01 / The game
A neighborhood ritual, gone quiet.
For years, a Wednesday-and-Friday pickup Ultimate Frisbee game ran in Silver
Spring, Maryland — the kind of low-stakes, high-frequency gathering that holds
a neighborhood together. The pandemic interrupted it. The winter of 2023
finished it. What remained was two or three diehards occasionally showing up
to an empty field and going home disappointed.
The problem wasn't any one platform. It was that nobody was on the
same one. Some players were on a Facebook group attached to a
different game. Some preferred email threads. Some used GroupMe. A few were on
iMessage chains that had splintered into half a dozen smaller chains. Nobody
had the full roster, and nobody had a reliable way to know — before driving to
the field — whether enough people would come.
"Will there be a game tonight or no? How the heck would I know. And since I am
the 'coordinator' I show up anyway. When other people show up and a game
doesn't make, well, those people may not show up next time. What a mess when
all we want to do is have some fun."
— Wes Long, Commissioner emeritus, Silver Spring Ultimate
02 / The insight
Nobody could commit, because nobody knew.
Jonathon Lunardi, a software developer who'd played in that game for years,
kept thinking about the problem on the wrong axis. He'd been assuming that
what was broken was which platform people used. The real problem was
that no platform — Facebook, email, GroupMe, any of them — let people
commit conditionally. To say "I'm in, if seven others are in
too" without anyone having to go first.
That conditional commitment is what SMSGO is built around. The organizer sets
a Goal — the number of people it takes to make the event happen. Members reply
YES to a text invitation. The system counts silently, nudges quietly if the
count is short as game time approaches, and the moment the Goal is reached,
every player gets the "It's ON!" automatically — location,
time, whatever the organizer wants it to say.
The first mass text, in spirit
"If enough of you say YES, the game is officially ON. Reply YES to play."
03 / The build
Eighteen months of evenings and weekends.
The first version was crude — a Python script wired to a text-messaging
account, with the Goal logic hardcoded for one game at a time. It worked
anyway: the group's phones lit up, the count climbed, and the game fired. The
second version was a real web app with a database. The current version is a
multi-tenant platform running Wave-based invitations, polls, Best Fit Time and
Place planning, automatic waitlists, teams with per-side goals, and
pay-as-you-go billing — over text and email, with no apps and no member
accounts.
Along the way, SMSGO filed a USPTO patent application covering the
threshold-driven coordination mechanism — the auto-fire-on-Goal engine at the
heart of it all.
04 / The revival
The game came back.
This season, Silver Spring Ultimate has had a game on the calendar
every single week since March — 22 straight weeks and
counting, with 42 games scheduled so far. Rain and heat take their
cancellations, but the coordination problem is gone: on game day, everyone
knows. Same field. Same organizers. Same roster, mostly — plus the 139 people
who have joined since word got around that the game was reliable again.
SMSGO is what happens when a developer decides that watching a good thing die
is unacceptable, and writes code until it stops dying.
