When Kittens Explode

A fascinating Kickstarter funding campaign just ended yesterday, and it was a major one. A new card game with the alarming title of “Exploding Kittens” (don’t worry—no actual kittens were harmed) has managed to raise $8,782,571 over the last 30 days. This makes it the third most highly funded Kickstarter campaign ever, and the one with the most total backers.

Exploding Kittens is a wonder of the Internet age—a party game full of goofy images and bizarre characters that was 1000-percent funded in less than an hour of its launch. It’s unlikely to have attracted the venture capital bigwigs from Shark Tank or the product acquisition VPs from Parker Brothers and Hasbro. The title alone is edgy enough to make your average Toys ‘R’ Us executive nervous, yet it’s clearly a product hundreds of thousands of people are willing to pay for. Thank you, Internet.

The advent of online crowd funding, of which Kickstarter is merely the best known platform, has become one of the most exciting developments in recent business history. At a time when voices from the left are again arguing that the history of the “self-made man” in America is built on myth, the projects that have been successfully crowd funded demonstrate that a single person—or a small team—with a good idea can produce something customers love and make some good money in the process. What could be more American than that?