Hi Steve,
You would likely want your own separate project that uses libmodal_pipe to create the client interface. That can be a systemd service if you want it on boot. MPA encourages lots of separate microservices and projects to all be compiled and run independently to avoid monolithic programs that grow too big and become hard to maintain. Examples such as all the voxl-inspect-*** tools in voxl-mpa-tools also serve as good starting points along with the modal-hello-client example you already found.
I hope this helps,
James