Morning
The calm school app for families at small independent schools.
I designed, built and shipped Morning on my own since May 2026, with Claude and Cursor: an iPhone app for families, a web admin for the school office, and the website. It launches with my own school community, a Montessori school in California with about 110 families and 170 students.
Why I made it
I’ve spent my career designing software for companies like Tesla, Cisco and Adobe. Morning is the first time I’ve pointed those skills at my own community.
I want to use what I know to do some good: take the stress out of a parent’s morning, and give the people who run a small school their time back for children and for each other.
It started when the Head of School asked me, a parent, to teach an after-school cricket class. The school wanted to do more for families online but had no one to build it.
The problem
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Schools. The same news written three times, with no idea who read it. A new sign-up link every week, and hours typed into a spreadsheet. Paper permission slips to chase before every field trip. Too small for the big platforms, and no one to build anything.
Families. Thirty school emails a month from a dozen senders. Three calendars: the website, the emails and the fridge. Two parents with half the picture each. Forms and sign-ups on links, PDFs and paper.
What I built for school admins
A web admin for the school office. Write a message once and it reaches every family, in the app and by email. Post a volunteer sign-up in minutes, see who has answered a form, and keep classes and the school calendar in one place.
What I built for parents
One calm place for the school day. Today shows each child’s day at a glance, a short note each evening says what tomorrow needs, school emails become a to-do list, and Ask answers questions typed or out loud. Both guardians see the same thing. Every screen uses everyday words and one obvious next step.
How I went about it
I started by listening. The Head of School and the office walked me through a normal week, and the hard part wasn’t any one tool: it was jumping between four or five of them to get one message out.
At home, my wife and I traced how we handle school logistics, and how often one of us finds out about something the night before. Every family had its own version.
So Morning starts with each parent’s own school email and the school’s calendars, with the office working as it does today. The admin comes in one feature at a time.
Reimagining the tools
With Claude and Cursor, one person could build what used to take a team, so I redesigned each tool around the family instead of stitching them together.
AI only where it saves a minute: the evening note, questions asked out loud, emails turned into to-dos. Names are tokenized on the phone first. On 42 school emails, GPT-6 Luna caught all 16 asks, Claude Sonnet 5.5 15, Haiku 5.5 11 and Apple’s on-device model 5.
How it pays for itself
Parents never pay. The school pays a small monthly fee for the office side once it replaces the tools it pays for today, and later a small fee on class and trip payments in the app.
A long road ahead
Morning is in testing with 15 to 20 families, and the website went live on November 1, 2026. Next up: translated emails, payments, playdate rescheduling and the volunteer sheets.
There’s a lot left to build. The part I’m loving most is talking with my school community about it.