Can a design studio ship a real product?
Snacks designs software for a living — but most of that work stops at the handoff. We wanted to prove the studio could carry an idea the rest of the way: all the way to a real, public, production product. So we wrote our own brief. A daily trivia game, live on the App Store, Google Play, and the web — not a prototype or a pitch deck, but a shipped thing, with real accounts, a real backend, push notifications, and the polish we'd demand for any client.
The constraint was the interesting part. One small team, no outside engineering, and a deadline measured in weeks, not quarters. It had to be cross-platform from day one, hold up to real players, and look unmistakably like Snacks.
It was also a deliberate test of how the studio now builds everything — AI-assisted, spec-driven, shipping every day. Snacks Trivia was the proving ground.
How do you ship three platforms in seven weeks?
Not with heroics — with a workflow. Everything the app should be lived in a set of living spec documents: the product rules, the database contracts, the design tokens, and a running decision log. Those docs were the single source of truth. Every working session began by reading them, and every non-obvious choice was written down — with its reasoning — the moment it was made.
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A spec that's the source of truth
Product rules, schema, design tokens, and a decision log lived in version control beside the code — so the gap between what we meant and what shipped had nowhere to hide.
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AI-assisted, every day
We built with AI against that spec — drafting database migrations, porting the web app to native, writing tests — while the team stayed firmly in the driver's seat on product and design.
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Web first, then native
We iterated fast on a Next.js web build, locked the behavior, then ported the proven flows to a React Native app for the App Store and Play Store. One backend served both.
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Decisions in writing
Every pivot got logged with its why. That record is what let a tiny team move quickly without losing the plot.
The game itself got good by subtraction. It started as a live, synced, race-the-clock game — until we watched real people fail to coordinate a thirty-second window, and pivoted to an async, play-anytime daily puzzle, Wordle-style, with progressive hints that build tension on every wrong guess. Playtesters said a clever auto-elimination mechanic felt disconnected from their taps, so we cut it. Design-only questions got repetitive, so we opened the topics to anything.
Then came the social layer: shareable one-off games anyone can generate in a tap and send to a friend — playable right in a browser with no account at all, or in the app.
A daily game, live on every platform.
Snacks Trivia shipped — a daily puzzle and a shareable-games platform, live on the App Store, Google Play, and the web, all on one backend. Real accounts, push notifications, anonymous play, server-side question generation, content moderation, leaderboards, and streaks — the unglamorous production plumbing, not a demo reel.
The numbers tell the efficiency story: roughly seven weeks from first commit to public launch, about 100 hours of hands-on build time, 332 commits, and three platforms from a single shared backend.
But the real outcome is what it proves. Snacks doesn't just design software — it ships it, on a timeline and at a cost that used to be out of reach for a studio this size. The same spec-driven, AI-assisted workflow now runs underneath everything we build.
Snacks Trivia is live now — on the App Store and Google Play.
Weeks 1–2 · Foundation
The first playable daily game on the web.
Weeks 2–3 · The pivot
Live, synced play gave way to an async daily puzzle with progressive hints and scoring.
Weeks 3–4 · Shareable games
One-off games on any topic, plus no-account anonymous play.
Week 4 · Hardening
Migrations moved into version control; error tracking and a security pass landed.
Weeks 4–6 · Native
The Expo / React Native iOS + Android app, built and submitted to the stores.
Weeks 6–7 · Polish
Win moments, a typographic pass, and a per-question answer timer.
We set out to prove a design studio could ship a real product. Seven weeks later, it was on the App Store.Snacks