Crowd-Doing Stretch Goals
Stop asking backers for money and start asking them for absurd deeds.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 96%
Exploding Kittens raised a million dollars on day one, two million on day two, three million on day three, and then fell off a cliff once everyone Matt Inman could reach had made a decision. Rather than ride off with four million, Lee replaced the money lever with a deed lever. The output was twenty more days of self-sustaining momentum and a final deposit of almost nine million dollars against a ten thousand dollar goal.
Origin
Lee spent his career building alternate reality games at 42 Entertainment and Fourth Wall Studios, where the central premise is that together you are stronger and a community can become an extraordinary version of itself. Staring at Kickstarter's one lever, he realised he had been training for this moment his whole life and simply ran an ARG on the campaign page.
Core principles
- 01Crowdfunding's default lever — give us more money and we will give you more stuff — is the only tool most campaigns ever pick up, and it is the weakest one.
- 02Reframe the mechanic entirely: crowdfunding is really crowd-doing, so tie the unlock to a deed rather than a dollar figure.
- 03The audience that will fund you is finite and exhausts in about a week; the audience that will play with you renews itself daily.
- 04Absurdity is the point — challenges should be insane and funny enough that completing them is its own reward.
- 05Explicitly release people from the money frame: telling backers money does not matter any more is what makes the invitation credible.
- 06Deeds are self-verifying at low resolution; you do not need to count every submission, only to see that the threshold was obviously cleared.
- 07The campaign page becomes mission control — the single place where challenges are issued and rewards are announced.
- 08Revenue arrives anyway, because the back this project button sits on the same page as the party.
How to run it
- 1
Recognise the cliff for what it is
After the first week the campaign collapsed, not because interest died but because everyone reachable had already made a purchase decision. Lee's phrase is that the tank was empty.
Pro tip Diagnose the plateau as audience exhaustion rather than product fatigue — the fix is completely different.
- 2
Choose to push rather than take the bow
Lee and Inman explicitly weighed riding off into the sunset with roughly four million against a ten thousand dollar target, versus pushing to see what else was possible on the platform.
Watch out Taking the bow is a completely defensible choice; just make it deliberately rather than by default.
- 3
Swap the unlock currency from money to deeds
Keep the stretch-goal structure but change what triggers it. Ten people posting a photo of a real taco cat unlocks ten extra cards; ten Batmen in a hot tub unlocks a carrying case.
Pro tip Write challenges you would personally find funny to see completed — that is the correct calibration.
Watch out Only offer rewards you can already manufacture and fulfil. This is not a licence to invent new product lines.
- 4
Announce that money no longer matters
Tell backers directly that you are done with money and are throwing a party everybody is invited to, with a fixed number of days left to celebrate.
Pro tip The deadline is the engine. Lee framed it as we are only here for another twenty days, so let's celebrate the whole way through.
- 5
Run the campaign page as mission control
Use the page as the single venue where new challenges are issued and completed unlocks are announced, so all attention concentrates in one place.
Watch out Lee's team tracked completions very poorly with a two- to three-person crew, and their campaign Gmail account was shut down for exceeding ten thousand emails per second.
- 6
Let the purchase button do its own work
Because the page is a Kickstarter page, the back this project button sits beside every challenge. No challenge asked for money, and the dollars kept rolling in regardless.
Pro tip Buzz generated by deeds brings new people to a page that already has a purchase mechanism on it.
In the wild
Facing a dead campaign with twenty days left, Lee and Inman invented challenges that had nothing to do with money. Show us a picture of a real taco cat — the game has a half-cat, half-taco character — and if ten people do it, ten extra cards go in the box. Give us a picture of ten Batmen in a hot tub, whatever that means, and everyone gets a fancy carrying case. Backers responded by taking photos, writing poems, filming videos, going out on the streets, meeting each other, throwing parties and ordering pizza.
→ Twenty days of momentum on a campaign that had already flatlined, ending in a deposit of almost nine million dollars.
The team running the campaign was, in Lee's words, arguably two or three people, with friends drifting in and out in their spare time. They had attached a Gmail account to the Kickstarter page and discovered the hard way that Gmail shuts an account down past a certain rate — which turned out to be ten thousand emails per second. They hit it. Tracking, Lee freely admits, was done very very poorly.
→ Proof that low-resolution verification is sufficient when the reward is something you were planning to deliver anyway.
Common mistakes
Treating the money lever as the only lever
Lee's summary of the ecosystem was one lever: give us more money and we will give you more stuff. Campaigns that never look past it are limited to the size of the wallet of a finite audience, which empties in roughly a week.
Unlocking rewards you cannot manufacture
The deed mechanic still ends in a promise. Lee's separate warning about t-shirts, posters and hand-autographed items applies with full force here — a challenge-triggered reward you cannot fulfil is the same trap wearing a costume.
Keeping the money frame while asking for deeds
Half-measures fail. The invitation only worked because Lee explicitly said money does not matter any more, which is what converted a transaction into a party people wanted to attend.
Is it for you?
Best for
Creators running a live crowdfunding campaign who have momentum, an engaged following and time left on the clock.
Not ideal for
Campaigns for serious, high-consideration or enterprise products where playful absurdity would undercut the buyer's confidence.
From the transcript
“we did stretch goals just like everybody else but instead of tying it to money we tied it to just insane”
“we basically said look we're going to throw a party and everybody's invited instead of giving us more money we're done with money”
“we basically said money doesn't matter anymore let's just have fun and it was a great invitation”
From the episode
#653: Elan Lee, Co-Creator of Exploding Kittens — How to Raise Millions on Kickstarter, Deconstructing Mega-Successes, Secrets of Game Design, The Power of Positive Constraints, The Delights of Craftsmanship, and The Art of Turning Fans into Superfans