pogo alley
PoGO Alley is a trading platform for Pokémon GO players: post what you have, post what you want, and find the trainer anywhere in the world who has your missing regional. The trade itself happens in the game; finding each other happens here.
Trading in Pokémon GO has always been bound to whoever happens to live near you. Most players either trade with the same few locals or never find the trade at all, and region-exclusive Pokémon make it worse: some can only be caught on another continent. When the game opened up remote trading, the missing piece became discovery. There was no good place to find the trainer in Japan who has your regional and wants yours. So I built the place.
The Explore feed puts every trainer's For Trade and Looking For lists side by side, so a match is visible at a glance. The screen I'm proudest of is messages. Negotiating a trade in text is clumsy, so the offer sheet makes it visual: pick what you get and what you give from each other's actual lists, and send the offer as a picture of the deal. And because every trade ends with exchanging trainer codes, your friend code saves to your profile once and drops into any chat with one tap, instead of a trip into the game to copy it out.
This was supposed to be an App Store app. Apple rejected it over the official Pokémon sprites in the interface, and there was no version of the product worth shipping without recognizable Pokémon. So the native app became a web app. Same product, same design, different distribution: pogoalley.com installs from the browser, and no review process can take it down. Losing the store hurt for a week; owning the platform has been worth it since.
- 200+
- trainers since launch
- Aug 2026
- launched, and still shipping
- 0
- app store gatekeepers
PoGO Alley launched in August 2026 as a web app and passed 200 trainers in its first weeks, matching players across countries for trades the game itself can't help them find. It runs on the same design instincts as the rest of my work, just pointed at a community I'm part of.
Next to CardPulse, this project works a different muscle. CardPulse is a data product where the design job is trust in numbers; PoGO Alley is a social product where the design job is making two strangers comfortable enough to coordinate. Building both taught me the difference, and building for communities I belong to keeps both honest.