During my time at Microsoft, two friends and I got together and formed GamerchiX. It was during a time that gaming hadn’t really taken notice of the female gaming community and we all felt it should. We created weekly playdates that were advertised on Xbox.com for women to find others to game with and had a private thread on the Xbox forums. When we left Microsoft, we didn’t want the initiative to go by the wayside so we formed PopChiX. The site did everything we had on Xbox.com and more. We let our users run the site. They submitted articles and had more robust forums to talk to each other.

To foster a feeling of belonging and to show our gratitude, we created badges to add to member profiles signalling their different achievements. Immediately following putting these into place, we saw a large uptick in user submissions and interaction with the site. Also, they were so much fun to create!