Short · checked 29 September 2026
The New York iPhone app for anonymous kindness.
A New York iPhone app for sending anonymous encouraging messages to phone contacts, made by Jeremy Parker from 2015, whose App Store page and website no longer load; Parker separately co-founded Swag.com, which Custom Ink acquired in 2021.
Up had "a huge mission," said its Stompstart card, saved in September 2019: "to make the world a better place." The New York iPhone app let people "anonymously send positive and encouraging messages to your phone contacts." "Anonymous kindness is the best kind," the card argued, because it spared the recipient embarrassment.
The app's own site, wakeupuseup.com, carried the same pitch in a Wayback copy from 1 February 2016, adding: "Our belief is that the world would be a much happier place if people didn't feel so alone." It offered UP free on the App Store, under a 2015 copyright. Launching Next featured the app on 8 March 2016, with the line that anonymity freed the recipient from "the burden of feeling any need to reciprocate."
The maker, Jeremy Parker, posted Up to Product Hunt in 2016, linking to its App Store page. "Anonymity apps like Yik Yak, Whisper and After School have been used to bully and break people down," he wrote, "and I wanted to create a simple app that could inspire and uplift." A podcast-guest bio lists Parker as Up's founder from May 2015, with no end date.
Parker's other company is a separate story. The same bio lists him as co-founder and chief executive of Swag.com from February 2016, and on 8 November 2021 Custom Ink announced it had acquired Swag.com, which it said Parker and Josh Orbach launched in 2016. None of these sources connects Swag.com to Up.
By April 2016 the web address showed only a GoDaddy parking page; it no longer resolves. The App Store page linked from Parker's post returns a "not found" error. No record of when or why the app left the store was found.