Stonington — Most smart, ambitious high schoolers spend their senior year fighting for a spot in an elite college. But not three young entrepreneurs who graduated from Stonington High School in 2013 and are in the midst of launching an ambitious mobile app.

Mac Walsh, Mack O'Neill and Cody Arsenault, all 20 years old, spent much of their senior year creating websites for local businesses. But since graduation two years ago, their main focus has been on developing a new mobile application for smartphones and tablets with the idea of revolutionizing the way people use social media.

Their so-called looP app, which just received accreditation from Apple Inc., seamlessly allows users to share social media circles with their closest friends on one advertising-free platform, making it easier to keep track of people and make plans without the usual online noise.

"There's a lot of width in social media, but not a lot of depth," O'Neill said during an interview at The Day. "We are focusing on the depth."

The three friends were in San Francisco last week for TechCrunch, the biggest tech conference in the United States, and were chosen to present their app at the so-called Startup Alley.

"People were blown away by the product and what we were able to accomplish," Walsh reported last week by phone after their presentation. "We got a lot of recognition and publicity."

They also were invited to Dublin Nov. 3-5 for the top tech show in the world known as Web Summit after being named one of the top 100 start-ups globally, according to the partners' business mentor, Tim Love of Stonington, former executive for the advertising and marketing agency Omnicom Group.

The app soft launched three weeks ago, and the business partners were still working out some last-minute coding issues at home before heading to TechCrunch as real users got a chance to try out the app for the first time. The free app is available online through the Apple Store.

It's an app idea that initially got the cold shoulder from potential technology partners whom the three friends, now under the business name BlueMavenMedia LLC, approached for help on a trip to New York City more than a year ago. Their first idea was to develop an app that would allow users to see all social media notifications on one platform.

"They said it wasn't possible," Walsh said.

Undeterred, the business partners tweaked their idea and enlisted financial help from an angel investor. During brainstorming sessions with other app developers, they finally solved the technical riddle of how to integrate all the social-media tools for a fast, seamless user experience.

Other apps such as Bump tried to integrate social media in a way similar to what looP attempts, and the concept proved successful enough that Google acquired the business two years ago for an estimated $30 million-plus, though it shut the company down soon after. Bump, in any case, was a file-sharing app that did not accomplish true social-media integration as the partners envisioned for looP.

At this point, looP integrates Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Soundcloud and LinkedIn. The app, in development to also incorporate Spotify, Beme and Twitch, is aimed initially at the 12- to 25-age group that wants to keep in touch and share information, photos and music with close friends every day.

"For the first year, our goal is we just want to work on the product," O'Neill said. "We want our user base to love it."

They met in a computer class at Stonington High School and also rowed together as part of the crew team. Later, as they were developing their app, the three all worked at the Ocean House together — Arsenault and Walsh as lifeguards, and O'Neill in the engineering department.

Luckily, they all came from entrepreneurial families as well. Telling their parents they wouldn't be going on to college right away wasn't easy, they said, and there have been ups and downs along the way, but at least their parents understood the urge to start their own business.

"We wanted to start something cool," O'Neill said.

They also wanted to make money, the partners acknowledged, a dream particularly in their high school years. Now, though, they have tried to focus more on the company and building something users will enjoy.

"At first, when we would tell people what we were doing most of them laughed in our face and said that we didn't understand how the world worked and that we needed to grow up, go to college and get a real job," Arsenault said. "It was disheartening at times but we also found significant encouragement from some highly accomplished business leaders who live in town and who mentored us."

The partners said they took no paycheck for their work, developing the app for a quarter of the usual cost and in half the time taken by the typical developer. Arsenault's main area of expertise is design, while O'Neill tends toward project management and Walsh focuses on dealing with developers and financial issues.

The partners said they went through a long list of potential names for the app, including Push, Bridge and Click but finally settled on looP. Arsenault said they liked the definition of the end being connected to the beginning.

The partners said they have been relying on technical expertise in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City, because that's where the talent is. But as they develop new apps, they hope eventually to bring in-house developers into southeastern Connecticut.

"We don't want to do just looP. We want to continue to build apps," O'Neill said.

l.howard@theday.com

Twitter: @KingstonLeeHow