For the past week, I had been struggling with the topic of this article. Originally, I was thinking that this would be an introduction to Mochify – who we are, what we (aim to) do, all the general information to christen our birth. As I sat on the MBTA on the way home from work, I started writing this post in my head, and the idea came to me that this would describe the confluence of events that have brought us here, and define our goals. As much as this is meant for our as-yet-non-existent readers, I am simultaneously attempting to convince the rest of the mochify team that despite our previous futile attempts at breaking off from our normal jobs, this time it is very different.

So what is mochify? The easiest way to describe mochify is that we are a software company, comprised of three developers who have long harbored grander designs. Real life got involved, and we were all on the opposite coast from the heart of the video game industry, where all of us had a desire to work, so all of us have been working in unrelated software fields: security, defense, education, marketing, and of course, enterprise-level bullshit. I don’t think any of us have moved closer to what each of us really want to do with our abilities.

For the 99.999% of the world that do not know about mochify’s previous life, we started as a very innuendo and geek inspired site, called Sticks of Joy (SoJ). SoJ was conceived in July, 2009, resulting in a short-lived site where each of us wrote about topics in the world of geekery, such as the subtle annoyances in the board game Clue. Sad to say, the site died soon after conception, and we never started the other portion of SoJ, which was to make video games.

Now that the brief history lesson is complete, fast forward two years to 2011. A couple of us switched jobs since SoJ, mindsets have changed, dreams and egos have been shattered and rebuilt, technology has evolved – it’s a brand new world. Two years ago we were mired in choices of what technology to use, and prone to over-engineering and over-designing our software. We spent maybe two months just wondering whether to use Torque, or XNA, or Blender engine, or Source engine, or any of the other hundred choices for a game engine out there. Couple that with having an infrastructure (web server, code repos, issue tracker, etc.) all maintained by one person (myself), as well as our tendency to write long, detailed software design documents, and it’s no wonder that we did not make it off the ground.

But this time it really will be different. If no one is convinced yet, let’s look at our past problems and the solutions we have, now that are under the guise of mochify.

• Lack of mission – I don’t think we really knew what we wanted to do in 2009, or 2008, or 2007. Now that we’ve had two years to mature our thoughts and ideas, we actually have real ideas to build on.
• Tendency to overcomplicate – Ah, those were the days when we were just young, upstart developers, raised in monstrous, slow-moving organizations, where the reality was heavy development processes and endless product design meetings. Paradoxically, we all wanted to make simple and intuitive software in the most complex ways possible. Now, though, our end-result goals and the path there should be simpler as we’ve embraced more agile processes.
• Confusion over tools – As I mentioned, we spent a lot of time nitpicking about what tools to use to make our projects, rather than actually working. Now though, we have Unity3d, Github, Campfire, and other tools that really have made life easier for us developers. Less worrying about server explosions, more time to work.
• Confusion about platform – Two years ago we were still thinking of building software for the desktop, and for video game consoles. Since then, we have come to embrace mobile platforms like Android and iOS, which have matured and developed large user bases. Most importantly, they have low barriers to entry in terms of pricing and bureaucracy, and have a glut of powerful tools aimed at making software for them simple. It certainly beats trying to get a license to make Nintendo DS games or trying to sell desktop software.
• Lack of communication – We are now doing more in-person discussion of our ideas (well, minus one person), and it has been much more helpful in motivating us to actually discuss ideas and get to work.

And that brings me to our mission, our goal, what these two years in hibernation have done to our philosophies. As Pat put it, he wants to have a ‘profitable lifestyle’, one where he works but it doesn’t feel like work, making software that helps his life as much as everyone else’s. My goal for mochify is to affect people in much the same way that github and 37signals do. We will not make software like theirs, but they have built strong communities that speak favorably of them, and have made software that is highly praised for having greatly simplified some aspect of life.

Plus, the name ‘mochify’ is really awesome.