( CNN ) -- The failed-startup story is familiar by now . A pair of Stanford grads come up with a million-dollar idea , let 's say Uber for cats . `` Mewber '' joins a startup accelerator , builds an iPhone app , gets a few million dollars from a venture capital firm , moves into a hip office in San Francisco and hires a handful of bright 20-something employees . Things are looking great . Then they discover that cats hate cars , rarely have important appointments they need to keep and are all mysteriously using Windows Phone 8 devices . The product fails , and Mewber shuts down . Betaworks is a New York-based startup studio that does things differently . Instead of going all-in on one product , Betaworks gives multiple ideas room to grow , and even die , in order to single out the most promising sites , apps and tools . `` We try to fail fast and small , '' explained founder and CEO John Borthwick . Borthwick describes Betaworks as a creative company of builders . Its employees work together in a studio atmosphere to conceive , build and grow multiple products at a time . If one idea is n't working , they can refocus their energies on something new . `` Every place I 've worked before has always been trying to make a specific product or company work , so you had no alternatives , '' said Paul Murphy , Betaworks ' senior vice president of product , who formerly worked at Microsoft and Aviary . `` We do n't have that constraint here . '' Many of Betaworks ' more popular offerings help people discover or organize news and other content , like Digg , Reader , Tapestry and most recently Instapaper . And the 6-year-old company recently branched out into games with the release of `` Dots , '' a deceptively simple game that requires players to connect colored dots with swipes of a finger . The abstract and addictive iPhone game shot up Apple 's charts , attracting a million users in its first four days and 3 million users in the month since it launched . Betaworks says 250 million games of `` Dots '' have been played . The company is moving fast to capitalize on the buzz and on Thursday released an iPad version of the game . Like most of Betaworks ' offerings , `` Dots '' was created quickly ( the team started in January ) , and its design was kept minimal . To come up with a product , the team starts with a running list of about 80 things they feel should just be better , from weather apps to business cards . Every four to six months , they 'll go through the list and pick up to a dozen things that they want to prototype . After one month , they 'll look at the first version of the app or site and , if it addresses a need , get it into the hands of 100 beta testers . In the past four months the company has been focused on launching five small companies , part of its `` Hacker in Residence '' program . In addition to `` Dots , '' there is Giphy , a search engine for GIFs ; Poncho , a personalized weather app ; Blend.io , which allows musicians to collaborate on music online ; and Telecast , which lumps YouTube videos together based on the viewer 's specific interests . Even once they 're launched , these products can be shut down by Betaworks at any time . Killing off an app is n't a big deal for Betaworks , unlike a startup that 's pouring all its energy into a single idea . And instead of losing their jobs , the developers and designers just move on to the next Betaworks idea . `` What makes it easier for us is , we sort of celebrate the ones we kill off as much as the one we spin off , '' Murphy said . The company also buys and rebuilds established tech properties such as Digg , Reader and Instapaper . When it bought the once-mighty Digg , that site cost $ 230,000 a month to run . Betaworks stripped Digg down and rebuilt it completely in just six weeks , creating a far simpler version of the curated-news site that costs only $ 19,000 a month to operate . `` If you think about the dynamic of what Digg was , a crowd-sourced news site , I think Twitter figured out a more scalable mechanism , '' Borthwick said . `` What Digg was needed to be rethought from the ground up . '' Some products are spun off into standalone companies , like traffic-analytics tool Chartbeat and URL shortener Bit.ly . Others have been sold off to large tech companies such as Facebook , Twitter , Microsoft and Zynga for a tidy sum . Betaworks also invests seed money in young startups , many of which , like Kickstarter , Groupon and Tumblr , have gone on to be hugely successful . The business model and minimalist approach to apps is working out swimmingly for Betaworks . According to Borthwick , the company is `` wildly '' profitable .
New York startup studio behind the hit game `` Dots '' has a unique business model . Betaworks develops its own ideas and buys interesting startups to grow them . Because the company is working on multiple products , it can kill the ones that do n't work . On Thursday , Betaworks released an iPad version of its `` Dots '' game .