Meet the father-son duo hoping to turn their AI side project into a gaming company

During a weekend in February, Geoff Teehan decided to try his hand at vibe-coding.

Despite having limited coding experience and never building anything like this by himself before, the longtime Canadian product designer was able to develop and publicly launch a relatively polished game within a matter of hours using AI tools.

Color’s interface is simple and its premise is straightforward: humans struggle to reliably recall colours; Geoff’s game aims to put your ability to do that to the test. Players are briefly shown random colours, asked to recreate them based on memory on sliding scales, and ranked on their accuracy. It is fun, easy to understand, filled with satisfying beeps, and surprisingly addictive.

“We definitely don’t know what we’re doing.”
Geoff Teehan,
Dialed

Geoff did not think much of it at first. But a quick post on Threads about Color snowballed into half a million plays in a few days, thanks to interest from some of Geoff’s product design friends. Then, demand soared after it found a global audience among online streamers like XQC, Jinxi, and ohnePixel. “It blew up,” Geoff told BetaKit in an interview.

By March, running Color was costing Geoff a lot of money, and he remained committed to his day job as chief design officer at Los Angeles (LA) payments infrastructure firm Lightspark. At the same time, pulling the plug on something that had become so popular also felt like a wasted opportunity, especially after an AI chatbot helped Geoff wrap his head around how much money the game could potentially make. The chatbot suggested Color could generate revenue “in the low millions” annually based on “exploding” traffic.

So Geoff texted his 23-year-old son Sam, a recent University of Guelph graduate. “I was like, ‘I need your help with this thing because it’s taken off,’” he said.

Since then, the father-son co-founder duo has shipped four more similar, free, browser-based memory games as part of a suite they’re calling Dialed: Sound, Time, Shape, and Color2. Though Color remains its most popular, the Dialed games have now collectively surpassed 26 million completed plays across 239 countries, with no paid marketing.

AI also helped Geoff and Sam land on the domain dialed.gg: “We love it because it really is about getting dialed in, and ‘gg’ references ‘good game,’” Geoff said.

While millions of dollars in annual revenue may be a tall order, Geoff and Sam believe they have found an effective recipe and see room to turn Dialed into a much larger business with staying power. That begins with building the right technical foundation, developing new games around the same themes, and monetizing with advertising.

“The formula right now is working,” Geoff said.

A “ridiculous” way to build something

Geoff, who now splits his time between LA and Palm Springs, is no stranger to product design—he has been doing it for the past three decades. He co-founded influential Toronto digital design agency Teehan+Lax in the early 2000s, before moving to Facebook (now Meta) in 2015, where he spent more than seven years helping with the social media company’s newsfeed and FinTech offerings. He left Meta to join Lightspark’s C-suite in 2022.

Geoff wanted to figure out how he could use new AI tools in that role, and in mid-February, he set out to learn by building something fun. Inspired by a conversation with a college professor many years ago about how humans often struggle to recall specific colours, Geoff hacked together an early version of Color within six hours, using a combination of Claude, Cursor, and Figma. “I felt like an idiot, but it kept working,” he added.

A screenshot of the Color game. — Color easy to understand, filled with satisfying beeps, and surprisingly addictive. Image courtesy Dialed.

“It’s a ridiculous way to build something, but A, I didn’t know any better, and B, I didn’t care, because I was just trying to learn how I could leverage these tools for my job,” Geoff said.

But despite its seeming simplicity, Geoff said the initial version of Color was costing thousands of dollars to run because it was built so poorly on the back-end—the initial version consisted of a single 8,000-line HTML file—and was not generating any revenue. With help from his dad, Sam is now leading the charge to change that.

As Geoff noted, traditionally, building software used to be an expensive endeavour. Companies had to figure out whether it made sense to make products before allocating the requisite time and engineering resources. AI tools have flipped that notion on its head by drastically reducing the time and cost of software development, while also permitting folks with limited or no coding experience to bring their ideas to life.

Geoff and Sam have found it “really addicting” to quickly ship products and see them succeed or fail. Most of Dialed’s games did not begin as “fully fleshed out” ideas, but rather simple concepts that the pair iterated upon until they felt solid.

Before joining his dad to work on Dialed, Sam worked in banking. During his time interning at RBC and working at CIBC, Sam said it was tough to feel the impact of the work he was doing. With Dialed, where he has been working for the past few months, it has been a much different story. Sam, who is working on Dialed from his home, splitting time between Toronto and LA, said it’s “an insane feeling” seeing users react with such enthusiasm to the release of new games and simple bug fixes.

Figuring it out

Today, Dialed is launching new games every one to two weeks. Each one has the same premise: it shows a stimulus—such as a colour, sound, or shape—then gets the player to recreate it based on memory before showing them the side-by-side comparison, ranking their performance, and comparing their score with other players. There are plenty of other colour-guessing games online, but the visual and sound design of Dialed’s suite appears to have helped their versions of the concept take off.

The criteria the father-son team has set is simple: the games must be memory-based, fun, have no barriers to begin playing, and be simple enough to absorb the premise within a single round.

“I think we could be really huge.”

To help reduce costs, Geoff and Sam used Upwork to hire a software engineer in Germany to reengineer Color and begin building out successive games under a new technical framework.

Dialed has fostered a community around the game on Instagram and Discord and has started implementing ads. Now, Geoff said Dialed is generating monthly revenue in the “low tens of thousands.” On rare days, he said they make thousands of dollars, but for the most part, Dialed’s daily revenue is “in the hundreds.” Plays by popular streamers can lead to huge spikes. Improving player retention is high on the company’s to-do list.

Sam noted Dialed is still burning through far more AI credits than it needs to be.“We definitely don’t know what we’re doing,” Geoff said.

Sam and Geoff have been having fun figuring that out. Geoff said Dialed has been able to dial back its core infrastructure costs to “well under” $1,000 per month, thanks to that engineer.

For his part, Sam said the chance to work with his dad and learn how to build a business is what drives him. It helps that he also sees an opportunity to turn Dialed into something much bigger.

“I think we could be really huge,” he said.

Feature image courtesy Dialed.