Scranton Student and Partners Create ‘All In One’ College Social Media App ‘FuzeMee’
By: Phil Rauch | Editor in Chief
SCRANTON, PA-University of Scranton sophomore Patrick Kelly has teamed up with friends Jon Krouse (Wake Forest), David Graham (Ohio State), and Chris Tsetsekos (Tufts) to create college social media app called “FuzeMee.”
The main goal of FuzeMee is to be an all encompassing social media platform where users can connect with each other before heading to school, recruit club members and organize club events. It can be used by college students for networking of all kinds (be it professional, social, etc.).
“FuzeMee is an all in one app for your college experience,” said Kelly. “It will provide great value for students from finding roommates before stepping onto campus for the first time, finding and organizing events on campus, or even just finding and chatting with friends. It’s extremely rewarding having the opportunity to improve students’ experiences in a huge part of their lives.”
As of now, FuzeMee has 2,400 test users with a total digital outreach of 20,000,000. According to metrics gathered on test runs at Ohio State and Wake Forest Universities, users log onto and interact with the app upwards of 14 times a day.
To garner recognition on colleges throughout the country, the FuzeMee founders have recruited over 5,500 student ambassadors. These ambassadors have committed to spreading the word about FuzeMee via their social medias, namely Instagram. Of those 5,500 ambassadors, 350 of them are from Scranton alone.
FuzeMee will be available for download from the App Store today, Sept. 7, 2021. Upon downloading the app, users must make an account and reserve a spot in their school’s wait room. The managers of the app will unlock a school’s waiting room based upon student user to school enrollment ratio.
Prior to availability of download on the App Store, users had to be sent a test link when FuzeMee was in its testing phase. Once they were sent a private link, they had to download an app called TestFlight which then gave them access to download the FuzeMee test app.
To get FuzeMee started from the ground up, the founders raised $800,000, with the help of angel investors. This enabled them to hire two full-time software developers to create the technology and interface for the app.
Jon Krouse, sophomore at Wake Forest University, mentioned how he felt ill-equipped to handle the transition from high school to college in terms of finding roommates; this gave him motivation to help found FuzeMee.
“After we were accepted to college when we were high school seniors, we were kept in the dark about the next steps in the transition process,” Krouse said. “We didn’t have any platforms to help us connect with our future classmates and campus. With FuzeMee, we want it to be the platform to help those students feel like they are a part of their college before even stepping foot on campus. We want it to revolutionize the college experience.”
David Graham, sophomore at Ohio State University reiterated the goal Patrick shared in starting up FuzeMee.
“FuzeMee is the all-in-one platform for a student’s whole college experience,” Graham said. “Our app allows incoming and current college students to easily connect with their new classmates, find roommates, and discover campus events. At FuzeMee, we strive to elevate each and every student’s college journey through a type of hyper-connectivity never seen before.”