What started as a weekend experiment with AI has turned into a fast-growing browser game business for Canadian designer Geoff Teehan and his son Sam.

In February, Geoff Teehan built and publicly launched Color, a memory game that asks players to recreate random colours from memory using sliding scales and then ranks them on accuracy. Teehan had limited coding experience and had never built anything like it by himself before, but he put it together within hours using AI tools.

Geoff said he “did not think much of it at first.” Then a post on Threads helped Color reach half a million plays in a few days, with interest from some of his product design friends. Demand climbed again after streamers including XQC, Jinxi, and ohnePixel picked it up.

“It blew up,” Geoff told BetaKit in an interview.

By March, Geoff said running Color was costing him a lot of money. He was still working in his day job as chief design officer at Los Angeles payments infrastructure firm Lightspark, but he also felt shutting down the game would waste an opportunity. After asking an AI chatbot about the numbers, he said it suggested Color could generate revenue “in the low millions” annually based on “exploding” traffic.

So he called in help from 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 pair have released four more free browser-based memory games under the Dialed name: Sound, Time, Shape, and Color2. Together, the games have passed 26 million completed plays across 239 countries, with no paid marketing. Color remains the most popular.

AI also helped them settle on the domain dialed.gg.

“We love it because it really is about getting dialed in, and ‘gg’ references ‘good game,’” Geoff said.

Geoff said he has spent the past three decades in product design. He co-founded Toronto digital design agency Teehan+Lax in the early 2000s, then moved to Facebook, now Meta, in 2015, where he spent more than seven years working on the company’s newsfeed and fintech offerings. He left Meta in 2022 to join Lightspark.

He said he wanted to learn how to use new AI tools in that job, and in mid-February he started by building something fun. Inspired by an old conversation with a college professor about how people struggle to recall specific colours, he built an early version of Color in six hours using Claude, Cursor, and Figma.

“I felt like an idiot, but it kept working,” he added.

“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.

That first version was expensive to run. Geoff said it cost thousands of dollars because it was built poorly on the back end and consisted of a single 8,000-line HTML file. It also was not making any revenue.

Sam is now leading efforts to change that. Before joining Dialed, he worked in banking, including internships at RBC and work at CIBC. He said it was hard there to feel the impact of what he was doing. Working on Dialed has felt very different.

Sam, who is working from home while splitting time between Toronto and Los Angeles, said it is “an insane feeling” to see users respond so strongly to new games and even simple bug fixes.

Dialed is now releasing new games every one to two weeks. Each follows the same format: show a stimulus, such as a colour, sound, or shape, ask the player to recreate it from memory, then show a side-by-side comparison, rank the result, and compare the score with other players.

Geoff and Sam said they have set simple rules for the games. They must be memory-based, fun, easy to start, and simple enough for players to grasp within a single round.

To cut costs, they hired a software engineer in Germany through Upwork to rebuild Color and create a new technical framework for later games. Geoff said that work has brought Dialed’s core infrastructure costs down to “well under” $1,000 per month.

The company has also built a community on Instagram and Discord and started adding ads. Geoff said Dialed is now generating monthly revenue in the “low tens of thousands.” He said some rare days bring in thousands of dollars, but most days revenue is “in the hundreds.”

Popular streamers can still cause major traffic spikes. Geoff said improving player retention is high on the to-do list, and Sam said Dialed is still using far more AI credits than it needs to.

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

Still, Sam sees room to build something much larger.

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

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