We had never shipped production software before this.
One weekend in February 2026, Geoff opened Cursor for the first time. He wanted to learn to “vibe code” — ship something without writing the code himself. He prompted: “Humans are bad at remembering color. I want a game that tests it. Show me a color, then give me sliders set to something random and let me try and recreate it. Show the results side by side and give me a score.” Six hours later there was a working game. Twelve hours later, with some screens he’d designed in Figma, it was polished. He texted the link to his 23-year-old son in Toronto. The next day, a database and a leaderboard. Two days later, multiplayer.
Color went live on February 12, 2026. After five days, 540,000 strangers had played it. Threads picked it up. The Verge picked it up. There was no marketing, no launch plan, no press list. The link traveled on its own.
Sam had already quit his bank job. He’d been playing with AI tools and publishing his own things. Geoff texted him after Color hit half a million plays. “I have a job I love and am dedicated to. But this is too good to let die. I need your help.” Sam started running Dialed full-time from Toronto. Geoff is still at Lightspark, leading the design team for global payments — a problem he’s been working on for nearly a decade.
Sam works on Dialed 60–80 hours a week. He’s a 23-year-old learning to run a company by running it. AI does the bulk of the work. Geoff weighs in on game ideas, design refinement, and strategy when Sam wants another opinion. The foundation is solid. Dialed is his.
The first two games — Color and Sound — shipped as single HTML files. No framework, no modules. Color was about 8,000 lines. So was Sound. They didn’t know any better. Then they did. Sam taught himself enough about software architecture to build a small framework, and Time, the third game, shipped on it. The framework is still imperfect; they don’t worry about it. What they obsess over is the experience: no instructions, no login, no app, works on phone and desktop, fun in the first thirty seconds.
Geoff thought running ads on a viral game would be easy. He assumed he could put a few Carbon ads on, cover the hosting bill, and call it a day. Hosting, Cursor credits, and database costs were running into the low thousands per month. It took way longer than anticipated to find an ad partner. Display ads are far from perfect, but with this many players the costs are real, and ads are the fastest way to cover them. Ad revenue covers costs and the trajectory is encouraging. It’s a simple business: low costs, modest revenue, AI doing the work. They’re introducing a fourth game and upgrading the original three so people can play in real time with others.
