A father-son duo has vibe-coded a gaming company that’s generated nearly 30 million plays and 20 million visits across four mini-games in just 90 days. Say hello to Dialed.
Dialed is a gaming website that tests players’ senses and memory in games about color, sound, time, and shape. Geoff Teehan, chief design officer at the payments services company Lightspark and former vice president of design at Meta, created a color-matching game using Cursor and Claude during a hackathon. The project was inspired by an old college professor’s comment about how bad humans are at recalling color.
“They think they’re really good at it, but you show them a color and then they go to a paint store and try to pick it out, and they forget it,” Teehan tells Fast Company.
The color-matching game he vibe-coded is simple: It shows you a color for a few brief moments, and then takes it away and tests how well you can re-create it using controls to set hue, saturation, and brightness. Players are then scored based on how close they come to matching the original. Teehan says their data shows vivid blues and greens are some of the easiest colors for people to successfully recall, while cyans and reds are some of the hardest. Pastels are 7% harder to match than vivid colors, he says.
The game launched in February after Teehan posted about it on Threads and X. It then “grew just way faster than I expected,” he says, with about half a million plays in a few days.
He brought on his son Sam to run and grow it full time in hopes of turning the website into a real business, and it’s since expanded into more vibe-coded mini-games along similar lines. A sound game, in which players try to recreate a tone’s frequency, launched in March, followed by a time-matching game in April and a shape-matching game this past Tuesday.
“I think we just figured out a simple formula that works,” Teehan says. “You’re going to perceive a stimulus, then you’re going to re-create it from memory using simple inputs or controls.” Players are scored, and they can share their scores and compete with friends. Simplicity is key.
“We’re stripping out everything else that’s unnecessary,” he says. “There’s no instructions . . . there’s no sign-ups or logins. There’s no onboarding. There’s no app to download. You just click a link, and you’re playing.”
Scaling the site from a single-use app to a multi-game page that supports millions of plays has been a learning curve for Teehan’s son, 23, who got his undergrad degree in finance and is now getting a crash-course education in growing a vibe-coding video game brand.
“It’s just really fun to build these out and actually see in real time, when we launch a game, how people react,” Sam Teehan says. He gets game feedback, suggestions, and ideas from Dialed’s Discord server.
Not every game idea has been shipped, and some of the concepts have been duplicative. The new shape-matching game combines earlier ideas for games they tried called Position, Rotation, and Scale.
“We built out a bunch of other games that were, frankly, kind of bad, in order to get to that game,” Geoff Teehan says. “It’s a lot of experimentation.”
He says the growth of Dialed shows how it’s easier than ever before to build products with just a few people.
