My First Million · Episode Brief
The Board Game Billionaire: From a $10k Kickstarter to $100M/Year Business
Elan Lee's definition of 'entertaining' is the opposite of what you'd expect from a $100M game company founder, and that's exactly why it works.
Exploding Kittens went from a $10K Kickstarter to the most-backed game in Kickstarter history (at the time) to $100M+ in annual revenue — a trajectory that makes it easy to assume the success was about product design or marketing. Elan Lee's explanation is more surprising: the product succeeded because of a deliberate decision to make the game not entertaining.
That sounds like a paradox until Lee explains what he means. Entertainment is passive — you sit back and receive it. What he was trying to create was something that generated stories between the players, which requires the game itself to step back and let the humans drive. The cards in Exploding Kittens are triggers for social interaction, not objects of entertainment in themselves. This is why the game works at parties and family gatherings in a way that more technically sophisticated games don't — it's engineered for human chemistry rather than for replay value.
The $0 marketing hacks segment is where the episode becomes most immediately useful. Exploding Kittens built its initial audience almost entirely through the webcomic 'The Oatmeal,' whose creator Matthew Inman was a co-founder. The insight isn't 'partner with a popular creator' — that's obvious advice. The insight is that the Kickstarter campaign succeeded because it was designed to be shareable: the card backs had jokes on them, the stretch goals were ridiculous and funny, and every update email gave backers something to forward to friends. The product was designed to spread.
The 'irritation is the source of innovation' principle that closes the episode is Elan's meta-framework: he finds ideas by noticing what consistently annoys him about experiences, then asking what the version would look like that solved the annoyance without sacrificing what was good about the original. Most game design starts from 'what would be cool' — his starts from 'what's broken about what already exists.'
Key Ideas
- →Lee's core design principle: games should not be entertaining in the traditional sense — they should be triggers for human interaction, stepping back to let players create the memorable moments themselves.
- →The Kitty Test pilot process: Lee would test new card designs with his cats as a proxy for 'will this make a human laugh when completely out of context?' — a strange but effective filter for absurdist humor.
- →Exploding Kittens' Kickstarter succeeded partly because the campaign itself was designed to spread: funny emails, ridiculous stretch goals, and card backs that gave backers something worth sharing before the product even shipped.
- →The 'creativity loves constraints' argument — Lee contends that having fewer resources forced decisions that improved the product, and that the instinct to add features is almost always wrong.
- →The 'irritation as innovation' heuristic: Lee's best ideas come from cataloguing what consistently annoys him about existing products, then designing the version that removes the annoyance without losing the core value.
Worth Remembering
Elan explaining why games should not be entertaining — and Sam and Shaan's slow realization that this is actually a profound product design principle, not just a provocative statement.
The Tim Ferriss game design collaboration: a story about trying to turn a friendship into a product, which revealed more about what makes creative partnerships work than the game itself.
The '$0 marketing hacks' segment, which turns out to be about embedding shareability into the product itself rather than spending on distribution — a principle that applies far beyond board games.
Lee's observation that 'doing what never makes you bored' is both career advice and a startup filter — the companies that succeed over a decade are usually the ones where the founders would have done the work anyway.