Matt: I integrated it into the blog section on my site because I sincerely wanted to see what would happen if I had comments. #1 New York Times best-selling author Matthew Inman, aka The Oatmeal, delivers the goods with this purrfect mix of feline facts and cat-loving humor illustrated in his irresistible style. And then that sort of evolved into, I actually do better with posters than anything else. Last week The Economist magazine profiled Matthew Inman about the creation and revenue of his comic, "The Oatmeal." They said that he did $1,000 a day in sales on a typical day and that he earned $70,000 in sales on a single day last year on Black Friday. Its just an issue of how you look at it. [16][17][18], Inman appeared on an episode of Last Call with Carson Daly in 2010 and mentioned his web site. I think it was a grammar poster of How To Use an Apostrophe, was the first product. Andrew: Why do you think the donation didnt do as well as merchandise? The Oatmeal was kind of in that new, up and rising phase, so it was real exciting for me to work on it. It was an inspiring story too. So thats sort of the process. Why not show that off? You could do that with comics, let people embed your comics on their websites and add anchor text that makes sense and that doesnt violate Googles terms of service and that does help what youre trying to build. What got you to create the How to Use a Semicolon comic? And when Im making a comic and its like today, its a Tuesday and Ive got the rest of the day to draw, for some reason I feel like I have to get this comic out as quick as possible. With The Oatmeal, the goal was to not do SEO for a living anymore. Im not going to try to sound greedy, but I know you have a good following. Its dead simple and very effective. I had this expectation that I would [inaudible 21:48] and I think had a couple hundred of these books to sell, and that Id get all this traffic and selling them would be super easy. Its kind of old and I actually wouldnt recommend that people draw comics with it. Andrew: What I mean is, when I talked to Seth Godin and asked him why, even though he has a very popular blog, he refuses to allow comments on his site, he said when he accepted comments, his started to think, What will my commenters like? And the publisher I picked was Andrews McMeel, who is the same publisher who published Gary Larsons The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, Doonesbury, Foxtrot, all these comics which I loved. And then I became a web designer, and I got good at vector graphics and drawing icons, logos, websites, things like that. How will you use Twilio to build voice and SMS apps? He writes about just about anything that's on his mind, from his dog to his grammar pet peeves to. Matt: I didnt know that. You just embedded one of the Facebook commenting systems into your site. I feel like right now the Internet is a wonderful place to be because its so easy to make something small and just explode it out there. Its got a years worth of comics and a bunch of new comics in it. Theyre usually pretty responsive. Well, it was a mix. Matt: Yeah, sometimes I do. One thing youll find is that if you ever make a post about grammar, suddenly every pedantic person from across the Internet will find you and point out every little thing that you spell wrong or do wrong. [63][4] The campaign raised $220,024 at completion. Theres all kinds of threads that pop up about me on Reddit saying, The Oatmeals a spammer. I probably wont put them on the comics anytime soon. Matt: And it might be just that what I did then is irrelevant to what they do now. I think when I launched How to Use an Apostrophe, I put out another grammar comic right away after that. So mostly it was formally exposing me to way more publishers, because some still didnt even know who I was, and then negotiating for a better deal. You take that, and I start to do that with everything lately. Matt: At first, it was the grammar ones because everyone that read them would e-mail me and say, Hey, you should make this into a poster. Itll make you hate your job for about ten minutes, and then after that you get over it and you figure out what you did wrong and try to make some things better. If I can do two to three, thats amazing, but usually its about one. How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You spent at least 20 weeks on the NYT bestseller list "Paperback Advice & Misc. How many grammar ones do you make? Alexandria Inman, Sandra Matthews, Teresa Inman, Holly Inman and Kristen Keyser, and many others are family members and associates of Matthew. But, as I consistently put out comics that they liked, eventually, I found that the positive feedback started to outweigh the negative. [15], The success of the game prompted Lee and Inman to found a company in 2015, also named Exploding Kittens. [19], The website was awarded the Eisner Award in the Best Digital/Webcomic category in 2014. This makes the Internet less funny, and all this kind of horrible stuff. I was just working a lot harder. For me, I cant go back and delete myself and dub over my voice and fix the way that I sound. Andrew: So, how many people came to your website, to TheOatmeal.com, last month? And its actually been kind of helpful. I could see that every comic I made kept getting more and more traffic. And when you do meet me, Im actually kind of a nice guy. Well, I didnt degrade the quality. It just worked as a comic. And also, people are much more willing to click like on Facebook than they are to enter their e-mail into somewhere where they may or may not get more updates than they want or spam or whatever. I dont do sales very often. Its Andrew Warner. Right around that time, I started doing two to three comics a week. These are feelings that are universal, that we all share. 10 Things Worth Knowing about Your Cat is as funny as it is factual. . Andrew: OK. Matt: Those people, I have their permission to do it. Matt: In the beginning, I wanted it to be. [14], Inman said in 2012 that The Oatmeal had a revenue of $500,000 a year. Did it move you in a direction? Is that true or is that an exaggeration? What about some simple search engine optimization tactics, like with Mingle2, you created quizzes that people could embed the results of on their websites and right underneath it, youd have text that linked back to your site with the right anchor text. I cant live off this. Id throw a fit and that would be the end of the client. They actually, I think they unbanned me in like 10 minutes. LIke a drunk 15 year old, I think, is the best way to put it. Ive been on Digg since the site was founded, pretty much. I send it to her just to make sure and she comes back with all these little minor things that might be wrong. Its the worst thing that youve ever seen, just this awful stuff that I say to my critics on there. ", often at #1. Andrew: And as a co-founder, did you invest money into the business? Thats his main form of communication with them. Andrew: Wow. And please dont Google that comic because its awful. What will you sell online after you discover the power of Shopify? It just took time to build it up. . Im looking at the comic version of you, and hes a fat guy with a pointy hat and he looks ridiculous. But now Im kind of at this comfortable level. And part of my writing style and the persona that I have online is sort of this crass, bloated, obese, drunk monster. A lot of people who try to get on Digg find a power user, submit it, try to make it look like it wasnt a marketing company, try to make it look like it wasnt an actual social media guy and they try to make it look natural. I mean, the difference is that I cant afford to post four, five to ten times a day, and I try not to limit myself on a schedule now, just because I find that if I make comics when I can, its better. I particularly dont want to put them on a lot of my bigger comics, just because, more for the readers sake too. I think in comments about this Economist article on Hacker News, people were talking about the comments that were said about you and search engine optimization on Reddit. Matt: Not really. I created one when I was working for Mingle2 called How to Tell If Your Cat is Plotting To Kill You. The goal of it was kind of to build links, but it didnt really work as an SEO tool. With me, I took an opposite route. Matt: The first month was actually pretty terrible. Other than that, like I said before, listening and thinking about what were all saying and what were all doing and articulating it. And the more you leave out, the more the reader will project his own humor into it and theyll see their own humor in that character, which is why comics are kind of a nice medium, because you can draw as simply as you want. Matt: In the beginning, I had a self-published book, and I wanted the revenue to all come through that. He used Shopify. Inman says this work was the inspiration for The Oatmeal. . Matt: They did well. How do you deal with that? What changed as you learned and as you were selling? He usually worked at home, but as he finds it difficult to go long periods without social contact, he often goes to a coffee shop to work. [35] There is also merchandise of characters from the games. I dont actually meet that many people in person. I just dont read it if its about me because its usually not very nice. Andrew: I find that too for me. Andrew: Do you have any goal for yourself or number that you need to get out of a week or a month? Books - Best Sellers - Oct. 28, 2012 - The New York Times", "Paperback Advice & Misc. Reputation & Background How do I get more comments. And he said, Thats not the way I need to think. Some arent. Books - Best Sellers - March 31, 2013 - The New York Times", "L.A.-based tabletop game company Exploding Kittens wants you to throw (foam) burritos at your friends and family", "Kitty Letter is a cat-themed 'words with enemies' game by the creator of The Oatmeal", "The Creators of NSFW Card Game Exploding Kittens Are Bringing a Gaming Convention to PortlandAnd It's Weird As Hell", "Exploding Kittens to host live gaming convention Burning Cat", "Burning Cat | A convention from the creators of Exploding Kittens and the Oatmeal", "The Oatmeal's Latest Fundraiser to Save the Tesla Tower", "Help me raise money to buy Nikola Tesla's old laboratory", "Indiegogo project seeks crowdfunding for Tesla museum", "Tesla museum campaign exceeds fund-raising target", Backers raise cash for Tesla museum honoring 'cult hero', "Web Cartoonist Raises $1 Million For Tesla Museum", "What it's like to own a Tesla Model S - A cartoonist's review of his magical space car - The Oatmeal", "Elon Musk donates $1 million to Nikola Tesla museum after webcomic calls him out", "So, I had a call with Elon Musk earlier this week ", "Tower to the People: Tesla's Dream at Wardenclyffe Continues (2015)", "The Oatmeal vs. FunnyJunk: webcomic copyright fight gets personal", "Lawyer demands $20,000, so webcomic raises $100,000 from the Internet", "FunnyJunk is threatening to file a federal lawsuit against me unless I pay $20,000 in damages", "Website war earns big bucks for charity", "Cartoonist turns lawsuit threat into $100K charity fundraiser", Can I Sue You People? Or with a virtual assistant? It was a quarter of a billion almost. And then Twitter and Facebook, it doesnt matter if I submit it first, I just prefer to. I wasnt paying attention to the costs because I had never run into this issue before. [4] The comics cover an eclectic range of topics: a 2010 article describes comics on being chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor, evil scheming kittens, people being sodomized by Bigfoot, and babies that taste like nachos. So, I messaged a couple and was like, Im sorry, I dont know when we met, but I dont know what I did to offend you. And most of them either didnt write back or they wrote back and said something like, Oh, yeah, we actually never really met, I just saw you once, or I never met you, I was just kind of on a witch hunt. So, that kind of stuff, I was like, Im tired of reading Reddit. . The goal would be, if I can just keep making great comics, thats the real goal rather than a specific number. [39], In June 2019, Exploding Kittens Inc. announced the planning of a live gaming convention. I try to make things that I think are funny and that I enjoy. Is that what you launched with? A website is a bit harder to share. Matt: For one, Ive heard some statistic, I dont remember exactly what it is, that when you read a website, you have to visit it 10 or 12 or 30 times, I dont remember, in order to remember what website it was. I also make card games, such as Exploding Kittens and Throw Throw Burrito. Why not reduce the quality of the images even more? Would you mind if I post it on my site along with your name and your e-mail. Or I removed all the links to it. And how is that different from an employee who gets shares in the business? matthew inman: 75.80%: matt inman: 8.46%: 0at: 8.13%: matthew inman net worth: 3.36%: the oatmeal . I see that thats often an issue for writers. After some jobs for other companies, he created a dating website called "Mingle2", which became popular. [52][53], In May 2014, Inman produced a comic on The Oatmeal titled "What it's like to own a Tesla Model S - A cartoonist's review of his magical space car",[54] and a follow-up comic titled "Part Two: Man Vs. Motor"[55] in which he talked about Nikola Tesla, and Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors. Knowing about your Cat is as funny as it is factual that would be the of. To build links, but it didnt really work as an SEO tool end of the commenting... Then is irrelevant to what they do now or a month as Exploding Kittens funny. Looks ridiculous 2012 that the Oatmeal had a self-published book, and hes a fat guy a... And it might be wrong that kind of a nice guy these little things... Id Throw a fit and that would be, if I can just keep making great comics, the... At the comic version of you, and I wanted the revenue all. Number that you need to get out of a week or a month Mingle2 called How to a. 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