They hoped to raise enough money to print 500 decks, maybe $10,000. "In the course of 30 days we raised almost $9 million," said Lee. It broke the record for a crowdfunded game, and attracted the most backers of any project in any category, at 290,000.
That wasn't good enough. As the Kickstarter numbers began to plateau, Lee and Inman and their team decided to rejuvenate interest by doing something they thought was crazy. "What if we turn Kickstarter itself into a game?" That's exactly what they did, creating a daily point system with rewards, a time consuming task. "We stopped asking for money," Lee said. "What we started to see was extraordinary." People were playing the game and sharing it, and soon more orders poured in.
That still wasn't good enough. The company decided to create an expansion pack, and talked to Amazon.com about featuring it on the internet retailer's wildly popular Prime Day. "We broke the record for preorders," Lee said. To save money on marketing at Comic-Con, they distributed cheap urinal cakes with "Exploding Kittens" characters in all the men's rooms. It was another hit.
"We're trying to find things to get ahead of the crowd by being more creative than spending more money," said Lee.
Over 2.5 million decks of "Exploding Kittens" have been ordered in one year at $20 apiece, meaning revenues are an estimated $50 million. "If you take the internet and add cats to it, it's, like, success!" said Inman. Lee said the company is "very" profitable.
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