A 19-year-old is building Omegle for college students.
It’s called DormParty. A one-on-one live video chat app made just for college students. People are calling it the “college version of Omegle.”
The idea is to help students make random social connections in a digital dorm room vibe.
Today, we’re taking you through the whole story & strategy.
Meet Malcom
Malcolm McDonald is the 19-year-old behind DormParty.
He grew up in Redwood City, California, and started working on DormParty as a teen with a goal to build a video chat app just for college students.
The app asks users to verify they’re real students, probably by signing up with a .edu email. That way, you’re not chatting with random internet strangers like on Omegle.
On X, he jokes that he’s “19 years old but still spells like a 12-year-old” and describes himself as someone who’s “trying to build in public”

Malcolm got the idea after Omegle shut down in late 2023 over safety and legal problems.
He wanted to create something better. A version of Omegle just for college students, without the chaotic (and creepy) parts of open chatrooms.
So far, DormParty looks like his first real startup, with not many signs of earlier ventures.
Malcolm seems to be serious about building in public, and if you check his socials you’ll see him sharing bits of his journey and asking for feedback.
On his personal IG he’s doing the same:

DormParty is released
DormParty officially launched just a few days ago, on August 23.
The website had been registered back on April 28.
Even in such a short time, Malcom managed to already hit 1.4K monthly organic traffic, according to SEMrush.
Malcolm is only running two social accounts, both under @dormparty.live on Instagram and TikTok.
But that’s been enough to spark initial reactions. He’s already gone viral and his views seem to be growing. Since late April, DormParty’s content has racked up 33.5 million views across both platforms.

The Strategy (& how it’s going)
Instagram is by far where Malcom is milking most views, with 32.1M in total, versus TikTok, where it grew to 3.5M only.
What really kicked off their early viral success was finding a format that worked: short, face-to-camera videos showing how the site works.

In one of these videos, Malcolm and his friend are using the app to match with students from rival colleges. As soon as the match happens, they start trash-talking each other.

This format took off for a few reasons:
- It doesn’t feel like an ad
- Rival schools triggers drama, especially among the US audience
- Shows (doesn’t tell) what his app does and how it works
- He’s sneaking in random browser tabs like “Jeramia Smith feet pics” to farm engagement in comments section (and it’s working)
Looking at their Top 20 videos, all have this exact same format.
There are a few spin-offs, such as this video from August 6th. Same story, but no rivalry: 1M views

Or this one, showing the other guy using DormParty in the middle of a lecture.

They’ve tried drifting further away from this template, but realized it doesn’t hit as much.
Instead of screen-recordings, they’ve tried filming the computer screen…12.5K views

And building the “dormpartyaholic” skit…14.2K views

And even faceless clipping memes, that did print some views: 80.8K views

But no doubt for now Malcom has found the sweet spot for his app on Instagram Reels with the uni crash out format, and that’s the one he’s doubling down on.
We’ll be here to follow along.
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