Introduction: How Elan Lee Ended Up at the Basketball Event [00:00:00]
Shaan: Elan, you were at our basketball event. Craig invited you. You said when you walked in, you had impostor syndrome dripping from your ears.
Elan: Absolutely. The first few minutes, I asked you — why are we here, what is this? And you said, “Everyone in this room is smarter than I am. I’m going to spend the next three days learning as much as I can. I hope you’re here for the same reasons.” And I thought: I’ve found my tribe.
Shaan: We do this thing at the event where we put everybody on the hot seat. In your case, we asked: how do you make hit game after hit game in an industry that’s supposed to be a game of chance? You gave us a one-liner that stuck.
Sam: You blew the room away for three reasons. One: your business is a giant dragon that looks like a cute, playful dragon. You have a board games company. Most people look at Exploding Kittens and don’t think “juggernaut.” Two: you’re clearly in it for the art, not the money. Three: you gave a ten-minute talk that night that changed how I think about products.
Elan: Can I give you some numbers? We can’t share everything because of investors, but here’s one: we sell a game every 6.4 seconds, round the clock. Of the top five bestselling games in the world, we have numbers one, two, four, and five.
Sam: That’s insane.
The Origin Story: From Xbox to Exploding Kittens [00:10:00]
Shaan: How did you get here? What’s the origin?
Elan: I spent years as chief design officer at Xbox. One day I walked over to my brother’s house, really excited to see my niece and nephew. They were playing Xbox when I came in. They didn’t even look up. To add insult to injury, they were playing a game I designed.
Elan: I thought: I’ve broken something fundamental here. Within two weeks I resigned. Whatever I did next had to capture what I remembered from my childhood — playing around a table, cheating, kicking each other, throwing food, making alliances, betraying each other. I couldn’t even tell you what those games were. I remember the relationships.
Elan: So I decided to make a simple card game and put it on Kickstarter. I called a printer. “What’s your minimum print run?” About 400 units. Cost: about $10,000. Kickstarter goal: $10,000.
Elan: I showed the game to a bunch of friends, including Matthew Inman — he created The Oatmeal, the online comic. He’s the funniest person I know and the best audience whisperer I’ve ever met. He said two things. One: “This is the best game I’ve ever played. Can I work on this with you?” Two: “We can’t call it Bomb Squad. Bombs are bad, of course you’re scared of them. What if the thing you were most scared of were cute, adorable, fuzzy little kittens — and we’ll call it Exploding Kittens?”
Elan: That was the origin.
The Kickstarter That Raised $8.5 Million [00:20:00]
Shaan: Walk us through the Kickstarter. You set it at $10K.
Elan: A friend, Dan Shapiro, gave me important advice: you have no control over the stories people write about your campaign. They set the narrative. But what you can control is the one number you set as your goal — and that creates the data-driven headlines: “tried to raise X, raised Y, hit goal in X minutes.” Set that number carefully.
Elan: We set it at $10,000 — a little low, but the true minimum. Matt made one post to his Oatmeal audience: “For the first time ever, I made a game. I hope you like it. Here it is.” We hit $10,000 in seven minutes. In the first 48 hours: two million dollars.
Shaan: Then what?
Elan: At 48 hours, all the Oatmeal fans who were going to back it had backed it. We’re sitting on $2 million. We made a choice: ride it out and call this a huge win, or go absolutely crazy and deploy every marketing strategy we’ve ever heard of.
Elan: We shook hands and went crazy. But here’s the key insight: every Kickstarter stretch goal I’d ever seen was about funding. “If you raise $20K, everyone gets a carrying case. If you raise $50K, 10 more cards.” They ignored the crowd part and focused on funding. I thought: backwards. We’ve got $2 million. Let’s ignore funding entirely and focus on the crowd.
Elan: Our stretch goals: don’t give us more money. Just have fun. Show us a picture of 10 Batmans in a hot tub. Show us 100 people dressed as cats. Show us the weirdest things you can come up with, and every time you do, we’ll make the game better. We’re not charging you more — we’re just having a party and everyone’s invited.
Elan: We had about a thousand backers at the 48-hour mark. By the end: 219,000 backers. That’s still far and away the record for any Kickstarter campaign in history. Nobody’s come close in 10 years. Total raised: $8.5 million.
Sam: Give me an example of the challenges.
Elan: One character in the game is Taco Cat — it’s a palindrome. We said: “Show us 25 pictures of real Taco Cats.” A veterinarian posted a picture holding a cat with a piece of paper showing she had legally changed the cat’s name to Taco Cat. We gave her credit. Then more and more pictures followed. Every day for 28 more days, the challenge was: how do we come up with five new things that will keep everyone entertained? Every time we thought something was too hard, they’d smash it.
The Core Insight: Games Should Not Be Entertaining [00:35:00]
Shaan: You have a one-liner about games. Say it.
Elan: Games should not be entertaining. Games should make the people you’re playing with entertaining.
Sam: When you pitched that to investors, they said never say that again.
Elan: It’s the first line on our homepage. Here’s why it matters: if you’re making an entertaining game, you’re trying too hard. It’s you versus the audience. When you’re done entertaining them, they leave and don’t come back. But if your goal is to create a tool set that makes the players the entertainment — you have an engine. Every game is different. They want to come back. They want to take it to a new friend’s house. You make a piece of cardboard and turn it into a viral engine.
Shaan: And how do you measure it?
Elan: One question. We have 400 test families called the Kitty Test Pilots. We used to send them a 40-question Google form. Nobody cared about the data. Now we ask one question: Do you want to play again?
Elan: That question is the most direct heat-seeking missile to answer “have you made the players entertaining?” If the game is entertaining, you extract most of the entertainment on the first play-through. If the players are entertaining, you want to play again. We only ship games where 100% say yes. If we get even one no, we watch the video of that session and find out what went wrong.
The Marketing Stunts [00:48:00]
Sam: Walk us through the unconventional marketing — the urinals, the vending machine.
Elan: The urinal stunt was year one at PAX — Penny Arcade Expo. We had no money. Everything at conventions costs money. So I made little kitten cutouts with our logo — the kitten was holding a bomb with a lit fuse. I secretly placed one inside every urinal at the convention center. You had to pee on it to extinguish the bomb. People flooded our booth. The organizers came over: “You can’t do this.” I said, “Show me the part of my contract where it says I can’t.” They couldn’t. But they told me that next year they’d start charging for that space. I believe PAX now sells urinal advertising because of this stunt.
Shaan: And I didn’t extract a single one.
Elan: The vending machine was year two — trying to solve the same problem at scale. The urinal thing got us a few hundred people per day. I needed tens of thousands.
Elan: I looked at our booth and thought: people come up, give us $20, get a box, walk away with no memory of the transaction. That’s just a vending machine experience. So what if we were the world’s coolest vending machine?
Elan: I took a refrigerator box from my garage. We covered it with fur and gave it giant googly eyes. It looked like an 8-foot cat. It had a screen, buttons, a credit card reader. You walk up, put in money, push a button, a game comes out. But then: an extra button. “Random item. $1.” People tried it. Out comes a pineapple. A hot burrito. A bag of rocks. A plunger.
Elan: Here’s the thing we didn’t tell anyone: we thought it was the world’s most sophisticated vending machine. People built little bleachers to watch it for hours. The box backed up to a curtain. Behind that curtain: eight of us sweating for ten hours a day, pulling random items and throwing them out the front. No robotics. No computers. Eight humans in a costume.
Elan: Our line got so long it blocked the aisle. It blocked all the expensive booths. It went out the door, out of the convention center, down the street. The line for our fur-covered vending machine was longer than the line to get into the convention.
Sam: At the Indianapolis convention, they said you couldn’t ship produce backstage?
Elan: They said we’d exceeded a “casual purchase” and would need to be a registered grocer. My team thought it was a dead end. I thought: I must be asking the wrong question. It turns out it’s trivially easy to become a registered grocer — fill out a form, pay about $100. Exploding Kittens is now a registered grocer in Indiana. And 14 other states, because every time we hit this at a new convention, we registered. Now we can accept produce shipments anywhere we go.
Constraint-Based Creativity [01:05:00]
Shaan: You have a brainstorming framework that’s different from most people. Describe it.
Elan: I hate blue-sky brainstorming. “Let’s brainstorm anything” is terrifying to me. I have zero chance of success without constraints.
Elan: The vending machine story is a good example. I didn’t say “how do we get tens of thousands of people to our booth?” I said: “We are a vending machine. What is the world’s coolest vending machine experience?” That constraint is the engine. Suddenly I know what to build.
Elan: When we were asked to build a game for NFL teams, we didn’t start with “build a good game.” We started by listing what football’s best moments actually are — that magical catch against all odds, the whole crowd going wild. We focused on reproducing that moment in miniature.
Elan: Creativity loves constraints. I teach this: I’m not teaching people to be creative, I’m teaching them to identify the problem. Once you’ve defined what success looks like precisely, creative people can work within those constraints. That’s the skill — problem identification, not problem solving.
Shaan: When someone tells you no, what do you do?
Elan: I assume I asked the wrong question. Every time. “No” just means you haven’t found the right question yet. The Indiana grocer thing — everyone was accepting a dead end, and I thought: I’m not getting anywhere asking “when does the warehouse open.” So I asked: “What are you doing with your parking lots?” They said nothing. I said “can I park three 18-wheeler trucks there?” Sure. All I needed was square footage, and they had that in the parking lot. No restrictions there — only inside the facility.
Hurry Up Chicken Butt: Design From Irritation [01:18:00]
Sam: Tell us about how you made Hurry Up Chicken Butt.
Elan: My daughter turned four. I was so excited because most games say “ages four and up.” We bought Candyland, Zingo, all the classics. We played them — she was happy. I was miserable.
Elan: The result: when we finished, she asked “can we play again?” and I thought: oh god, no. And that must have shown on my face. She said “what’s wrong?” I said “I think this game is broken.” She said something brilliant: “Let’s fix it.”
Elan: Fireworks. We spent the next month on it. She drew pictures of everything fun she wanted. I wrote a list of what success looks like. My five constraints: my daughter has to beat me without me letting her win. I have to want to play again. It cannot be luck-based. I have to watch her get better every time we play. And nobody can lose — there can be winners but no losers.
Elan: Jerry Seinfeld says “irritation is what causes innovation.” Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee existed because he hated doing late-night shows. Every one of my five constraints was a personal irritation. These were the things everybody was doing wrong that nobody had raised their hand about.
Elan: The game is essentially hot potato with a chicken. You pass the chicken around. When it screams, you’ve “lost a point” but the person before you wins the whole game — so actually there are only winners. Adding the timer creates the tension that most non-competitive games are missing.
Elan: When we sent it to test families, two things happened: 100% said yes they wanted to play again. And nobody sent the game back. We lost so many copies. It’s currently the number-one bestselling game in the world.
The Tim Ferriss Game [01:32:00]
Shaan: You made a game with Tim Ferriss. How did that go?
Elan: After his podcast interview, he said “I’ve always wanted to make a game — can we talk about it?” Which is like Matt Inman asking if he can be your partner. The answer is always yes.
Elan: He’s obsessed with Poetry for Neanderthals — one of our games, currently in the top five. So I knew the parameters: creativity component, heavily players-entertaining-other-players, fast, funny, learnable in one minute.
Elan: I brought suitcases full of games to his house. None of them were right. After months, we were on a six-hour walk and I said: “Let’s start as basic as it gets. What about rock-paper-scissors?” Tim likes rock-paper-scissors. And the thing is — playing it once is dumb. Playing it twice starts to get interesting: “What did he do last time? What am I going to do?” All that meta-thinking kicks in at game two.
Elan: So I said: what if instead of three options — rock, paper, scissors — we had 25? And a hierarchy between all of them? And everyone plays simultaneously? We ran back to the house and started writing cards as fast as we could. By hour four, I asked the room: “Anybody want to play again?” Both of them: “Hell yes.”
Elan: We kept inviting friends over, kept asking “do you want to play again?” — rinse, repeat, remove a card, write a new card. That’s how every game gets made. Those blank cards I carry everywhere — they can become dice, boards, spinners. I carry them in my backpack because I never know when the next idea is coming.
Sam: You have this quote — you took a skydiving course and asked the instructor if he ever got bored. He said, “Do you ever get bored of having sex?” That’s how you feel about games.
Elan: That’s it exactly. It’s not a thing with an expiration. It’s a little dopamine factory. I was at an airport once — flight cancelled, everyone miserable, screaming at gate agents. And in one corner: six kids giggling. Playing Exploding Kittens. I walked over and thought: this is it. This is why I have this job.