Exclusive: Creating Getting Lost

By June Ramli

Sydney, Aug 9: Have you ever wondered what it takes to create and then market a card game?
If you have, wonder no more, as DailyStraits.com has an exclusive interview with Cat Macnaughtan, the founder and CEO of Getting Lost.
Read on to discover how this innovative game went from a simple travel blog to a beloved tool for spontaneous adventures, all while tapping into the growing demand for digital detox experiences.

DailyStraits.com: Tell us about yourself and your work background. How did the idea for a card game come about?

Cat Macnaughtan: It’s a bit of a story! It actually all started in 1991 in a campground in a small town in NZ called Stillwater. I was 12 at the time and met a 13-year-old local boy called James. We dated briefly and then broke up and became friends instead. Through our teens, 20s, and 30s we hung out, but we’d both met other people and had children. But then in 2014, both of us newly single, we picked up where we left off 23 years earlier. I was working in advertising in Auckland at the time with my five- and seven-year-old daughters, and James was living on the Hauraki Plains working as a joiner and bringing up his six-year-old daughter. So here we were—me living in the city, James in the country—after a lifetime as friends, suddenly bringing up three girls together. We were adventuring everywhere, and so I started writing all about it on a blog I called Getting Lost. We gathered a community along the way, and they all asked how we found the places that we visited. We told them to just go out and explore, but they told us they wanted directions. So we made some!

DailyStraits.com: How did you come up with the game idea, and how much testing did you have to go through before you decided to settle on the current idea?

Cat Macnaughtan: We kept getting asked for directions from our community who were following our Getting Lost travel blog. We realized that people had become very reliant on being directed (Google, trip guides, and even blogs like ours), and while they craved spontaneity, they still wanted directions! We worked through a number of different ways we could deliver these—dice, an app, a website were all considered—but in the end, we landed on cards! As with every game that we make, we co-create it with our community, involving them at every stage. So we had a built-in community of testers (then 20,000 people—now over 100,000 people) from day one.

DailyStraits.com: What was the cost to produce the initial deck of cards and where was it produced?

Cat Macnaughtan: We spent $3,000 producing the first batch of Getting Lost games. My brother 3D printed our suitcases at home (until we broke his 3D printer), and we printed the cards with one of those big online outfits (before moving a couple of months later to our Auckland printers, who we are still with now).

DailyStraits.com: I vaguely know how video games are created, but how does one create a card game? What are the hooks that one needs to look into before the product is finished?

Cat Macnaughtan: You need to start at the end, actually, and figure out what it is that people want to feel and have experienced when they are finished playing the game. That question is usually pretty hard to answer, so with all our games, we ask for suggestions for direction ideas from our community. Sometimes there are literally thousands of them. We read them all and start trying to figure out the emotion/outcome that people are trying to get when playing. We generally have a list of 3-5 outcomes and then we group these and start mapping directions to them. Our direction cards need to be very generic and able to work in a big city, small town, and all around the world, so that takes a lot of thought to get right. We are also mindful of using inclusive language and avoiding country-specific terms.

DailyStraits.com: Did you start a Kickstarter campaign to fund the game? If so, what was that experience like?

Cat Macnaughtan: Nope! James and I put up the first $3,000 and we’ve bootstrapped it ever since.

DailyStraits.com: Talk about marketing a new card game. What is the cost of making the cards, and how many units did you put out before deciding to replenish stock?

Cat Macnaughtan: Cost is an interesting question because so much of it is outside of the actual production of the games, like advertising, postage, staff, premises, and retailer margins. We also put all our money back into making new games, so for the first five years we didn’t make enough money to pay ourselves to work full-time in the business (we did work full-time but also had to have other jobs to pay our bills). In the last year, we’ve earned enough to pay me a full-time wage. In terms of stock, we literally sold out on the first night that we put them up for sale, and we struggled with selling out for the first three years. We have a really close relationship with our printers and have full transparency around our sales and predictions. We print on demand and update our stock numbers monthly or, in our really busy times, weekly. Even with all of that, we still occasionally run out!

DailyStraits.com: How many card games have you sold? Is there increased interest in card games now, with more people wanting to reduce screen time?

Cat Macnaughtan: Over 200,000 games! One of the reasons we landed on a card game (and said no to an app) is the need for less screen time—and also if you want to go on epic adventures, they don’t always even have internet access…

DailyStraits.com: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in bringing the card game to market?

Cat Macnaughtan: My background is in advertising, so marketing the game was relatively easy, but the rest around creating a product and running a business was all new to me. It was really tough in the initial years to try to figure out how everything worked while still working in my “day job.”

DailyStraits.com: Can you share a memorable story or feedback from a customer who played your game?

Cat Macnaughtan: We had one adventurer that discovered a whole abandoned hotel, but outside of that, it tends to be more things like a giant KFC bucket in the middle of a field, an army tank (also in the middle of a field), and pods of dolphins. We hear a lot about people discovering beaches or parks that were ten minutes down the road, but they’d never turned that way before. Mostly we don’t hear about the places they went but the fun they had being off screens and doing something a little bit crazy. We do get a lot of photos of women dressed in crazy op shop clothes on a slide (two of our cards in the Girls Road Trip Edition).

DailyStraits.com: What are your future plans for the card game? Are there any new editions or expansions in the works?

Cat Macnaughtan: There sure are! We try to develop six new games a year. We have a really long list of ideas, a lot of which are suggested by our customers and community. Some will stay on there for years and suddenly bubble to the top because of someone we meet or a conversation we have. We’ve finished our development for 2024, but I was having a great chat with someone about a Restaurant Edition and now I can’t stop thinking about how we could make that come to life, so that one may have to sneak forward.