Noah Pompan ’14 recently launched BOOM, a social media platform designed to provide college students information about events on or near their campuses.

BOOM delivers news to students about local business promotions, parties, lectures and other events that occur on college campuses. The app is location-based and uses a geofence to limit the content to the designated campus. It allows its users to post photos of events either to their friends or anonymously to every user at the school.

Pompan’s goal with the app was to create a more community-oriented version of other social media apps.

Pompan, a student at Gettysburg College, designed BOOM with his childhood friend Tyler Peterson. The two of them were inspired to create the app after realizing they both were often unaware about the events and business offerings in their area. They polled their peers to discover that this was a shared experience among college students.

Pompan and Peterson were able to turn their initial idea into a startup through Gettysburg College’s Entrepreneurship Fellowship program. The program promotes the career of entrepreneurship to students by inviting them to pitch an idea to a board of faculty and alumni.

Pompan was a recipient of the award in the summer of 2016 and was awarded $10,000 along with a team of three alumni mentors to help bring the project to life. Over the summer, he and Peterson developed the app and found business partners to invest in the project.

Currently, BOOM is available at Gettysburg College and Peterson’s university, the University of California, Santa Barbara. Pompan plans to launch BOOM at other college campuses and to begin making money from the app by giving advertising space to local businesses.