I played for a bit, and I definitely could be missing something, but this mostly felt like I was clicking random upgrades and hoping they would accelerate me. As far as I can tell, the colors correspond to powers of ten, but I couldn't tell if I was spending a currency or just making the usable number as high as some cap. That made it more or less a guess as to what kind of strategy I should use. Eventually all of the dots were full... and I think that means I made a cell? But there wasn't any indication if that was actually right or if I missed a step.