and does over $100m a year in revenue. The secret was never the game alone — it was treating marketing as storytelling and fans as co-conspirators.

Good luck comes from refusing to give up when the obvious move is to walk away.

From tinkerer to Xbox designer

• Grew up dismantling siblings' toys to understand how things worked; rarely put them back together.
• Graduated with mostly Cs — except an A+ in physics from a teacher who let him hunt for errors in a new textbook instead of sitting tests.
• Interned at Industrial Light & Magic; hand-animated breath pixels for the Titanic door scene.
• Recruited to Microsoft to help define the Xbox before it had a name; promoted from programme manager to designer after his boss told him he was "one of the worst programme managers I've ever seen."
• Worked on the design team for the first six Xbox launch titles, starting with Halo.

The Beast and the birth of alternate reality games

• Tasked with building Xbox games tied to Spielberg's AI; the "glue" connecting them became a scavenger hunt scattered across the internet — later named The Beast after an asset inventory that totalled 666 items.
• The Beast was interactive theatre at scale: Lee published fragments, millions of players dissected and reconstructed them, then lobbed the narrative back.
• The AI games were cancelled after the film's tone clashed with the game concepts; The Beast launched anyway and became the template for everything that followed.
• Left Microsoft burned out and unwilling to start on Xbox 360; Jordan Weissman, his boss, resigned the same day and they co-founded 42 Entertainment.

42 Entertainment and alternate reality marketing

• 42 Entertainment built alternate reality games as marketing campaigns — most notably for Halo 2, where players reconstructed a story delivered through ringing payphones across major cities worldwide.
• The work was world-changing but structurally broken: revenue stopped the moment a campaign ended, forcing a constant hunt for the next client.
• Returned to Microsoft for 18 months to build content for Xbox One; quit again after watching his niece and nephew ignore him to play a game he had designed.

The Hawaii trip that started Exploding Kittens

• Friend Shane Small proposed an app: Russian roulette with a deck of cards. Lee tested the concept immediately with a Sharpie on a poker deck — that deck still sits on his shelf.
• In Hawaii, met Matt Inman (creator of The Oatmeal). Inman wanted to illustrate a game; suggested renaming "Bomb Squad" to Exploding Kittens so the threat would be funny rather than obvious.
• All three founders agreed to equal thirds, shook hands, and launched on Kickstarter four weeks later with a $10k goal (the minimum print run of 1,000 decks at ~$10 each).
• Lee expected $10k total; Inman predicted $5m. They were both wrong.

The Kickstarter campaign

• Hit $10k in seven minutes after Inman posted to The Oatmeal's audience.
• Passed $1m in 24 hours; hit $3m by day three.
• Revenue dropped sharply on day four once Inman's audience was tapped out. Instead of shutting down, Lee converted the Kickstarter page into a storytelling game.
• Stretch goals were tied to audience achievements, not money: dress your cat as a taco, send us the photo. Get 10 Batmans in a hot tub. The page became a shrine to what backers created.
• Final total: just under $9m from 219,382 backers — still the record for most backers on any Kickstarter campaign.
• Had to produce 700,000 decks for the first print run; the original local manufacturer had never printed that many cards in 10 years of business.
• Cards Against Humanity connected them to their manufacturer and distributor; every copy shipped by July 30 as promised.

Building the company and surviving the flops

• First full year after Kickstarter: ~$20m in retail sales through Target, Walmart, and Amazon with minimal paid marketing.
• Convention strategy: built a furry, eight-foot cat vending machine staffed by team members hidden inside, dispensing random items ($1 for a burrito, a plunger, or a watermelon). The line blocked multi-million-dollar Hasbro and Mattel booths.
• Second game, Bears vs. Babies (Kickstarter: $5m): sales fell off a cliff within 12 months — too complicated, rules harder to explain.
• Third game, You've Got Crabs: died in eight months — a mechanic built on silent secret signals that left everyone at the table staring at each other tugging their ears.
• The "one hit wonder" fear was real; Lee stopped eating. The answer was to assume Exploding Kittens would fail and race to find the next hit.

The break with Throw Throw Burrito

• External inventor Brian Spence brought in Flaming Mangoes — a card game where players simultaneously collect sets and dodge foam objects being thrown across the table.
• Inman renamed it Throw Throw Burrito, added "the world's first dodgeball card game" to the box, and put a window cut-out revealing the squishy burritos with an arrow reading "throw these."
• First-year sales: 500,000 copies (a normal game sells ~30,000 in year one); has remained in the top 10 ever since.
• Kickstarter raised only $3m — a declining trend — but retail performance inverted that entirely.

Investment and expansion

• Chernin Group invested $40m, pitching that the games were probably as big as they'd get without expanding into TV, film, and theme parks. Lee and Inman agreed.
• A Netflix animated series went into development; an app followed. Lee's compromise with himself: as long as board games remain the core, screen expansions are fine if they funnel people back to the table.
• Asmodee (French publisher) bought 55% of the company in 2021 — the first time Lee or Inman took money out. The partnership put Throw Throw Burrito into 29 languages.
• COVID produced a 90% revenue increase in 2020; the constraint was supply, not demand. Two years of daily whack-a-mole with plant shutdowns, container shortages, and distribution disruptions.
• Revenue now exceeds $100m annually; 90% from games, 60% of sales through brick-and-mortar.

How games get made

• Design team of five or six people runs retreats two to four times a year — an Airbnb, raw materials, three days of tinkering.
• On the final day, the marketing team arrives and the design team pitches all 20 ideas. Marketing has veto power: if they cannot articulate how to sell it, the game dies on the spot.
• Lee's daughter (then four) hated every pre-K game they tried; said "let's fix it." They co-designed 12 games over several months using construction paper and crayons; four were good enough to develop; all four reached retail.

The company's operating philosophy

• Company mantra: "We don't make entertaining games. We make games that make the people you're playing with entertaining."
• Two non-negotiable components for every product: the game must be genuinely good; and the team must know exactly how to sell it. Both are required — neither alone is sufficient.
• Lee's definition of luck: every time he was confronted with a problem that could go badly wrong, giving up was always the wrong answer.