11 Years Ago Today, Nobody Believed We Were Real
On April 1st, 2015, my brother and I launched a Kickstarter for a prank greeting card company. A card that plays music for hours with no off switch. The response was pretty much what you'd expect when you launch a prank company on April Fools' Day: nobody thought we were real.
That first day was rough.
But then a site called DudeIWantThat.com picked us up. Then a few other small sites. And then BuzzFeed and Gizmodo wrote about us and everything went sideways in the best possible way. In our first 30 days we raised $92,073 on Kickstarter. For a greeting card. A really annoying one.
The early momentum was surreal. We landed a major wholesale order. We were accepted onto Shark Tank and had a shark ready to make a deal. It felt like one of those moments where everything clicks at once.
And then it didn't.
Our manufacturer had purchased a bad batch of batteries. Cards were failing. We had to refund customers and replace products, and just like that, the earnings from that brilliant year were gone. I was back to square one. I remember sitting with it in late 2016 thinking: can a prank greeting card company actually last this long? Honestly, I wasn't sure.
My brother had moved on by then. It was just me.
I kept going anyway.
That was 6 years and about 65 products ago.
We started with 6 card designs. Today we have over 70 cards, 5 full product lines, and more than 40 additional products, all designed in-house. Some have flopped. Most haven't. We've had videos pull millions of views, tens of millions of views, and this past Christmas a single video hit nearly 120 million views. I looked twice just to make sure I was reading it right.
What surprises people most about Joker Greeting is who actually buys from us. We are not a site for enemies or mean-spirited pranks. We are a prank company for families, friends, and office mates. That turned out to be the right bet. There really are more friends than enemies in the world, despite what the internet might suggest.
As we head into year 12, we have new Garbage Pail Kids cards on the way, and a brand new product line we're testing that should be ready closer to December. It's prank-related, but it opens up some ideas I think parents and kids are really going to enjoy. More on that soon.
Twelve years. One very stubborn founder. And a greeting card that still won't shut up.
Thank you for being part of it.
— Travis Peterson, Founder, Joker Greeting
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