Mar 3, 2017 By Luke Campbell 3 min read

David Ciaffoni has always been interested in the intricacies of technology, from taking apart old radios that his father brought home to building a personal gaming computer and teaching himself programming skills throughout high school.

Ciaffoni, who had planned to attend the University of Pittsburgh to pursue a computer science degree, was swayed by a commercial he saw that would take him across the country to San Francisco. He had been taking a program at CCAC when he came across an online video about Make School Product College and its alternative way of teaching.

“It seemed to be just a great way for me to expedite the process of entrepreneurship,” Ciaffoni said. “It was a real culture shock, though. It’s the first time I’ve ever moved out of my house and really been out of the state.”

Now 22, the 2012 Peters Township High School graduate has created an application called Confess after a dormroom conversation with his roommate, Juan Pablo Fernandez. The app, which allows people to anonymously send confessions to Facebook friends, was released Feb. 16.

“It is something that I’ve wanted for a really long time,” Ciaffoni said about the creation of an app. “I just thought it was an idea while we talked in our dorm room working on separate things. We wanted a way for people to tell secrets and confessions that they might not be comfortable to tell in person.”

Generated for a younger audience, mostly for middle and high school students, it allows people to talk about uncomfortable topics or possible things that younger people have difficulty saying face-to-face to their peers.

“When you are young you still are learning a lot about yourself,” Ciaffoni said. “There is a niche where people might feel apprehensive towards their friends.”

With already several hundred downloads of Confess across the world, Ciaffoni and Fernandez are trying to keep the anonymous comments positive with features of reporting harmful confessions and also lending feedback through four different emojis.

“We’ve actually seen a lot of cool confessions from people,” Ciaffoni said about the users. “One of our worries was that there would be a lot of negativity because of the anonymous aspect, so that’s why we built in features for positivity. One of the biggest excitements was when we saw our first user outside of our own network. We think we’re going to have to do a lot of viral and grass-roots marketing to really get it going.”

The free app can be downloaded in the iTunes store.