The Board Game Billionaire: From a $10k Kickstarter to $100M/Year Business

we launched this thing saying alright let's let's aim for ten thousand dollars we hit our ten thousand dollar goal in seven minutes and in the first forty eight hours we had two million dollars after that is when the story gets really interesting i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel every okay well good sam do you want me to kick it off yeah wait well yeah i do first of all sean how did you guys even come in the same world craig so we invited craig to the event because craig is one of my favorite people even though he has us to play basketball we're like craig you gotta be there you're the the the exemption you know you you're not basketball guy but we just want you there for sure we told him what it was he got excited and he goes i have somebody who i think should come and we were like okay great who's the plus one and he was i guess how long have you guys been friends the it's gotta be a decade now it's so funny because he called me up and he's like okay i have the weirdest invitation ever it's a basketball event but i'm not going to be playing basketball and i'm was like okay that's as weird as it gets and then we started talking and i'm so glad i went it was amazing yeah that's actually a big leap of faith for you because you know we know craig so obviously you know there's a personal connection connect what what did he say that made you get off the couch for that i mean random he didn't he honestly didn't give me many details but in general craig is one of those people on this list i have where if he says to try something i just try it and don't ask questions there's only like four people on that list but he's on there so i'm so glad i did it exactly and ever since we met shit that event i was like okay we have to have you on because you blew us away just to give people context alright so there's a room full of people imagine twenty five we tried to invite the twenty five most interesting ambitious people that we could find who also love like basketball in this case and the room is like i mean it's basically like thirty percent billionaire and and so there's a lot of successful people in that room and i would say you blew us away the most you gave this talk that really kind of inspired us and i would say you blows away for three reasons number one your business is a like a giant dragon but it looks like a playful cute dragon and so you know people don't look at it and think wow this is a juggernaut you have a board games company if anybody's ever seen the the games like exploding kittens that's your game and not only is that your game you were telling us we were like so like of the top games like you know is yours number one and you i don't know if i wanna para phrase you exactly but you go we have number one two four and five of the top five sold games in the world and i just thought that was incredible so you have this huge business but you have this artist spirit where you're the nicest guy and you're creatively driven it didn't seem like you've got into this for the money you got into this to have fun and you gave this talk at night this little presentation a little ten minute presentation that blew us all the way so that's why i wanted you to be here you can respond to that and then sam i hear your impressions too before we jump in well first of all you even before like i would just love to say that is so flattering like i showed up to that event like about as fish out of water as it gets and impostor syndrome like you know dripping out my ears it was just this this room is filled with incredible people and sean i think it was you i think i think the very first few minutes i remember i i i i ask i asked you like why are we here like what is this thing and you see you had the best answer ever you said everyone in this room is smarter than i am i'm gonna spend the next three days learning as much as i can i hope you're here for the same reasons and i was just like holy crap i have found my tribe but here's where i wanna be this is so great there was one moment when i was with you in the asana and you asked me and maybe austin reid for someone like that you're like can i get your guys as opinion on something and you like express like you know opinions on an investor conversation something you're like can you just give me your take on this and we gave you our opinions and you asked the question in a way where i thought i was helping you and then i was like how big is your business and then you said the numbers and my reply was why are you asking me this question like you are you you it's so funny you win the award for most humble person because you're acting like you are in this room of big shots when like of all the people there you were the big shot are you able to give any numbers whatever you're comfortable with to give the audience a sense of how big exploding kittens is like if it's valuation game sold revenue anything you want i i have to be a little careful because we have investors who who like to keep it under wraps but i'll i'll tell you this we sell we did this math this was so ridiculous we sell a game every six point four seconds round the clock and our first like we started our company on kickstarter in thirty days we're were trying to raise ten thousand dollars we raised almost nine million instead our first our first print run was seven hundred thousand units and that was mind blowing like how the hell you print seven hundred thousand games and for scale i'll tell you that is today like so such a tiny print order for us like i wouldn't even consider printing that many because they'd sell out so fast it wouldn't even be worth a while one of the coolest things was when you took us we went to target and walmart and we were walking around the store and you took us to the games aisle of a target you were just kinda breaking it down like this shelf the shelf that i've walked by hundreds of times don't really pay much you know i don't even think about it i just i either buy something or i don't i don't think about the business of the shelf and you talked about this sort of like and you know this sort of six foot six foot space and it was like this shelf is like i i mean i won't use your numbers but i'll just give it generic idea of like this shelf is like hundreds of millions of dollars and every inch of this shelf if for target the way they think is like sales per square inch or something like that if you were describing how that works and then you were like yeah you know i'm trying to figure out our walmart sales so i'm gonna go work as a walmart associate for the next few weeks just to get kind of an on the ground look and not like a marketing stunt you were like no i genuinely wanna know so and you said you're gonna do that right after our effect did you end up doing it yeah and they postpone it this honestly this this tariff thing right now has turned everything into quite turmoil but it looks like it's going to now be scheduled for september so i'll be going to arkansas to work good walmart for a bit but the whole reason it's you're right it's not a stunt like my goal isn't like hey i wanna tell the world about this and and and get publicity like in order to sell products at any retail location you have to understand all the customer and you have to understand when they're walking into a space what are they looking for and what turns them off and what turns them on and if they pick up a game and then put it back why did they put it back and it's not so much of it is contextual it's not necessarily the game right it's not necessarily i looked at this game and it wasn't for me it's i looked at this game and then something else caught my eye so i put this down and i picked it up and and those are the stories i need to hear in order to be as successful as possible and i just figured finally like the only way i'm gonna get this is by living there and spending as long as it takes to talk to people and figure out like why'd did you put that game down why why'd you pick that one up why why'd did you walk in here to begin with and yeah i just think i have so much to learn i'm really excited to do it how big is the company in terms of employees and how old is it company is we just had our ten year anniversary so we just turned ten we got about a hundred employees a little less and yeah we're we're based out los angeles although that we've got offices in canada and in europe and kinda all over the everywhere we have a distribution center we also have an office so give us the origin story so how do you how did you do this why did you why did you decide to create a board game and then how did you do this kickstarter that blue everybody's socks off you and you set out to raise ten k and instead you raised nine million or something like that and and then now it's this company that's making you know i don't know exactly how much makeup that you don't it if to confirm or deny but i'll just put it out there i think you've built a billion dollar games company and in a space that i think most people the cool part is most people think you either are gonna choose something for the money i gotta go do this sweaty b to b you know business the hr tech whatever or i'm gonna have fun i'm gonna build something cool that's fun that won't give people delight and enjoy you got both you did both you did the fun thing and you ended up with the money prize too that's why i love about your story and so how the heck did this happened can you just tell us the kinda of origins sure yeah it's a bizarre story so i used to work i i've been designing games for my whole life but the the most notable place i worked was at the xbox i was the chief design officer there building games for the xbox forever ever and i remember one day so one day i my my brother he's got two kids and i love them my niece and nephew they're the best and zeke and k and i i walked over to their house i was so excited to see them and they were playing xbox when i walk in and i was like hey yeah how's everybody doing and they like didn't even look up like didn't even acknowledge my existence and to add insult to injury they were playing a game that i designed and i was like oh i've broken something so fundamental here like this just feels wrong and within two weeks i resigned from xbox and thought whatever i do next it has to capture what i remember in my childhood right like when i think about playing games there you know other than the nes there really weren't any consoles at all so we were playing around the table and we were cheating and kicking each other under the table and throwing food and and making all those like alliances and and betray each other and all this fun stuff i don't even remember what the games were i remember the relationships and it's because we like looked each other in the eye and we and we like could lie right to each other's faces or it's you know secretly cons conspired to make you know my younger brother lose so i was a favorite activity but i remember all these really fun things that were i think very formative for me and so when i resigned i thought i wanna return to that and certainly the first step is really simple i'm just gonna design this very simple card game and see like kickstarter exists i'll put this thing up on kickstarter i'll try to raise just a little tiny bit of money what's a little bit like ten thousand dollars you thought ten thousand dollars and ten thousand dollars wasn't an arbitrary number i like i called up a printer and i said look i wanna do this thing what's the minimum print run and he said you gotta print out you know i think it was like four hundred units i was like okay well how much is that cost and it came out to just about ten thousand dollars and i was there we go and this was really because of you felt some type of guilt about your your family being using screens yeah i felt like i was on the wrong path i felt like i was part of the problem instead of part of the solution was that a big fit like were you getting wealthy from that job i mean cheap design officer sounds like your your that's a big deal if you had asked me then the answer would have been yes now my scale is a little bit different and and and so when you when you do this you've never made a card game before right you've never not something you grew up doing you new your you're a beginner at this stage totally literally my first try but the stakes are so low right like if i'm just gonna be making a few hundred units even if the thing is totally broken that's okay people you know they're gonna pay twenty bucks for this thing they know this is my first time ever trying this like this will be easy right and i showed the game to a bunch of friends and one of those friends was matthew wit and he is the creator of the oatmeal the online comic it's like the funniest guy i know and he's like he's the audience whisperer like he knows how to command a crap and he knows how to get their attention and he has i how to keep them engaged and just this incredible brilliant mind and i showed him this game and he said what's it called i says it's called bomb squad because we got a deck cards and there's a few bombs in the deck and those are the bad ones we try to avoid the bombs and all you're trying to do is get through the deck and not draw bomb and he said a few things he said one this is the best game i've ever played i would really really like to work on this with you will you please let me work on this with you so and i was like yes like hell yes if if the o'neil ever asks you if you can work on a game with you your answer is yes like holy crap one opportunity and he said cool the second thing is we can't call it bomb squad because it's too obvious like bombs are bad of course you're scared of the bomb there's bombs in the deck you're scared of the bombs it's called bombs squad who cares you're gonna forget that in five seconds what if instead the thing that you were most scared of were cute adorable fuzzy little kittens and we'll call the game exploding kittens and dead and that's really the origin story like that one simple conversation happened to meet the right person at the right time and we decided to collaborate on this thing and then we had the discussion with the distributor and he's like matt said we're gonna make we're gonna do more than four hundred units i was like i don't know i don't know this is this is totally risky neither of us of made a game before and so a friend of mine a guy named dan shapiro he runs glow forge he gave me this incredible advice when i was talking to him about what number to set our kickstarter campaign he said look when this campaign runs you had no control like there's gonna be store hopefully stories written about your campaign but you don't control any of them they get to set the narrative and you just sort hold on but what you can control are the stories that are like tried to raise x instead raised y hit their goal in x minutes right right all of these statistics data driven stories you control those by setting that one number that you have control over setting that at the appropriate place and he was totally right and so we set it at ten thousand knowing this is probably a little low but it is the truthful minimum that we need for our order minimum and now we can control those stories where any of you guys like famous back that i know the i know what the oatmeal is but is that like a big enough where you're like where he's like a dude i'll blow this up just like tell me what it it turns out the answer is yes but none of us really knew it at the time so like we launched this thing saying alright let's let's aim for ten thousand dollars because of matt matt made a single post saying pay oatmeal fans for the first time ever i made a game i'm really proud of it i hope you like it here it is and we hit our ten thousand dollar goal in seven minutes and it's because of that a hundred percent that he made one post hit hit ten thousand dollars and then within the first twelve hours maybe maybe it was closer to twenty fourth ten years ago we we raised a million dollars a hundred percent because of that and in the first forty eight hours we had two million dollars a hundred percent because of that after that is when the story gets really interesting because forty eight hours in all the oatmeal fans that are gonna back this thing have backed it right they've seen as post they know what they know they're interested in this thing or they decide they're not interested in this thing and they've either purchased it or not and that's it the sales price on that is two million dollars amazing like we are off to the races we can do anything now we've raised two million dollars and matt and i sat down and we're like okay we now have a choice either we can say we have raised two million dollars that is one of the most successful kickstarter campaigns in history in the games category and we can just kinda ride this thing out knowing that we're not gonna raise much more than that maybe we'll get to two point five and we'll declare that a huge victory or we bet it all like what if we just went absolutely crazy and deployed every marketing strategy either of us have ever heard of and we shook hands and said let's do it like let's let's try as as big and as bold as this thing can possibly be and on kickstarter they've got these things called stretch goals right we've met our game but if we get i don't know we've raised ten thousand dollars if instead we raised twenty thousand dollars everybody gets a free carrying case fifty thousand dollars we're gonna add ten more cards into the game stretch goals right they're trying to motivate people to back the project i sat down and i thought this whole thing is crowd funding and all of those stretch goals every strategy i've read every youtube video i've watched everything is based on funding like they ignore the crowd part and they're just like laser focus on funding funding funding funding i was like i think that's backwards i think instead we're doing ignore the funding because we've already got two million bucks and let's just focus on the crowd part and instead of doing traditional stretch goals all of our stretch goals were based on the crowd so we're like look we don't care about money anymore don't give us anymore more money we don't want any more money nothing we talk about from now on is gonna be about money because the funding doesn't matter let's have a party and everyone is invited so we're like look we're gonna do those same things we're also gonna give you a carrying case in ten extra cards and all that fun stuff but it's not based on how much money you give us it's based on how much fun you have so show us a picture of ten batman's in a hot tub whatever the hell that means show us a picture of that or show us a picture of a hundred people dressed up as cats or show us the craziest and most interesting things you can come up with and every time you do that we're gonna make the game better and you're not gonna pay us more we're just gonna make the game better because this is fun and we've already raised enough money let's have a party and we did that for the next twenty eight days and we watched our numbers just skyrocket i'm gonna focus on the crowd part here right like we had i don't know let's say we had a thousand backers at that point by the end of this thing we had two hundred and nineteen thousand backers for this campaign that is so far in first place of any kickstarter campaign in history to date it's been ten years and no one's even come close to that record and it's because we said the funding is completely irrelevant all the matters is the crowd but funding was a really nice side effect though but it was eight and half million dollars that you got well yeah there was that too so wait give us the example so you said ted batman at about what are what were the other things that you did to get the crowd to do yeah we said so one of the characters in our game is called taco cat which is my favorite character right taco cat is a pal room spell taco cat backwards and you still got taco cat so we had this adorable character and we said look we don't actually know what taco cat is but show us twenty five pictures of real taco cats and we'll make the game better what you say show us do you mean like post the comments section yeah basically just like an online message board that you were using and watched whatever social media platform you wanted we just said you know cup tag us on it and that's all we care about and so that was the viral they were posting a of image that didn't make any sense in the feed and they tag you guys that got people curious that to go check you out yeah that the why have you stuffed your cat into a burrito what is happening here and on and on those pictures went one we had this veterinarian who worked in an animal shelter and she showed us all she did was she had a picture of her holding this adorable cat and a piece of paper and the piece of paper showed that she had legally changed the cat's name to taco cat for real and we're like alright that's about as taco cat is a guest so we gave credit for that one as well and they just it went on and on and on like that for thirty days every time we thought here's a challenge way too hard they absolutely smashed them and then we would just our challenge was every day how do we come up with five new challenges it's gonna keep everyone entertained you have these little one liners that are like what if instead of the funding we focused on the crowd that's like this like simple idea that then you and then you run with them so it's like that and if i was gonna describe you i'd say he takes silly ideas very seriously the old charlie take take a simple idea and take it seriously i think yours is take a silly idea and take it seriously you do that with your games you do that with your with your marketing campaigns and you did this when we were at the event we do this thing where we put everybody on the hot seat and let's say somebody's like a real estate mo we'll just instead of saying hey tell us about your business we'll just say alright so how do you make a billion dollars in real estate well what's the secret and like in your case it's like what's the secret how do you make hit game after hit game after hit game in a hits business that normally sounds like something that's a just a game of chance but you're doing it again and again and again you must know something and you said a great line can you could you describe your philosophy around games because you said you know one liner that just stuck with me yeah oh i love that you focused on this one so the line is games should not be entertaining games should make the people you're playing with entertaining and that simple line it which is a very silly line like i i remember the first time we pitched it to our investors we're like we're not going to make entertaining games and they're like never say that again like i never put that in any piece of writing ever and instead we put it as the first as the first line on our webpage page because games should not be entertaining if you're making an entertaining game you're trying way too hard and it's you versus the audience which means when you're done entertaining them they're gonna go away and never come back if instead your goal is i'm just making a tool set my tool set is going to make the people that you are playing with the entertainment suddenly you've got an engine suddenly every time they play it's different suddenly they constantly wanna come back they wanna play it over and over again they want take it to new friend's house you make a piece of cardboard right a deck of cards you've turn that into a viral engine and that's the secret to success in the board game industry but that sorta of is like going to the met and seeing a picasso and being like dude it's just like sc lines like this is uni impressive you dismissing it as just a let it doesn't explain why your company is potentially worth billions of dollars and makes potentially hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue what is actually happening because like we've had all these rich and successful billionaires on the pods and i'll meet them and i'm like oh you're really nice and then i start thinking like oh no this got a shark like you must be a shark to be this successful so like what else are you not what are you not telling us that that has allowed this company to become a potentially allegedly multi billion dollar company yeah well one is you have to do it consistently which is hard right but how do you tell if your game is a tool set to make people entertaining and like unless you have the the litmus test right unless you can quantify the data that you're putting in those boxes like then it's just a theory and i remember we started taking submissions from external inventors and i just eventually you've started rubber stamping them with here's why we're rejecting you because this you're trying too hard to be entertaining and it was incredible like hundreds of these submissions and every every game i was making the same mistake where they're like i am building and entertaining thing and i kept having to remind them or not buying entertaining things and eventually we found like one or two inventors we could work with and then i had to design all the others which is totally cool because i know what i'm looking for but how do you test it like how do i know that i'm hitting that mark way before the thing hits the market because by then we could already screwed it up so i figured out one bit of quantifiable data that lets me back up that claim when i say a game is not entertaining it makes the players entertaining i can back that up and the way i can back it up is in our testing procedure we we have we have these this group of four hundred families called the kitty test pilots and all we do is we send them games all day long and we ask for feedback and it used to be we would send them this crazy google form we're like how long did you play how many players how old are they what was your favorite part what was the part you hated what part needs worked you know on and on and not like thirty forty questions and i realized like nobody's reading these like i'm i'm i don't even care about what this is by the time i finished reading their answers to this questionnaire i haven't actually learned anything about whether or not this game has made the players entertaining and so we now send out a questionnaire and it has one question on it just one start to finish one question and that question is do you want to play again and i have found that that question is the most direct heat seeking missile to answer the question have you made the players entertaining because the a game is entertaining you have extracted almost all the entertainment from it on your first time through but if the players are entertaining you wanna play again and we only now ship games where a hundred percent of that questions answer is yes we get even a single no we dive into that person and we watch the videos and we figure out what happened there because they should want to play again and if they don't we've got something to fix i think the most successful people sean have you ever studied like personality tests and like oh and read about disagree agreeable this and how and the people who are most successful rank very low on agreeable right that disagreeable is a positive trait for founders yeah because like the very simple example is you just are on you you don't accept how things are done you disagree with that therefore you wanna go make your own oftentimes people who rank high on disagreeable ness are jerks you lot do not you are not a jerk you are a objectively a sweet person but you seem like you are hiding this this disagreeable ness because like for example you have incredibly high standards or you just made a survey where us if a a a lot of staff might be like well we have to ask ten questions but can't just ask one question but you're like no no you see this makes sense for this reason do people enjoy working with you because like i guess i'm passing on how your ability to be disagreeable but also polite and it seems very effective it depends on who you ask so i think i think my team likes working with me at at the very least very few people ever quit but if you were to ask our printers if you ask our distribution partners i think they hate working with me at like despise it and and the reason is because i am absolutely a professional like what i do for a living is make little boxes of joy and if you open a box and there's something obvious wrong with it or the card quality is not where it should be or like the in exploding kittens you don't know which card is an exploding kitten it has to be a surprise right and and that means the backs of every card have to be identical and if i can detect one degree off in the pant in the pant registry of this card versus this one i'm sending the entire i don't care how many millions are in that shipment i'm sending every single one of them back and i'm not paying a penny and you are gonna rep reprint them for me so they hate me and i get it but also i don't think the company would be where it is today if i said yeah we'll just ship it that way in the next run will be better i love that you also have a approach to marketing that i think is very different than most founders it was really inspiring to me when i started to hear these stories can you talk about some of the unconventional hustle things because if i'm listening to this right now i'm like okay cool so he was like had a cool like a sick job at xbox he quit first game first hit wonder hit exploding kittens which is like the number one game in the world for i don't know how many years now oh his buddy happened to be the oatmeal guy so we had instant distribution must be nice right i'll just be youtube comment guy for a second you it must be nice to be you know to have have connected powerful friends that's why i'm not successful right that's i think where most people land or stuff like that what they don't know is that first there's all this that that person is not just your friend there's actually like luck that you create along the way to create those types of opportunities so either you could talk about that or you could talk about some of the hustle tactics you guys did like the vending machine like the other stuff you guys have done that where you were not just like handed the case keys to the to the castle but you actually like scrapped your way there yeah yeah i mean look the company you've just described is a company that would disappear in eight months right like there's no longevity to that at all so once you have a hit game which requires a lot of luck but also a lot of skill once you've gotten that now the skill really has to kick in because now you have to make sure that thing doesn't disappear i have to make sure your next ten games are also successful you need to make sure your profit margin on each game is where it should be you need to make sure you build a community on and on and on so i'll give you i'll give you a few examples and they're all they're all kind of marketing like once you have a company once you have any degree of success you have to be able to double down on that and get your audience to care passionately so we used to go to this convention in seattle called packs penny arcade expo and we're a tiny company we got no money for marketing right we've had this one successful kickstarter campaign we spent literally every penny actually producing the product and building the company and our bank account is empty and we show up to this thing and we've got like no ability to get people's attention and advertising is expensive and they literally rent out like every square into the walls in there and so anything you wanna do cost money which we don't have so have this idea and this like convention is to impress other game makers or vendors to carry your game exactly all all of the above right so you're getting you're building a fan base you're building other relationships you're trying to get distribution you're trying to get into retail stores the only thing we had ever sold is a single product on kickstarter and now we got nothing left like the these exhibits if you go to one of these you become an exhibit your booth like the big games they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars just on the booth right and you're like you also sign up to be a booth but you're just a fold out picnic table in right in section f over you know past the bathrooms that's you're you're just sitting there hoping somebody walks by your shitty table and you're like how am i supposed to compete with that it's like michael scott in the jobs fair episode everybody's like you're literally just have a table and you're trying to convince people to do that you do i got the crappy sign that i printed on my little on my little ink up printer and that's in the folding table and and that's it and so the very first year i was very proud of this i knew we had to have marketing space and i couldn't find any that we could afford in so i made i mean these little kittens i cut them out little adorable cute little kittens with our logo on it and the kitten was holding a bomb and it said exploding kittens and there was a fuse and i secretly put one of those inside every uri in the convention center so you had to pee on them to ex the bomb it like mobs are booth like everyone wanted to see who made these things so much so that the organizers came to us and they said you can't do this and i was like well show me show me the part of my contract where it's like can't do this i understand you don't want me to do this but show me where i can't and they said they said alright well we're not gonna prohibit you from doing this because you're right you found a space that is just nowhere in our guidelines but we'll tell you this next year we're gonna start charging for that space so i think i haven't checked because we haven't been back to packs but i think they now charge for uri advertising space thanks to this little stunt we've believe have do you wanna go get them out of there or or are you expecting me did not extract us single one of that's actually genius the second years when you did the vending machine thing because vending machine is insane yeah okay so the vending machine was trying to solve the problem on a more permanent basis because like i do this uri thing and they shut it down and it honestly it just wasn't big enough like that got us a few hundred people every day but how do i get that how do i get tens of thousands of people every day so i looked at our little folding table and thought you know people come up to this thing and they give us money they give us twenty bucks they get a box and they walk away and they have no memory of that transaction because all that really is is a vending machine right you go you put money in the vending machine you push a button and you get your your your soft drink and you walk away and you have no lasting memory of the interaction you just had because there's nothing remarkable about it so i thought alright if we're gonna be a vending machine what if we were the world's coolest vending machine like the most spectacular vending machine the world has ever seen and so i took an old refrigerator box i had in my garage so this big eight foot tall cardboard box and we cut some holes in it and we built we sorry we covered it with fir and these giant goo eyes so it looked like cat we built a eight foot tall fur covered cat and it had a a cut out a hole for a screen where we could like put a display and it had little buttons and it had a little credit card reader it had everything a vending machine should have and the experience was you walk up to this thing you put in your money you push a button and a again comes out very very simple we're not talking anything crazy expensive or really anything that remarkably yet other than okay it's covered it looks like a cat that's kind of adorable nobody's ever seen a vending machine like this before and that attracted a crowd but then we had to push it over the top so i put in an extra button and the extra button said random item one dollar way cheaper than a game what the hell does that mean and so enough people were willing to try this experiment what happens if i put a dollar in this and push random item and so they'd put a dollar in and push random and comes a pineapple from the vending machine or a hot burrito or a bag of rocks or a plumbers if it's missed you behind it just sticking your hand that was pineapple or what this was the thing this is what we didn't tell anybody everyone everyone assumed this is the world's most sophisticated vending vanishing because it can deliver two thousand different objects and people literally brought up chairs and they built little bleach chairs around this thing just to watch it for hour after hour after hour to see what the hell is gonna come out of this thing and basically for for the listener it looks like just a box but the box backed up to like a curtain and behind the curtain i would imagine you had a whole team of people like so so there's the punchline instead of it being a vending machine it was just a vending machine costume there was no robotics in there there's no there's no computers there's nothing there's eight of us sweating our asses off for ten hours a day backstage and every time someone pushes that random item button we are literally pulling a random item and throwing it out the front of the machine and we had our line got so long that it blocked our aisle it blocked all all the other super expensive you know million dollar booths nobody could walk up to those anymore because our line was so long it went out the door it went out of the convention center it went down the street and the line for a silly little fur covered vending machine was longer than the line to get into the convention itself and all of that's just because like we had no money and we had to think creatively about like what does it mean to build a community around a transaction and that's what we came up with so don't have you ever read about doctor fe all richard fe richard fe yeah sorry yeah read about him so yeah a little bit what why what what comes to mind here he would like get super hands on with a problem and not and question everything and he would start at the very foundation of that of that question and basically not accept any truth before him he would have to like question each one in order to solve a problem and one big example of this is he helped create the atomic bomb and so like they like questioned all these like previously thought rules that he broke and elon kinda has that same thing and i i admire this because i i work really hard to have this but i don't i still don't have it entirely it's not this doesn't come naturally to me and i don't excel at it but i think that for everyone listening the skill set is really important which is how do you how do you be really creative and the framework being you question everything at the very beginning and don't assume anything that you've ever been told is true is that right yeah yeah i think that's accurate and and also never take no for an answer like it it's it makes no sense to ever have someone shut you down for any reason so the vending machine is a great examples one of my favorites of we so we we install this thing in a convention center and we're handing out pineapples and watermelon and and and ridiculous objects and and we're putting goo eyes on them and giving them mohawk and all all kinds of fun stuff and we got to a convention in indianapolis and they said you can't do this because we cannot let you ship the produce backstage to your to your your space on the convention floor and i said why and they said because you've exceeded what they called like a casual purchase and now you have to the only way that we can accept that much produce is to a registered grocer and you're not a registered grocer so you can't do this anymore and i i remember thinking like my whole team was like okay well here's the dead end we need to think through like what objects can we do instead and i got so frustrated i was like you're you're just accepting the dead end here and i don't think we need to and it turns out it's easy trivial to become a registered grocer i went to a website and you fill out a form and you pay like a hundred bucks and today exploding kids is a registered grocer in indiana you know where else we're a registered grocer fourteen other states because it's that easy as well and so every convention we go to we can now accept the shipments backstage because exploding kittens is also a grocery store i love that we you know when we were doing it our event mister beast is there jimmy donaldson said he and he his production document so like his training document for his team like an older one but had leaked online and it's really fascinated to read this because here you have a guy who wrote this probably when he was twenty two twenty three twenty four years old right so it's kinda like he's said expert at twenty four but he's a he is an expert in youtube he'd actually have been doing it for over a decade he's the most successful youtuber on the planet and he's like i know how to make videos that people watch and one of the things that he talks about in there he goes push past the no just because you receive an initial no from somebody absolutely does not mean that it's a no forever that it's a no under any circumstance that there's a no without so you have some caveats and if you come back and you just say i asked is you know they said no that's not an acceptable answer in our in our org right so he's like you i wanted the pyramids for a video the the egyptian pyramids and they're were like his team told him no and he goes what do you mean like who told you know egypt told you know who'd you call what did they say why did they say no did you call the other guy who's the other guy give me the number let's call them do they have kids let's face on their kids see if that works they they're like what are the different ways that we could do this to just to an accept an initial no is basically out there's is a culturally unacceptable at the company yeah i i think i think that trait more than anything is what i've seen in successful business owners and i don't know if it can be taught it's more just that like when you hear the word no there are two possible reactions one is damn and the other is i didn't hear that properly let me dig deeper mh and it has to be instinct intentional like every time you hear the word no you have to think okay i didn't hear that properly let me dig deeper over and over and over again i love like it's not just being a jerk in saying you know just pushing just pushing on them but being curious or being like clever or being playful and trying to figure out like if i had a trillion dollars maybe you'd say yes okay so like let's just agree it's not physically impossible to do this right okay once it's not physically impossible that means now there is a way let's just see what that way might look like it's so good maybe the better way to phrase it is when someone tells you know instead of assuming that that's the answer assume you ask the wrong question mh hey sean we did this thing i was talking to david the guy who hosts the podcast founders the other day and we did a show called the anti business billionaires and there's like a handful of people out there who are these billionaires who they shockingly don't care about revenue and profit and they're like very passionate about whatever it is they're making the guy who started pat is one of them where like he just doesn't seem like he cares about money or the guy who started dyson james dyson he's another guy where oddly he's obsessed with making vacuums do you care at all about revenue and profit or do you just see it as a like do do you care about business i didn't originally now once i figured out how to look at businesses another game that can be won i suddenly started caring passionately about business like i used to think alright i don't actually wanna be ceo this company what i wanna be is lead designer i'm a hire a ceo and we tried that for a while and what i realized is like everyone we hired into that spot was playing the game the wrong way and i wanna play instead and so now i actually love strategy meetings i love business meetings i love when we go in and talk about the next ten years and or how we're going to solve this very particular problem about this convention or this next next game launch or this next partnership because that is such a fun game and i was like in high school i loved physics physics was my favorite topic until i realized i need to switch to computer science and the reason i needed to switch was because for physics everything that were teaching us the answer was in the back of the book if you had a problem you could just you could just flip to the back of the book and i realized that computer science was very different because computer science was like the cutting edge like there were no answers in the back of the book at all you had to figure everything out as you go and that was really exciting for me that was like a life changing moment when i was sixteen that's what business is to me there are no answers at the back of the book and if you wanna win this game you gotta figure out what the rules are infinite your own where you need to and get to that finish line for anybody else look at sean's hands and look at i just realized that wherever we do this you got us yeah you gotta know it you're talking to a girl she puts her hair behind her gear there's like so indicator of of like of attraction when you're talking about this i'm like this is beautiful i mean just the way you're describing this like there's no answers in the back of the book like do that inspiring i i i love that show i love that stuff i also think there's other things we can learn from you so and you know i've learned from me on on the marketing side and maybe we'll just close the loop on the marketing idea which is it's one thing to hear the idea of the vending machine and be like oh wow that's a great idea i'm interested in what is the mindset that creates that idea what are the questions that you ask how do you brainstorm what are you doing differently that's leading you to crazy answers like that that actually works so like i don't know if you could describe it or if this is like asking you know steph curry had to shoot a jump he's like just kinda flick my wrist just goes in when actually a thousand little things are happening that he's not even a att to but like you know for example you said something like what if and like i know what what if questions are just like a great like a great tool in the tool belt for a creative thinker yeah it's very different than we should yeah it's just like the language changes everything what are some other things you do when you brainstorm i love parameters i hate blue sky brainstorming like the idea that like hey let's sit down and create a game is the most terrifying experience in the world for me or let's let's sit down and brainstorm from anything and we don't know what it is so what are the parameters for the last handful of meetings that you've had yeah so okay let me let me back up and say like you asked about marketing for a convention right i told you the story about the vending machine but i also told you the parameters are baked into there like we didn't start by saying what's the coolest experience we can have at a convention right we started by saying this is a vending machine transaction there's our parameters what is the coolest vending machine experience we can craft but you also said how do we get tens of thousands of people to come without spending instead of three hundred a sort of an unreasonable target unreasonable is totally reasonable like it's fine to set your goals that high as long as you you understand the parameters of the problem if i were to sit down and say how do we get ten thousand people to come to our booth i'm again i'm not gonna get anywhere like i i just have no chance of success there but if i sit down and say i'm am going to build a vending machine that must attract ten thousand people now i'm running now i'm i'm busy for the next ten months building that thing because i know what that is shockingly a useful tip because i do the other thing right just say how do i get how do i get the ten thousand how do get ten thousand people to come yeah yeah no i i there are people who are great at it like you know you mentioned mister vie jimmy he is exceptional at that like if you were to tell him just like i i listened to your interview with him right and you're you're spitting out random downs and he's coming up with incredible ideas he is exceptionally talented at that thing i stuck at it i need to know exactly the shape of the box and i will build you the coolest contents for that box in history but unless i understand what that box is capable of holding i i just i have no chance of success so it sounds like one way to put it is creativity loves constraints and you use the constraint you start with the constraint rather than starting with the just the desired outcome right the desire outcome comes there it's part of the it's part of the the the the the goal it's the parameters but you you actually start with a constraint in order to to get yourself to think a little bit differently do you have any other examples of kinda like this constraint style of thinking whereas has to build a board game for a a few different nfl teams and what does that mean how do you get an nfl audience to play with a board game and if you were to just leave it there you kinda don't have a chance you're basically saying build a good game go and me personally i'm gonna suck at that task but what we started to do you're like the best in the world of do doing this just yeah gonna suck no chance of success i promise you zero chance of success so instead we sat down and we said okay what is football like what are the best moments and i started writing this list and my list was the the magical moment where a player catches the ball against all odds everyone's covering them it's impossible it's impossible somehow it was a perfect throw a perfect catch and off they went to score and we've i personally really focused on that do do do you even care about football football matters very little to me but only because it is very hard for me to watch people having fun without wanting to do that same thing by myself well that's pretty funny but the reason i'm asking is because this is your perspective as a total outsider where correct you just you just created the rules yeah yeah yeah yeah well it's watching other people right like my family is obsessed with it so i watch them watch football and i'm like oh that moment okay that moment there and and so we eventually built this game it's called catch and all it is we made these cute little foam figures and we had an increasing series of challenges defined by the other players because the other players have to provide the entertainment where you have to throw an object this little character in the air and just catch it so simple throw it catch it really easy but now players are gonna start throwing cards at you you have to do a blind fold you have to spin around before you catch it you can only use one hand you can only use two fingers you have and and like what if i give you ten of those cards at the same time now that very simple throw and catch has become really really entertaining for everyone to watch you defy the odds and at the last moment pull it off despite everyone's expectation and the crowd goes this sounds so trivial this is actually pretty groundbreaking so let's give a very a specific example that's not related to you so sean has a sean works in e ecommerce industry let's just say that sean sells shoes sean owns a shoe company and let's say growth has stag and they and he comes to a meeting and he goes i we need to we need a our company needs to improve we we have to be better what would like be interesting constraints in order to make sean's company better it make the meeting productive yeah what you'd want to do with a shoe company i've never worked in shoes before so bear with me but i will anything you throw at me i'm gonna try to tie it back to a community i'm gonna try to tie it back to how do i by wearing these things form more lasting reasonable exciting connections with other people so what if you started printing out beautiful incredible shoes that you'd be proud to wear you love every single shoe that you make but everyone has half a secret message on it and somebody else has the other half of that get your shoe next to them to read it choose right like suddenly you have a reason to go not only tell your friends to buy some or buy more yourself but suddenly you have a reason to go seek them out in the world you're walking through a crowded airport and you see someone with those shoes walk right over them put theirs what's right for the match yeah exactly right so no there's a very low percentage hit there and so you'd have to probably redesign it to have a much higher percentage hit and that's very achievable but again the first thing i'm gonna do is define a constraint and say a successful shoe equals a reason to look for more of those shoes out in the world because then more of those shoes are gonna sell that's pretty great wow just yesterday i was with my wife and we're walking out somewhere and this woman had a trader joe's bag and she goes hey sorry to bother you but is that that bag that everyone's going crazy about online i was and i my mind i'm like people going crazy about trader joe's bags nowadays daily what what's going on and i guess there's a little i guess there's a certain design of a trader joe's bag and it's not even like limited edition or i don't know what the full story is but you're it kinda highlighted to me it's like man you could take any moment it's like the moments in between the moments and if you if you do something interesting there you give people a reason to feel special or reason to connect the reason to collect a reason to to to to do one of those things it's like damn how much wasted surface area is there in my businesses where we're not just just by applying creativity we create magic we create it's a right we create value for people if we just were a little more intentional versus just going on autopilot and i think nine and five percent time i'm just on autopilot in my businesses i totally get it and and i've been i've been there as well k can can i tell you a story about i'm i'm so proud of of particular solve for that problem okay go so my daughter excluding kittens is not the number one selling game in the world list number two best selling game in the world number one is a game called hurry up chick butt hurry up chick butt i i designed with my daughter and she when she turned four i was so excited because you know most of the games are like ages four and up and when she turned four we went out and we bought all the games right we got candy land and we got z at the all the games and took him home and we started playing and i immediately noticed a problem which was i am having miserable time she's happy she's playing with her dad she's getting to see bright flashy colors like all the stuff is designed for kids but i am bored out of my mind and what the results in is when we're done playing the game one i've let her win because i gotta let her win because if i try at all i'm going to crush this poor four year old and two is when we're done she says hey daddy can we play again and all i'm thinking is oh god know which i am so miserable the last i i did it i did my time we played the game i'm gonna go do so go do something fun now and i i remember having that reaction and it must have shown on my face and my daughter said what's wrong and i said i i think this game is broken and she said something brilliant she said let's fix it and like fireworks started going off in my head because i was like yeah let's fix it like why are we not fixing this and i spent the next month we split the work my daughter started drawing pictures like all the fun games everything fun that she wanted in a game and i started writing this list of what success looks like and for me it was my daughter has to beat me without me letting her win and i have to look forward to playing again there the game cannot be luck based i have to watch my daughter get better at this game every time we play i have to feel like she's learning something and there cannot be any losers she can win but there but nobody can lose so those are your constraints those are my five and by the way did you start with just things you hate it he happens for sure yeah yeah i'm i'm saying this like oh overnight i came up with these five things but the list was like twenty five things long and i narrowed it down to those five which were the most important i'm writing this book on creative right around on jerry seinfeld has his great quote says irritation is is what it causes innovation and he's basically he created comedian and cars getting coffee because he just hated going it was so sick going on late night talk shows and doing the same thing every time he's like alright a talk show that has none of those things in fact my irritation is gonna be my source of innovation sounds like good all of those things you talked about were sources of personal irritation for you everyone one of them for sure everyone there were the things that everybody was doing wrong and was the industry standard nobody raised their hand and said this is broken like this is not fun for half the players who play this game that half being the adults did you present things well what did you present those five things to your daughter or did you renew the one didn't care about those things so you are the one you were the one what what i'm trying to get at is can you present those five things to people at your company and they be just as creative in effect like could they make hit games like is this a is this a transfer transferable skill a teachable skill absolutely yes i is long again it's not you're not teaching problem solving you're teaching problem identification and then creative people will be able to solve those problems but if you try to solve if you try to teach how to be creative you never get anywhere all you're really teaching is how to identify a problem how to know what success looks like and then you just hire creative people to work within those constraints but then do you as the leader define if you have a hit yes well well korea chick butts an easy way it's an easy definition because again as soon as it went out to testing party this was one of those games where when we send it out to testing not only was it a hundred percent yes i wanna play again nobody sent the games back this is a huge problem for us like we send them out we want you to send them back so we can tweak them and then send them back out again nobody would send that game back to us it was ridiculous we lost so many copies of that game so bridge the gap there so because i i play this game i play it literally with my daughter who's five i bought it after we met and was clear up chicken butt and we play it at home with my my son and my daughter it's a great time but i've seen the end output and now you've described your initial conditions is there anything else interesting in how you kinda of figured out how you bridge that gap so we go through tons and tons and tons of versions and i sit with my daughter i'm like look i i want i know we want gain and she's like i wanna run around cool that's gonna be part of the game running around i wanna act silly cool that's gonna be part of the game acting silly and then the back of my mind i'm like i need tension right like a game without any form of tension is a broken game because you need something to push you forward in most games it's competition with the other players but here that's not gonna be present so i need something else to insert the tension the the pulse of the game and we do that with an electric timer right it's essentially hot to the way the game works is it's hot potato you've got this adorable cute little chicken that clocks and eventually screams and you pass the chicken around and if you're holding the chicken when it screams you have lost a point and everybody else proceeds but the tricky part it it actually works where the person before you wins the whole game again my users only winners are you like pixar where you have like your five or eight trustworthy people in a room and you're just banging this out absolutely yes and how long are the meetings and how many meetings were there between idea to iteration one to final inter iteration okay so we sit down we'll meet for like two hours and we'll just discuss parameters what success looks like let's brainstorm in that space and we'll usually come up with like i don't let's say five or six interesting things to explore then everybody goes off and does their own thing everyone's got an assignment play with this one and we're gonna come back and we're gonna try all these games and in this case we actually had like i don't know fifteen or sixteen different ideas that we were playing around with and they all sucked like they all everything fell apart in one regard or another except for this one that's not true except for four games four games made it out the door two were almost immediate failures and two of them one was hurry up chicken butt and the other is called the best worst ice cream which is like i think it's ranked number eight in the world right now so it's up there i only look at the top five because that's the score board i like to keep but it's doing great and could this could this apply let's say i owned a b b saas software could could i use this process in my company i'm tempted to say yes i like i don't know definitively the answer but i believe that the best ideas come out of constraint and defining success and i can't imagine there'd be many creative based endeavors that would not benefit from that approach you just did a game with tim ferris and i did see was a part of creating it i'm just curious like what was that like and what were the main things you taught tim and then did tim teach you anything or did you sort of modify any of your process because tim is such an interesting guy that maybe he he could bring a little bit of a different different approach to what you were doing yeah so i went on tim's podcast like two years ago he just wanted to know what's the game industry like wait what what is it that you would do for a living and so we talked for a while at the end of it after we finished recording he said i've always wanted to make a game can we talk about making a game and i was like absolutely that's like when matt asks you if he can be your partner the answer is yes great yes yes yes let's do it and so we started talking and he is obsessed with one of my games called poetry for ne falls and it's a really simple really fun game it's in the top five and he just loves loves lu that game he plays it with all his friends he plays it all the time he's constantly sending me pictures of him playing that game with his group of friends and he keeps saying like i need a game at least this good and so the first few meetings were me just going over to his place with suitcases full of games like all my favorites but they all tried to scratch that same itch like i know what's great about poetry for there's a creativity component it's heavily players entertaining other players and it's fast funny you can learn it in one minute and you play it in ten minutes right like i i knew i knew that was his version of what success looks like and so we started playing a bunch of games like that and we started honing in on what the process what things he liked the most what games he liked the most which ones he didn't and it fast became clear okay none of these are right like not a single i must have shown him a hundred different games and the answer was yeah none of these at one point we were on this walk we've been walking for like six hours and at one point i was like okay let's start as basic as it gets what if we started with rock paper scissors tim happens the like rock raf paper scissors and i was like ky rock paper scissors is actually no fun at all until you play it a bunch of times playing rock paper scissors wants is stupid but playing it again now we're playing a game because now i'm thinking what did you do last time what am i gonna do this but knows that i know that he knows that i know right like all that stuff starts to kick in in at game two and it's not present at all in game number one so i was like what if we start there really really basic and instead of three activities rock paper scissors what if we had twenty five and what if there was a hierarchy between all of those things and what if we're all playing at the exact same time and we just started with crazy statements like that like i don't know what that game is i don't know how those things make sense but his eyes lit up and my eyes lit up and it was like something okay what if also we made it rhythm based and we ran to the house and we just started sc on cards fast as we could my buddy ken gru was there too an incredibly talented designer and between the three of us we just started crafting cards as fast as we could and the first version of the game of course sucked but it was at least something it was at least like hey we are playing a game where every single person playing this game has a task you have to do this symbol you have to do a peace sign you have to pretend your a bell a baller arena and you have one second to do the right thing and we started playing around with alright that's a little too easy what if we made that harder what if we had switch rolls what if every role had a color and now we have to skip all the red ones so what if we had to go twice as fast what if we had to whisper what if we had to shout what if what if what if what if and we started writing all these cards fast and furious tell it we eventually got to this thing where we had been playing for like four hours and i looked around the room and was like hey anybody wanna play again and both of them were like hell yes and so we kept doing that and then we started to invite other friends over and they started playing and we said do you wanna play again and they said yes and so we we just kept doing this thing rinse and repeat remove a card write a new card i use these blank cards where i can create them super fast i buy these like by the truckload on it did that when we were at sean's event you basically you were readily on your hands and needs like dealing out cards that's right you're like you know i don't like this one and you pull out like a blank card and you had a pen and you like throw new rules i live and breathe those cards because you know it's beautiful those cards they're not just cards like obviously you can use them to make any game you want but like let's say you need a six sided die right and you don't have a six sided die you've got six cards right one two three four five six on the cards and shuffle them up and draw one now you got a six sided die right like if you need a board you can make it out of a grid of cards if we you can do a spinner you make that out of cards like i i walk around my backpack is so much heavier than it should be because it's loaded with blank cards because i never know when the next idea is coming you have this quite great quote you said i took a week long skydiving course and at the end of i asked the instructor you get bored of this and the guy said do you ever get bored of having sex and i thought that's exactly it this is how i feel about games that's how i feel about this job it's not the thing with an expiration it's a little dopamine factor for me and the people who get to have these experiences i don't know how you can get bored of that and it's just internal you so that was a quote that you had and i read that it's like i wanna feel that way about this anything of my life no right i like you know like you see it kids play with bubbles you're like i wish i felt anyway about this kid how the skis about bubbles and i see this and i'm like elon the you guys bubbles he's got the answer this guy had this is the answer to life go ahead i was it i was at an airport and our flight had just been canceled it was so terrible because everyone was miserable last flight out they're starting to hand out hotels but they're but they're like hey the flight might come back everyone's gotta stay in the terminal for hours and hours and hours and every hour they delayed us again and it was awful and everyone is miserable everyone is miserable and they're frown and they're grumpy and they're screaming at the poor gate agent and it's awful except for this group of six kids sitting in the corner giggling and laughing and i could not help myself had to walk up and see what they're were doing and of course they're playing exploding kittens and i remember thinking like this is it like this the all the chemicals going through my body right now like this is why i have this job this is the greatest feeling in the world and i just want to keep delivering this every opportunity i have that's so good i was gonna to say you you know my i have these kind of people i admire for different reasons so it's like you know you can admire a a great athlete for how they how disciplined they are how they train the body how they just they just never give up right or you can admire elon for you know thinking big and sort defying the odds and and and really going all in on his bets and being like you know what i i need to have that all in mode and you're to me on this like on that very short list of people because you build things for the joy and from a like i'm from a place either you're like a more pure artist i think as your career i see you was saying you're not like a ceo who's got a ballpoint pen you're an artist with a brush and then and then the second part of it is like the limitless thinking in terms of there's kinda nothing out of bounds like yeah okay i can register myself as a grocer or we can we could create this vending machine that what if it distributed any item right like i would be scared to go there because how and what if a lot of things go wrong and i think you just think about things a little bit differently that inspires me and then the last bit is like the simplicity like figuring out when you look at something like oh the game is fun not because the game itself is fun because it makes the players fun it's like oh that explains char trades in fictional and all the games i grew up playing thousands of times and not just once or twice yep it's because of that core insight or you know instead of doing focus groups and surveys you're like one question you wanna play the game again that that's simplicity so like to me those are the three big things that you do that i'm like i if i can get you know ten percent of what you're doing there i level up if i do that i'd love to share that and but i'll to say it doesn't just have to apply to games like we i remember during covid all of our plants shut down and once once we once stuff comes in from china we have to we it goes into these giant warehouses and it has to be unblock and then rep packaged with all the correct labeling and then off it goes to all the retailers and during covid no one could go into those facilities like they just wouldn't allow anybody in and that was gonna tank our business we were there's no way for us to survive zero sales for you know six or twelve or two years right like no way to do it and so most games companies shut down for at least a little while there and i remember thinking like there this is a no like this absolutely people are telling me no so you know to use the earlier quote like so i must be asking the wrong question and instead of calling these warehouse owners over and over again saying when are you opening your doors when you're opening your doors i finally asked a different question it was what are you doing with your parking lots and the answer was nothing because nobody's at work so our parking lots are empty i was like cool can i park three eighteen wheeler trucks in your parking lot and they said sure why not and so i brought the games over in these eighteen wheeler trucks and i had one person per truck go inside and rep package our games because all i needed was the space it occurred to me i didn't need the warehouse i just need the square footage and they've got that in their parking lot and there's no restrictions there there's only restrictions inside the facility and the reason i bring that up is because that's just a game right like that's just somebody saying here's a roadblock everybody else is saying a roadblock i can't get through this roadblock it's time to shut down my business when the reality is just ask a different question there's a different way through this roadblock if you're willing to play the game i used to have this high school cross country coach that was like i'm gonna teach you all about running and everything but i'm really trying to teach you about this other pastime that we have called life and that's sorta of how i feel about you and this podcast is you came to talk a little bit about business a little bit about creativity but we're really learning like a good way to live you know that makes me so happy yeah to be passionate to be passionate about what we about certain things we're doing to find the positive to to look positively and things that could potentially be negative and to solve problems in creative ways you're awesome we appreciate you oh yeah so much i'm saying that hey where should people follow because i'm following you on tiktok where you're doing like it's amazing i don't understand have you seen his tiktok no i'm not well so i don't use tiktok this is a well and you should because but i idea to live more like him be positive thinking like here's what's happening basically say the world's best game designer is on tiktok teaching people how to design games little simple tricks and tips in like thirty second nuggets and it'll get like two views because tiktok algorithm doesn't know yet who they're who they're messing with and i can't believe it's like you could you couldn't pay i could not pay you for this type of information did you only have all followers i what makes i i just started doing this here's what i realized like i teach these classes at my company once a week and we we'll we'll tackle whatever topic here's how we write instructions here's what we put on the front of the box here's what we put on the back of the box here's games is out like oh all over and over and over again and we don't record any of them and her kinda realized like i this is all gonna just disappear like nobody's recording it i have no motivation to record it so i hired a social media team and all they are they it's like it's like hiring a trainer at a gym they come over once a week and they force me to have a camera on me and give the same class that i gave at the company just for free online and so we've been recording them and posting them and the it's yeah like you said nobody knows they're there yet but if you've ever wanted to learn how to make a game or more importantly how to apply those lessons to anything in the whole wide world because it's all applicable i'm gonna just keep posting these things because are you able give your team constraint like you know without any money and only teaching creativity lessons figure out making me dance on tiktok yeah like get this to five hundred thousand of views per video yeah i should absolutely do that is that what the constraints would be that basically that's what the constraints would be it would be yeah it would be how to stay like true to what i want to deliver right without dancing but yeah how to how to increase the viewership on this and to be fair nobody has been tasked with that yet my my goal for the last like i don't know it's been probably like two months has just been let me just create the content put it in a place and then once it's there then it's probably worth promoting because now there's enough there to make it worthwhile you're your your bad ass you're awesome you got the you got the goo guys from us shout where where should people follow you just shout out your handle yeah if you just search for the the the kinda hub of everything is just elon on youtube that's where i'm putting the long form stuff and then from there it links out to all of the the tiktok and instagram and everything else that where you can find it in shorter form awesome thanks for coming on dude it's such a pleasure thanks for having me and yeah just a huge fan so so grateful that you that you wanted to chat with me what what a thrill of course by the look at how many games are behind them just within just within sight right there is not ridiculous yeah that's that's one of two shelves there's another one over there that's equally packed we've got ninety games now sixty sorry we have sixty games but ninety total because there's like weird expansions and variations and stuff yeah it's stupid it's just i it doesn't make any sense to me anymore well alright thank you ma'am that's it that's a pop i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a less travel never looking back