Two weeks ago, Jeff Kelly and Jim Owens had to buy 300 potatoes. Then another 200 potatoes the next day.

Ever since a Buzzfeed article about their spud-based messaging business went live on Jan. 29, Kelly and Owens found themselves bombarded with requests for personalized potato messages.

Renton locals Kelly and Owens are co-owners of MysteryPotato.com, a website that sends a personalized potato as an anonymous piece of mail. That’s right, you can order a spud with a message etched on it and send it to anyone across the world. According to the website, “Potatoes are simple and they bring joy and confusion like you would not believe.”

“It’s a silly thing, the potatoes,” said Owens, retired CEO of Cast for Kids Foundation.“But once you get into it, the messages people are sending in start changing your mind on how stupid this is. Some of the messages are really, really touching.”

The business receives various requests, including prom proposals, thinking-of-you notes, apologies, and anything (and everything) in between, including messages such as, “The potato looks like you,” “Hey idiot, why are you holding a potato?” and “Will you be my spuddy?”

“The customers are the inspiration for a lot of these [messages],” explains Kelly, an engineer at Expedia. He says that its surprising how many different ways people incorporate the words ‘startch’ and ‘tater’ in their messages.

One of Kelly’s favorites was a request for a “Will you marry me?” potato. “He was very spud-sific about that [message],” commented Owens.

The long-time family friends weren’t planning on starting a gag gift niche-market business. Instead, they were hoping to buy a website where they could sell information products. But then Kelly saw MysteryPotato.com was up for sale.

“I saw it come up for auction and I immediately sent it out to Jim and said, ‘Wouldn’t this be a crazy, whacky thing for us to buy?’” said Kelly. “We didn’t want that everyday sort of commitment, but this website was so fun! Jim’s response immediately was, ‘Wow! Let’s do that!’ So we ended up buying it.”

“I certainly didn’t envision (doing) this,” said Owens. “First of all, a man my age who doesn’t know much about social media to have one viral for the first time… At my age, 90 percent of my friends don’t even know what that means.”

“They think you need to go to the doctor,” added Kelly.

After procuring the website in mid-October, Kelly and Owens were selling five to 10 potatoes a day on average, with a slight spike in traffic during the holiday season. But when the Buzzfeed article about MysteryPotato.com went live two weeks go, the requests skyrocketed. The pair received over 500 requests within two days.

“It was wild,” said Kelly.

“You might say it was ‘spud-tacular,’” said Owens.

“We ‘starched’ the day off right,” added Kelly.

The new-found hype came with added challenges, including an influx of international orders.

“We had to create a business model that allows us to create a team that’s distributed across the world to create potatoes and deliver [them],” said Kelly. “We’ve got 10 folks around the world that’s not in the USA.”

The duo isn’t worried about the future and is focused on bringing a smile to their customers’ faces. They say that their future is “spud-tacular” and that they are only “starching off.”

“Selling potatoes… we know’s it’s a fad thing,” said Owens. “But when you’re talking about fads nowadays, fads can last a long time because the internet touches millions of people over time.”

“We’re in it for the enjoyment of running a business that makes people happy,” said Kelly. “When we look at our core product, as far as I’m concerned, it’s based on where our customers take us as opposed to where we take them. That model of ‘we know best and we’ll take the customer there’ is history.

“It’s so much more rewarding to be in a business where we’re not sending hateful messages. Where what we’re sending is hopefully creating more joy and happiness or other positive feelings when people are receiving it. It’s so much more personally-rewarding.”

“If we can get Oprah to endorse us…” said Owens.

“I’ll settle for One Direction,” said Kelly.