For years, a small 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. By spring 2024, the game had been effectively dead for a year and a half, with 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 show.
"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
The insight
Jonathon Lunardi, a software developer who'd been playing in that game on and off for a decade, 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 — gave organizers a way to commit conditionally. To say "I'll come if seven other people will come" without anyone having to step up first.
That conditional commitment is the threshold mechanism that SMSGO is built around. Members reply YES to an invitation by text. The system tracks the count silently. The moment the count hits the organizer's threshold — say, eight players — every YES gets a "GAME IS ON" confirmation automatically, with whatever custom message the organizer set up: location, time, what to bring. Below the threshold, the system nudges quietly. People who don't get pinged unless they need to.
The build
Jonathon spent eighteen months designing and rebuilding the engine in evenings and weekends. The first version was crude — a Python script wired to a Twilio account, with the threshold logic hardcoded for one event at a time. The second was a real web app with a database. The current version is a multi-tenant platform that runs Wave-based invitations, polls, multi-question availability surveys, automatic waitlists, and pay-as-you-go billing — all over SMS, no apps, no member accounts.
The revival
The Silver Spring Wednesday-and-Friday game has now run eighteen consecutive weeks without missing a session outside of weather cancellations. Same field. Same organizers. Same roster, mostly — plus everyone who has joined since they heard the game was reliable again. The system filed a USPTO patent application covering the threshold-driven coordination mechanism, and currently serves four customer organizations and one hundred forty-five members.
SMSGO is what happens when a developer decides that watching a good thing die is unacceptable, and writes code until it stops dying.
