Grid Critters

Dave Geddes was miserable. Making six figures at Domo as an open web architect, surrounded by friends he'd recruited himself, with insurance and stability—he had everything except purpose. Then he took his family to see Moana. When the titular character sang "How Far I'll Go," something broke open. "I just lost it. I was weeping in the theater," Dave recalls. He quit two weeks later.

With savings from years of high pay, Dave had runway but no plan. He bought into Amy Hoy's "30x500" course ($2k+) to learn the fundamentals of audience-building and business. The real breakthrough came when he was trying to center text in CSS at McDonald's on an infinite Diet Coke supply. Frustrated with repeatedly checking CSS-Tricks for flexbox reference, he invented metaphors to remember flexbox properties—a crossbow shooting zombies. A friend encouraged him to share it online, so he built a junky email course. Then Kent C. Dodds, a fellow Domo alum, tweeted about it. Within weeks, 300 people signed up a day. Within months: 12,000 on his email list. Dave launched Flexbox Zombies as a free game. Despite his wife's skepticism about giving away 6 months of work, the game became remarkable—not just good, but genuinely different. It still gets 25,000-30,000 page views a month, five years later, with zero Google ranking and no paid marketing.

With 70,000 total enrollments in Flexbox Zombies and a massive email list, Dave spent 9 months building Grid Critters—a full-production game to teach CSS Grid. He hired professional artists (spending ~$10k on contract art), wrote guides, and poured in craft. On launch, he offered pre-orders at $145, full price $229. He went on vacation to escape the anxiety of whether anyone would actually pay. At the pool with his feet dangling, his phone started blowing up: "pre-order pre-order pre-order" notifications from Teachable. He made $30,000 in the first wave. "Amy was right," he realized. "You're never the same after you make that first dollar."

Dave's pricing strategy evolved. He lowered Grid Critters to $179 (sales went up), then to $99 (sales steadier and better). He realized that by positioning games as *courses*—not as entertainment—he could command course pricing. He also learned to hire. Rather than solo-building, he contracted professional artists and animators, dramatically improving quality. When Google approached him to build a game about Service Workers, they gave him unlimited budget; he spent $170k on contractors and a German composer, taking it to a level impossible solo. But his greatest challenge came during a dark period when he lost sight of customers, focusing only on his own income anxiety. Reconnecting with customer problems—through the frameworks of 30x500—pulled him back.

Dave has been full-time for four years, now well past the $30k launch day. He credits remarkability for growth: his games are so different from standard tutorials that people naturally share them. He's never spent on ads, only content marketing. A ten-year-old once hacked his coupon system with Burp Suite, only to confess honestly—so Dave gave him free access and was inspired. He's building a mastery-coin system to incentivize course completion and cross-purchase. His dream: a small studio of 5 people, cranking out a suite of coding education games. He's writing tools to make game creation faster. Unlike his brother's donation model (a few hundred/month), Dave's paid model generates steady revenue. He's living the programmer's dream: making games, full-time, on his own terms, without a boss or permission.