JailBird Games, LLC is the first company that I have co-founded. It originated in the Creating a Company course at the University of Washington as part of the Entrepreneurship curriculum. It lasts two academic quarters (6 calendar months) and is structured in a way that students exit their ventures at the end.
I entered that class like most others do, not really knowing anyone. I fortunately did have one other person I knew, so we both stuck to each other and managed to be on the same team once we joined one. After about a month of deliberation with that team, we landed on building a card game. By pure chance, we decided to name the game JailBird and from then on, we were off to the races. Our product, JailBird, is a bird-themed party card game where you betray your friends and frame them for crimes, with the goal of being the last bird standing.
Our game draws inspiration from Exploding Kittens. Fun fact: before we started even developing our own game, our whole team got together after class and played a few rounds of Exploding Kittens to use as inspiration for our game mechanics. If you've played Exploding Kittens before, you will notice some similarities in our game.
Since then, we had spent numerous months working on mechanics and designs (we luckily had a fully dedicated design team!) and eventually had a prototype. We had then pitched to a panel of judges (the Creating a Company course has a dedicated fund to invest in student companies for no equity but with promise of repayment) and raised some funds. By that time, we had generated about $1000 in pre-sales, and were on track to have our products manufactured and delivered by June of 2020.
June of 2020 came around and our product arrived. The downside though, is that the manufacturer we partnered with had given us unsellable goods. We initially wanted to recoup damages, but ultimately decided not to as it would have been too long and costly of a process. At that point, we had no money and no product, but still wanted to see this game to fruition.
We eventually decided that we were going to raise funds via Kickstarter and spent several months working out logistics and creating dedicated designs for our campaign page. Our entire team, at the time 8 people, had reached out to numerous family members and friends to commit to backing us at the beginning so that we could be in the good graces of Kickstarter's algorithm. After all our hard work, we managed to achieve 128% of our funding goal!
We currently sell on Amazon, so if you'd like to check us out follow that link. If you buy a copy, let us know what you think of the game! We are extremely proud of it.