PodUp is a small startup that was founded by Jackson Main. The point of the service is to provide busy gamers with a stress free queueing experience by matching users based on similar schedules and aligned goals. When I spoke with the founder, he told me that the most common problem he saw were from his favorite games online forums. There were constant posts for games that had a small player base looking for other teammates to help with a specific quest. There was clearly a market for it, they just didn’t have something to cleanly facilitate a session actually happening.

When I first joined the team, I noticed there was a serious lack of brand personality and a serious need for a new logo. I really believed in the mission and have experienced the very problem that the service set out to solve. I play online multiplayer games, and I, like many other disgruntled players, have on many occasions run into less than ideal teammates that ruined my session and mood. The service was initially named PodPlay, and while alliteration can be great for helping a brand stick in people’s heads, I had a different vision and idea for the name of the company.

I took inspiration from brands such as Band-Aid and Q-Tips in that the brand name has almost completely dominated the commonplace term for their respective products: bandages and cotton swabs. I proposed the name change to PodUp with my reasoning being that when our user base wanted to start queueing games, they would ask each other to “PodUp”; replacing the question.