Stalefish Labs

Bad Timing & Sticktoitiveness

Michael Morrison — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0700

Timing really is nearly everything. And what it isn’t, circumstance makes up for. — Steven Van Zandt

It was such a great plan, it really was. You know those success stories where lightning strikes someone with a genius idea, and then somehow stars align and they take their idea to fruition right when it’s needed most? Wild success ensues, and you get to read about the virtue of following your dreams, and how simply seizing opportunity is all that separates you from similar results. If I was really cheeky I’d give you a numbered list of steps to follow. Well this is not one of those stories, this is a tale of timing, really bad timing. This is a cautionary tale to show how even endless enthusiasm, diligent work, and careful planning can be hilariously mocked by the unforeseen.

My big idea was a software solution to the cat herding problem of figuring out who’s in and out when trying to get together with friends. I’m an old skateboarder (really old!) and it’s an activity that is generally less enjoyable and less safe alone. So skating with friends is a key part of the sport. We used text messaging to plan sessions and it sorta works but has a lot of failings like the first joke or unrelated comment can fully derail the in/out responses, the skate session invite scrolling off into oblivion. Seemed like a problem that could be perfectly solved with a mobile app.

Enter Muster, a mobile app for getting people together in the real world. I tend to play the long game, meaning my pet projects sometimes take a while but I don’t quit easily, so back in 2019 the app had been a project for going on a decade. The iOS version was finally nearing completion and the excitement of actually releasing this thing into the wild was getting real. What had started as a Minimum Viable Product very much morphed into a full-featured app, and the unwillingness to not ship something half-baked at least partially explains the ridiculously long development timeline. In tragedies there’s often a seed of self-destruction if you look deeply enough, and in the case of Muster the perfectionism of features caused the publish date to slip literally years and eventually land in early 2020. So I was wrapping up the final touches on this app for helping people get together…what could go wrong?

On February 20, 2020 I excitedly published my decade-plus long project to Apple’s App Store, the dream was now reality. Indeed, that dream of connecting the world one intimate event at a time was officially beginning. I celebrated with a drink and dessert (actual photo)…it was now time to sit back and wait for the world to adopt this can’t-miss new idea. I imagined finally doing away with clumsy antiquated texting to plan our skate sessions, and the app quickly growing beyond our skateboard crew as a solution for all informal RSVPs. Muster would be a force for good, bringing friend and foe together. Bullies and bullees burying the hatchet, dogs and cats living together in harmony, was peace on Earth finally within reach? I should’ve savored that dessert a bit more…probably a good general rule to live by.

The CDC Museum lists the official start of the COVID-19 pandemic as December 19, 2019, with the first U.S. case on January 20, 2020. But given that pro sports dominates much of American culture, it would be March 11, 2020 when things “got real,” as the NBA canceled the remainder of their season. So less than three weeks after the launch of the app that had been carefully designed to break with other forms of social media and put the focus on people being face-to-face with each other, we find out that being face-to-face with each other is literally life-threatening. Brutal.

I had managed to create a doomsday app purely through an accident of timing. Like catastrophic timing, some of the worst timing ever. How could you possibly spend ten years of your life creating something, only to release it within weeks of it becoming absolutely useless? Worse than useless, dangerous! That was a crushing, helpless feeling, sadly but mercifully overshadowed in some ways by the life and death consequences of the pandemic, which trivialized our individual pursuits in the wake of literal survival for many. Even so, we all knew there would eventually be a return to normalcy, just no clue how or when, and at what cost.

So yes in hindsight I should’ve been working on Zoom not Muster leading into 2020, but here’s the good news about horrific timing…eventually time heals most things, one way or another. You just have to hang on and not let the lows of the present erase the potential highs of the future. I can’t say I was bursting with such cool-headed stoicism in 2020, there was little pretense of calm or wisdom in the moment. Nevertheless, quitting wasn’t on the table, the newly released app languished unused during COVID, as did many of us, while we safe-distanced and waited to find out what happens next.

Then time marched on and eventually things got better. Even though Muster’s initial release was comically flawed, like on a Shakespearean level, it ultimately survived COVID, and is alive and well today. It continues to help me and my friends not skate alone, and it has remained a vibrant project that is still evolving and improving as I stumble to unravel the subtle social challenges of bringing humans together.

I guess the takeaway (in both tech projects and in life) is to realize that even the best attempts at planning can go horribly awry, and the only thing you can truly control is how much quit you have in you. I learned that sometimes the best laid plans will be thwarted by the unknown, where opportunities become problems that turn into predicaments. The only choice is to quit or press on, and if you believe in yourself and what you’re doing that choice is surprisingly easy to make.

Muster is available now on the App Store, built by Stalefish Labs.

Obsession & the Artistic Entrepreneur

Michael Morrison — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0700

Without obsession, life is nothing. — John Waters

I obsess over things. Once an idea takes hold, I’m at its mercy. It can arrive in an instant but linger for a very long time, in some cases years and even decades. It can be an obscure hobby (beekeeping), a high-risk activity outside of mainstream ball sports (skateboarding), or it can be an idea for a problem to be solved. Problem solvers are often thought of as entrepreneurs, and they certainly can be, but we’re really talking about two wildly different personalities and skill sets. Yet obsession can give one a false sense of the other.

I mention this because I’ve been obsessively working on a particular problem for quite some time, and as you learn more you might think the time, energy, and money I’ve spent on it makes me an entrepreneur. That’s what I thought too, and I was very wrong. Entrepreneurs are (or should be) serious about things like determining if there’s actually a market for their solution, how to properly reach that market, and just maybe how much it will cost, both financially and more importantly in time. They would do that BEFORE diving into the work, and they’d be right to do so. But that’s not me, and when aiming that laser focus of obsession at a problem, I’ve learned I’m really only solving it for myself.

Project myopia can be a wonderful thing for personal projects where you’re effectively doing pro bono work for yourself. Expectations typically line up pretty well with results when they live in the same person’s head. Or to put it in marketing terms, you don’t have to sell yourself on the benefits of your own idea. Thing is, you DO have to eventually sell others on your idea if part of your plan involves it solving their problems too. For example, a mobile app with a comically ambitious scope. I’m talking about Muster, which is attempting to evolve the concept of an RSVP for the mobile age and in doing so change how we get together with each other in the real world. I’ve been working on it for nearly 15 years, which is slow by almost any standard but insanely slow for tech (the iPhone itself has only been around since 2007). But I’m patient, and stubborn. And I understand that to do just about anything meaningful in life, you must exhibit dogged perseverance and cultivate a certain love for the process of creation itself, with a bright line separating effort from outcome.

So with Muster think an extremely informal evite with a hint of messaging, calendar, a touch of Instagram, even a dash of Strava. I know in marketing you aren’t supposed to define yourself in terms of your peers or competitors but it’s often the simplest way to convey an idea, and zero-sum thinking is usually counter-productive in a world large enough for multiple ideas to co-exist and serve unique purposes. Besides, referencing “the competition” is small potatoes when it comes to Muster and ignoring marketing best practices. Anyway, the idea grew out of the need to distill the communication for getting together down to two possibilities: in or out. Other interesting features evolved over time but that’s still the core of the app: let’s get together, are you in or out?

Seems simple enough, right? I naively thought so too way back in 2010. Turns out there’s a lot of subtlety in event planning, even informal events like meeting up with friends for a coffee. How do people find each other in the app, cultivated friend lists like Facebook? If we’re meeting on Friday in Atlanta (EST) but I create the invitation on Wednesday while in Nashville (CST), what time zone is used? Do you show that time zone in the app? To both people? Is location required or should it be optional, maybe inferred from the title like “Grilling at Our House?” And what about notifications, iPhone and Android users coming together, privacy concerns, etc.? It started to become clear why no other mobile apps have succeeded in solving this ostensibly simple problem, and why most planning is still done with clunky text threads. Enter an obsessive guy with technical skills, a problem to solve, an over-abundance of optimism, and zero regard for proper entrepreneurial decision-making.

Years go by. Then a few more. Plenty of roadblocks surfaced, including a shuttered software development tool (Parse) and a pandemic, among other challenges…but all those design problems mentioned got solved, and many more were identified and solved as well. Not only that, but real-world usage led to several significant enhancements such as event messages and media, invitee groups, plus-ones, co-hosts, min/max attendees, and more. The idea evolved but I stuck to my guns in building the app I wanted, not the app I guessed the world needed. Sure, tons of testing was done with friends and family, not to mention Muster being both a lead sponsor and planning tool for the world’s largest backyard skateboard contest. But at the end of the day every major decision came down to “what do I personally want this app to do?”

And here we get to the real issue at hand. I’ve heard it said that if Bob Dylan hadn’t become one of the greatest songwriters in history, he’d be sitting on a sidewalk somewhere playing the exact same music. That’s an artist. An artist creates because they can’t not do it, and the best artists create for themselves, regardless of whether they ultimately sell their art or perform it to make a living. With art, success lies in the creation itself, not in how it’s received by others — Vincent Van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime!

Business is in many ways the opposite of art, where success is necessarily defined by others voting with their wallet for a product by trading goods or money. App-making is certainly a business, I mean apps are literally published in an app STORE. So it’s difficult to make the “apps are art” argument with a straight face. Yet there’s an artist inside this engineer who is dutifully committed to creating the ultimate real world social app purely for myself. And at the same time publish it in a store where others get to decide if it also provides any value to them.

The irony that this ruthlessly individualized app depends on others for business success isn’t lost on the artist in me, yet I can’t not create it. The resulting conflict is real, and the jury is still out on whether this particular marriage of technology and liberal arts ultimately delivers on that famous Steve Jobs insight. In the meantime, if you ever stumble across a guy on a sidewalk sitting on a skateboard with a laptop coding away, consider downloading his app and inviting him for a coffee. I’m in!

Muster is available now on the App Store, built by Stalefish Labs.