Exploding Your Community: The Story of Exploding Kittens

When you’re looking to learn about crowdfunding from others, you can’t simply ignore a project that lands in the Kickstarter Top 10 in under 48 hours.

One look at the creators behind the Exploding Kittens Kickstarter project and you can see why it did.

Elan Lee and Shane Small tell stories for a living. Both have been heavily involved in the gaming industry for years. They are joined by Matthew Inman (AKA The Oatmeal), and in late January 2015, they launched a card game that took Kickstarter by storm.

The game

I like a good game, but this game sounds actually good.

Crowdfunding experience

This isn’t the first crowdfunding campaign linked to Inman. In fact, it was through his blog, The Oatmeal, that I was first exposed to the idea.

In 2012, Inman ran two projects on Indiegogo. For the first, Inman battled a frivolous lawsuit by raising money in what became known as BearLove Good. Cancer Bad. All the money was to go to charity in a big eff-you response to a copyright claim.

A month or two later, he helped to raise $1.3 million dollars to buy the land once owned by Nicola Tesla, and turn it into a museum dedicated to the eccentric scientist.

Any interesting, quirky project related to Inman would have managed to raise the very achievable funding goal of $10,000, but Exploding Kittens raised 87,820 times that amount.

 The campaign

The game reached it’s funding goal in an astounding 7 minutes. A week into the project, and it was fast approaching $4 million dollars, and had already become the biggest Kickstarter community with over 101,000 backers.

While it was always unlikely to knock The Coolest Cooler off it’s perch as the most funded (at the time), it took the crown for ‘largest community’ from Reading Rainbow very early on.

And it’s community is what really sets Exploding Kittens apart for a case study.

What did they do differently?

Apart from having a great product, an experienced team, and a raving fanbase?

They valued that fan base. The first stretch goal (turning an expansion pack into a stand-alone game) was triggered at 100,000 community members – not at a monetary goal.

The team had initially said they didn’t want to do more stretch goals in order to avoid complicating the project, stating in the now somewhat infamous Update 9:

The team put together a set of “Backer Achievements” to unlock; therefore sending the Internet temporarily crazy putting people dressed as Batman into hottubs (you can’t make this up).

The announcement of these achievements was made on February 4. The idea was that more achievements backers ‘unlocked’, the better their product would become. When they unlocked 20 ‘achievements’, the second stretch goal would be released. A third goal was to be attained at 30 ‘achievements’.

The image below was updated on the Kickstarter page as achievements were ‘unlocked’.

Photos were submitted via Twitter to a dedicated account using the hashtags #Update9 and #ExplodingKittens. They were then collated in Facebook galleries.

This tactic came into play right in the middle of the campaign. This is when crowdfunders find the pledges slow to a dribble. In the case of Exploding Kittens, it served to ensure people were still talking about the project, and that the pledges continued to roll in.

On February 10, the backers unlocked the next stretch goal – an upgrade to the box. And on February 17, the final stretch goal was unlocked as well.

The Final Countdown

– Exploding Kittens, Update 12

Most projects gain a pretty significant amount of their funds in the final 3 days. It’s part of the Golden Gate Bridge Effect. Exploding Kittens took advantage of this, announcing a 3-Day Backer Party in it’s February 17 update.

It had the desired effect, with the project not only collecting an additional $2 million dollars of pledges in it’s final three days, but also adding 51,428 backers to it’s community.

This meant that Exploding Kittens managed to raise 25% of it’s funding total AND backers in the last three days of the campaign alone.

How did they do it?

Day 1: Twitter Drinking Game and The Oatmeal Illustrates Your Comments

Amount pledged: $506,281

New backers: 12,210

Comments received: 7,813

Every so often The Oatmeal decides to draw fan photos or illustrate comments. He’s done it before on Facebook and Twitter. It’s sometimes bizarre, often funny, and always popular.

You can see in the Kicktraq stats at the top of the page that the backer comments spiked on this day, with almost 8000 backer comments submitted – 4 times the daily average for the project.

The illustrations were put on Twitter and uploaded to Facebook throughout the day, gaining more exposure through shares and retweets.

The drinking game itself also got the project trending on Twitter. According to the rules of the game, there were two hashtags to use: #BackerParty and #ExplodingKittens.

As you can see from the Topsy trends below, the drinking game had the desired effect, with mentions of both hashtags spiking.

There is little doubt that the extra exposure generated by these activities contributed to the more than half a million dollars the project collected on this day.

Day 2: Animal Shelter Pizza Parties

– Source: Newsweek

Amount pledged: $507,754

New backers: 12,498

Pizza parties held: 50

Reciprocity is not only understood to be a major contributor to crowdfunding success, it’s also one of Robert Cialdini’s “Weapons of Influence”.

When you are sitting on the most successful gaming project of all time, you’re going to be incredibly grateful. And the best way to express gratitude is to give back.

So on Day 2 of the Backer Party, the Exploding Kittens team sent over 1000 slices of pizza to 50 cat shelters all around America.

To get a pizza delivered, cat shelters needed to take a photo of their team holding a #RSVPizza sign. As you can see from the Topsy trends, this stunt got a third hashtag trending for the team.

Images from shelters containing happy volunteers, cute cats, and delicious pizza were posted to Twitter, and another Facebook album.

It stands to reason that the internet loves cats and pizza. The project gained another half a million dollars.

Day 3: Reddit AMA

Amount pledged: $1,078,497

New backers: 26,720

While I am dubious of the impact of Facebook on a campaign, and the impact of Twitter tends to be more about awareness than pledges, there is one place that always gets the pledges rolling in: Reddit.

An AMA (‘Ask Me Anything’) is a sure-fire way for a project of this magnitude to gain further exposure to an audience who love geek culture and all things meme. This was an ideal place to finish the campaign.

In general, the last day of a campaign will always provide a spike. The Kickstarter reminders go out to backers and it is the last chance to get on board. Many backers make their move in the final 24 hours.

But the Exploding Kittens AMA was also popular, and allowed the project to ‘give back’ and celebrate the last couple of hours with their fans. The team rolled over the finish line at $8,782,571 pledged by 219,382 backers.

Conclusion

Exploding Kittens was always going to succeed.

It had a good product, a “superstar creator”, a willing audience, and a laughably achievable goal.

It’s real genius is in how it harnessed it’s community to spread the word and have some fun. This is how it went on to do so well.

A week into the campaign, I predicted it would make between $6 and $8 million. This prediction, while still somewhat accurate, did not take into account the stretch goal strategy or the final 3 day backer party.

The Exploding Kittens team made their campaign a two-way dialogue with their backers, and the gratitude for the opportunity the internet gave them shines through throughout the entire campaign.

If you want to build a community from your crowd, there aren’t many projects that have done it better to date.