Firesight Studios

Julius Hubbard has been a Chattanooga firefighter since 2004. He's also a painter. A muralist. The guy who designs the fire department's t-shirts. Essentially, he’s a jack (or rather a Julius) of all trades.

Not only that, but he’s managed to build quite a reputation for himself, much of it through his design company, Gusto Art. The marquee of his portfolio: a towering mural for the city’s utility company EPB, just around the corner from City Hall.

As for his co-founder, best friend, and cheerleader-in-chief Justin Zimmerman, well, his path into software development wasn’t as straightforward. He got into masonry first, construction next, and then some more blue-collar work followed that.

But then, in 2012, he enrolled himself in a local college's new cybersecurity program, switched over to computer science, and ended up finding what most folks spend a lifetime looking for: the thing you wake up for every day.

And when he says “every day,” he means it. In fact, he hasn’t missed a single day of coding in the 14 years since. That's over 5,000 days in a row if anyone’s counting.

As if that weren’t enough, he still had enough in the tank for a second calling. So, in 2016, Justin joined the rank and file of his local fire department, bringing him right into Julius’s orbit.

What happened from there is what you might expect when an unstoppable developer collides with an immovable artist, literally: Justin was sent across town to fill in for a staff shortage at Julius's station.

Julius's reputation preceded him, of course. After all, who didn’t know the guy who'd designed all the t-shirts. Justin even had his opening line ready: “have you ever thought about doing software development?"

The line did not land, at least not at first. Julius brushed him off.

But Justin was tenacious. He kept at Julius, until somewhere along the line, they managed to touch on a shared dream: to tell stories. And to turn those stories into games.

So, it was decided. The two would become partners. Julius would do the art; Justin would code.

But the two took their time. They’d spend years honing their respective crafts together, building pilot apps for local businesses here and there, before finally in 2024, they made things official: Firesight Studios.

The name ended up capturing their whole story in one breath: “fire" for the service that brought them together; “sight" for the creative vision.

And the team's synergy only grew when they met sound engineer Michael Sutherland. His addition to the studio felt like "another Julius meets Justin moment," bringing a musical quality and character that perfectly aligned with their vision.

Their first title out the door: Palette Splash, a color-blending match game inspired by Julius's own daughters, while he watched them learn color theory. They marketed it entirely themselves too, with roughly $5,000 from Julius's brother Nathan, nearly all of it spent on Google Ads campaigns.

Then for an encore: Word Mayhem, a real-time multiplayer word search with a vintage cartoon vibe.

But they didn’t stop there: what came next took them on a bit of a detour from games. They went on to co-create a bill-tracking app with AI built in, powered by Gemini, Google's AI model.