Find co-creators everywhere, w/Exploding Kittens' Elan Lee

23:32It was like that scene in Jaws where they see the shark for the first time and he backs up into the boat and he basically says, we're going to need a bigger boat. It was that degree of terror. Tahirah Fallon can conquer one of the biggest Kickstarter orders of all time with all of his limbs intact. Stay tuned until after the break.

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25:50We're back with Alon Lee. To see exclusive clips from my interview with Alon, head to the Master's Scale YouTube channel. You'll hear how Alon is using AI every day to streamline his creative process.

26:07Before the break, we heard how Alon and artist Matthew Inman created the tabletop game Exploding Kittens. The project became one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns of all time, engaging the games community to create their own social content and spark new additions to the product. Now, though, we rejoin Alon in the midst of a crisis. He's tasked with fulfilling 700 ,000 orders of exploding kittens in six months. However, Alon's fear went beyond an expected missed delivery date. I think what was at stake at that moment was our initial reputation as a provider of games. The danger of inviting in co-creators is that you are obliged to them.

26:56Once you've gotten them fully on board to your idea, you can't leave them hanging. Alain found himself with a mountain to climb. We had to figure out where to get cardboard from. We had to hire giant ships to move this thing across the water. We had to then rent out warehouses. We had to figure out trucks and rentals and postage and getting all these things everywhere. Holy crap, that's a lot of work.

27:22Overwhelmed, Alon reached out to Carly McGinnis, his old assistant from his time at Xbox. While she too didn't have experience in mass production, she was organized and driven, exactly what Alon needed to tackle this challenge. He has the vision and the ideas, the details not so good at. I see a butterfly floating by and I'm off. So I balance him very well in the sense that I'm all about the details. During her time at Xbox with Elan, Carly learned how to work best with creatives like him. Often they have brilliant ideas, but just at the last moment possible. And that somehow ends up being the best idea.

28:07If you can relate to Carly, she has some advice. What I've learned is pad your deadlines, lie to them, and outlining the cost of what it's going to be if we don't execute by this date. While I wouldn't endorse lying to your collaborators, creativity in production can certainly be a yin and yang. You need the co-evolution of both in unison to progress. Too much focus on production alone can stagnate creativity, but too much creativity in isolation, and the product or project won't see the light of day. With the 700 ,000 orders still looming, Alain had little time to spare. He arranged an urgent lunch with Carly to fill her in on his wild adventure.

28:55I said, look, I've got to figure out how to make 700 ,000 copies of this game. Do you mind helping? I trusted Alon, but I was unsure, am I going to be able to do this? Not only was this something outside of Carly's wheelhouse, but she was also still working comfortably at Microsoft. To jump ship and join Alon on this project was a massive risk. But what appealed most to Carly was Alon's drive to embrace her as a co-creator. From her time as his assistant, she already had a clear sense of their working dynamic. I wanted to voice my opinion, and Alon really championed me there. He didn't micromanage me.

29:36He trusted me. Trust is kind of the biggest thing you're looking for. When you trust a collaborator with a lot of responsibility, you're opening the door to a true co-creator relationship. This allows for co-creators to emerge throughout any stage of a product's life cycle, and not just at the moment of ideation. This organic approach to collaboration demands you sharing the spotlight. But what you gain is agility and diverse expertise. Alon's trust in Carly to run production won her over. She decided to leave Microsoft and join Exploding Kittens. Bursting with equal parts anxiety and excitement, Alon showed Carly how to play Exploding Kittens by writing down the instructions.

30:23He had written them front and back on an index card. And he gave them to me, and I looked at them, and I said, like, I don't understand this at all. Like, what is this? We're supposed to learn through this? And I remember thinking, God, we have so far to go. Co-creation isn't always a show of unconditional support. In this instance, Carly didn't understand the game whatsoever. She showed Alon that the instructions needed to improve if anyone else were to share in his enthusiasm for the product. Over time, the pair got the rules down to a clear, understandable brief. You'll have a hand of cards.

31:00Each one of those cards is going to help you avoid drawing the exploding kitten. So, one of them might let you peek at the top few cards before you draw them. One of them might let you skip your turn. One of them might let you shuffle the whole deck before you draw. Your actual turn consists of playing as many of the cards in your hand as you would like to alter the deck in your favor. And then you draw the top card from the draw pile and hope it's not an exploding kitten. Go around the table, continuing this process. Eventually, everybody is going to draw an exploding kitten except for one player.

31:34That player, last person standing, is the winner of the game. That's it. On the production front, Carly's first step to developing a strategy was to tap the team's network. Kickstarter and the tabletop industry are extremely supportive. We decided to call everybody we know. I was friends with a few folks at Cards Against Humanity, and they have one of the biggest games in the world. We had partnered to learn what they had gone through. They were also a Kickstarter. And they introduced us to a wonderful woman named Sherry Spiro, who has a company called Breaking Games. Having been one of the few independent games businesses to successfully fulfill an order of this size, Cards Against Humanity and their partner, Sherry Spiro, were the perfect industry figures to shadow.

32:23She said, come to me and I can help you connect with manufacturers in China. I can help you with the freight. I know Cards Against Humanity has a sister company called Black Box. They are a fulfillment network. They were not quite ready yet to launch this business and, thankfully, decided to use us as a guinea pig. Carly saw this as an opportunity for a mutually beneficial co-creator relationship. The lack of experience, however, led to more than a few hiccups. There were tears. We had a cargo ship just lose containers into the ocean. We had a cargo ship catch on fire. Despite these challenges, Carly kept the production process on track.

33:04Six months after the Kickstarter campaign ended and the last photo of a cat dressed as a taco was captured, Alon set out an update to the game's 700 ,000 backers. Surprise, everybody gets your order tomorrow. I'm so proud of that because every night was sleepless. Every night was work until 3 a.m., wake up at 8 a.m. the next day and start over. For six months, that's what we had to do to get those things out the door. And we were on time with every single one of those orders. Alon credits Carly with the ultimate success of the campaign. What he found in Carly was a counterweight co-creator, meaning the skills Alon lacked Carly possessed and vice versa.

33:49It's important to be honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses. In the race to scale, you'll need a diverse skill set that is often impossible to find in one person alone.

34:06Impressed by Carly's ability to lead through chaos, Alon later made her the president of Exploding Kittens, Inc. With the Kickstarter campaign completed, Alon, Matthew, and Carly finally had a moment to process the new state of play. This was a success despite ourselves. We really did not understand what we were creating or what to do with it after we were done sending out all those games. Where in this part of the thing did it become a, like, this isn't just a Kickstarter, a fun creative project. When does it become a company? Yeah. I think step one was retail. Because we knew that all of the supply chain stuff, we could slowly bring in-house.

34:49That was just a matter of hiring the right people and putting those structures in place. Retail is really tricky. The big ones are Walmart and Amazon and Target. And the way that those companies work is for toys and games, they really only have one buyer. And they only really have time to meet with like, I don't know, 10 or a dozen companies. So I thought, if they're only going to meet with 10 people, how do we become number 11? And that's tough. They almost never take on new people. Alon met with one of the retail representatives and asked, what is it going to take for Exploding Kittens to be sold in your stores?

35:25They said, well, you need a handful of games, and every one of them has to be a bestseller. Multiple number one hit games? Surely, it's hard enough creating one. Regardless, Alon accepted this challenge. Before you could go about designing new games to be sold alongside Exploding Kittens, Alon had to decipher what made Exploding Kittens a success in the first place. What was the secret sauce that he could replicate for future success? I think the secret is just one line. We don't make entertaining games. We make games that make the people you're playing with entertaining. This approach to gaming was inspired by Alon's childhood spent playing games with his brothers and sister.

36:12We're playing board games every single day. I honestly don't remember what the games are. What I remember is laughing, throwing things, forming secret alliances and betrayals, the fighting and the camaraderie. I remember all that bonding. Because the games were just a tool set to make us the entertainment. Alon insisted that all the games he designed should have this ethos as their underlying principle. Every single card is an invitation to have an interaction with another player. Anytime you play a card, you're about to hurt someone, to help someone, to form an alliance with someone. You're about to do that, like it or not, because every single card is designed to make the people you're playing with entertaining.

37:00With this structure in mind, Elan began to design more games for Exploding Kittens, Inc. Designing a game is a major feat in itself. Iterating on it to create an experience that users want to return to again and again is a whole other thing. The only way these games could become additional number one hits is if they tested through the roof, indicating to Elan that they're ready for launch. But Elan wasn't satisfied with the standard process for game testing. Traditionally, the way that game testing works is you hire a group, they do these blind tests, everyone sits in a room, there's a one-way mirror, you watch people play the games.

37:38It's horrible. And I looked at that trying to figure out, like, why are these tests so bad? Why are we pouring all this money into it and literally learning nothing? And the reason is because nobody plays games like that. None of that feels natural. Alon believed that the whole industry precedent for game testing was useless. So he decided to try something that few other game companies had. We thought, we got all these players from Kickstarter who love our game. They're all playing it with their friends and family. What if we just wrote to all of them and said, we got more games. We'll send them to you for free.

38:16All we want in return is film yourself playing the game and send us the film. We just want to see how you play and what worked and what didn't work. Rather than test the games on strangers, Alon went directly to the people who loved the original Exploding Kittens game. These are testers who would already be excited to influence and co-create games for the business. Alon named this new program the Kiddie Test Pilots.

38:48Hundreds of families registered to play the games in the comfort of their own home and share their feedback. Our games have gotten so good as a result of this. We have figured out how to take six pages of instructions and shrink it down to one page because these incredible families have helped us, guide us through that process. The testing improvements helped Elon and the team get one step closer to launching a whole batch of vetted games. Not only did the testing environment radically evolve the process, Elon also experimented with how the business sought feedback from the users. The industry standard for game testing, you finish testing a game and then you give them a questionnaire.

39:29There's 25 questions on there. Did you like the setup? Did you understand? And when you finish playing our games, there's one question on the whole survey, which is, do you want to play again? That's it. That's all I care about. When a game hits 100 % yes, we're going to ship that game. The games that came out of the kiddie test pilots included Throw Throw Burrito. Throw Throw Burrito is the first of its kind. It's a combination of card games and dodgeball. You've got crabs. How are you kids? Do you like keeping secrets? Do you like crabs? Then I've got the game for you. and bears versus babies.

40:03The goal of the game is to build adorable, magnificent, glorious bears and other monsters to eat the horrible, horrible babies. President of the company, Carly, was able to form a partnership with Amazon to get these games into an online marketplace. To attract the major retailers, these new games needed to sell like hotcakes on Amazon and through the Exploding Kittens website. Thankfully, Elan began to notice a major byproduct of the team's kitty test pilots. When those games go out, those families not only have prototype versions, but they also get the final version. That's the greatest marketing campaign ever because they helped make it.

40:41They're the ones that go post to social. They're the ones that go tell their friends. And they all get to shout, I helped make this. They're the ones who go to stores. and when it's not in the store, they demand that store start stocking that particular game. This is a great example of a promotional co-creator. The best case scenario for your business is that you inspire consumers to become stakeholders in the work you do and willingly share and market your products organically. When you create products that have this sort of an impact, you know it's something special. With each game released, Elan made it impossible for the major retailers not to take notice.

41:21We produced another game. It immediately shot to number one. We produced the third game. That one shot to number one. We produced the fourth game. Same thing. They'd done it. As impossible as the challenge seemed to create multiple back-to-back hit games, Elan and his team of co-creators around the country pulled it off. Once we got to that point, We now had the leverage to go to Walmart and Target and say, add us to your list. And they finally did. Once we had that, we're in an incredible position to negotiate now. Once exploding kittens and Alon's other games hit the shelves of major retailers, success continued year after year.

42:05The production structure and testing process that they built over time could now scale and flourish.

42:16To date, they've sold over 65 million units worldwide. Despite all of Alon's success, he's not done reshaping the games industry just yet. His most surprising encounter with a co-creator occurred while laying on his living room floor. I have a five-year-old daughter. And right around four, you start buying games for your kids, right? You go out to the store and you buy Candyland and all the rest of it. And we would play those games and it sucked. It was so miserable. Those games are awful. To someone like Elan, who really knows games, a game like Candyland can set him on a tirade. There's no skill.

42:55There's no strategy. There's no decision-making even, right? It's roll a die, move a piece. Roll a die, move a piece. Why am I in this room? There's no point in me being here. While Elan was losing the will to live, his daughter was having a blast. However, one day, she did notice her father's irritation. She's like, why aren't you happy? And I said, well, this game isn't fun for me. I know it's fun for you, but it's really not fun for me. And she looked at me and she simply said, let's fix it. And my brain exploded. Not only did Alain's new co-creator show him the potential to take Candyland apart and recreate it in a new image, but he also saw endless possibilities to build games with his daughter's unique perspective.

43:38This childlike naivete is something entrepreneurs should follow. Children are great at calling up basic failings in the status quo that we as adults can take for granted. Let's fix it should be a rallying cry for entrepreneurs everywhere.

43:59I started thinking about Pixar in particular. because Pixar looked at the movie industry and said, movies for kids are no fun for adults, but they could be. What if we made a movie that was equally fun for kids and adults? And I thought, why hasn't anyone done that for games? Why isn't this as much fun for me as it is for her? Over the course of a year, Alon and his daughter sat on their dining room table, building worlds and creating innovative games from scratch. Every night, we built games together. And we started out building some terrible ones. And we had to work through the process of me teaching her what I knew and she teaching me what was really appealing to her and the character design and the mechanics.

44:42And we finished four games. The games. I want my teeth back. Hurry up, chicken butt. The best, worst ice cream. And my parents might be Martians. Didn't get any special treatment just because Elan's daughter created them. They went through the same rigorous testing as all the others. they are now in target all four of them

45:09we sit down we play these games and half the time she beats me even though i'm not letting her win they are equally fun for parents and adults holy crap wow that was hard to design your average co-creator often won't take the shape of a five-year-old girl but it's a great example of how radical collaboration and a willingness to look for co-creators anywhere can lead to your most extraordinary creations. By expanding the way we typically look for a co-creator, Alain sparked a new era of multi-generational games. And for his daughter, well, she can experience something few five-year-olds ever have.

45:49She gets to walk down the aisle at Target and look at those games and her name is on the box. And that's the greatest thing ever. I feel my cheeks flushing because it's just, it makes me so happy to think about that. Discovering and onboarding a new co-creator isn't just a way to bolster your product. It also plays into the most fundamental element of entrepreneurship, relationships. Your relationships live beyond any product or business. The more we lean into human connectivity, the stronger our leadership and ability to connect with consumers and partners. Evaluate your network and see who could potentially be your next co-creator.

46:35Maybe start by inviting them over for a game night. I'm Reid Hoffman. Thanks for listening. This is Emily Warden, Capital One Business customer and owner of Emily Warden Designs, a bespoke fine jewelry store that quickly gained buzz after opening its doors in Richmond, Virginia. My customer base grew exponentially once we had a storefront. We had one engagement ring case at the time, and we had lines out the door every weekend. As her storefront continued to have record sales, Emily knew it was time to up-level production. We normally just purchase diamonds in very small batches or per order. So we wanted to invest in not just one or two pieces, but a collection of natural diamonds.

47:23Emily knew creating a collection would be a big investment, but with the help of her Capital One business card, she was ready to bet on herself and bet big. It was about$40 ,000,$45 ,000 all in up front. Having the Capital One card was definitely reassuring to be able to make such a large investment purchase. And of course, to get the cash back that came with it. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards. AI agents can make your teams more productive, but if they aren't connected to other agents or your data or your existing workflows, they can only take you so far. Any business can add AI agents, but IBM connects your agents across your company to change how you do business.

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48:29Our director is Ryan Holiday. Original music and sound design by Eduardo Rivera, Ryan Holiday, Hayes Holiday, and Nate Kinsella. Audio editing by Keith J. Nelson, Stephen Davies, Stephen Wells, Andrew Nault, and Liam Jenkins. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastinelli and Brian Pugh. Our CEO and chairman of the board is Jeff Berman. Masters of Scale was created by June Cohen and Darren Triff. Special thanks to Jodine D 'Orsay, Alfonso Bravo, Tim Cronin, Erica Flynn, Sarah Tartar, Kitty Blazing, Mariel Kurekker, Chinime Ezequena, Colin Howarth, Brandon Klein, Sammy Oputa, Kelsey Saison, Luisa Velez, Nikki Williams, and Justin Winslow.

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49:25Thank you.