Boom
Boom is a Mac camera app that helps you stand out on every video call 〰️ whether you’re on Zoom, Meet, Teams, or anything in between. It turns your webcam into a stage you control, with creative layouts, overlays, stickers, and branded graphics that make every moment on screen more engaging and expressive.
Get to know Boom
Who’s behind Boom?
Hey, I'm Robleh Jama 〰️ designer, founder, and the maker of Boom. I've been building products for a long time. It's my hobby, really. My craft developed around mobile, I fell in love with the iPhone early on and started making apps in 2010. It was still the Wild West then. Everyone was learning from each other, and it felt like a tight-knit community of people constantly raising the bar.
For me, it was always that cliche of your taste being here, but can you get your skills there? I kind of accelerated that. The first app was a kids' app called Pocket Zoo 〰️ you could watch live animal cameras on your iPhone. I built it right when I was about to be a dad. The formula became clear pretty quickly: you need a great name, a beautiful app icon, a clear value prop, and a way for Apple to notice you. I got good at getting noticed by Apple, and Pocket Zoo became the number one education app on the App Store.
From there, I kept building things I wanted for myself. Wake Alarm was a beautiful alarm clock that went flat before everyone else. I love taking sensors and using them in original ways. With Wake, it was the proximity sensor. You could slap the phone to snooze, flip it to turn off, or shake it if you're a heavy sleeper. That one had a few million downloads. Then came Quick Fit, a home workout app I made because I wasn't hitting the gym as much as I should. That one ended up in an Apple commercial. And then Next Keyboard 〰️ a third-party keyboard that was way more difficult than anything we'd built. It became the number two paid app on the charts. The only one we couldn't beat was Minecraft.
Those projects led me to start a little studio in Toronto called Tiny Hearts. We did a mix of our own apps and consulting to pay the bills. One of our clients was Shopify, they needed a keyboard app, so we built ShopKey. Eventually, they really liked us, we really liked them, and they acquired my company. I joined Shopify to run a small internal studio called The Garage, where the goal was to disrupt Shopify from within.
Out of that studio came Arrive 〰️ a package tracking app I'd been sitting on. We shipped it as a separate brand, plugged it into the Shopify growth wheel, and whenever you bought something at a Shopify store, it'd say go download Arrive. We didn't need Apple, didn't need ads, it just went to the top of the charts. We doubled down because it had clear product market fit, shut down The Garage, and Arrive eventually became what's now known as Shop. It has around 200 million downloads now, and I still use it, just got a delivery notification this morning. I spent six and a half years at Shopify working on mobile experiments, crypto stuff, and new ideas. But I've always been building products for myself. This is my hobby.
Boom started the same way. When we shifted to this remote, hybrid world, spending hours on video every day, I realized we're all basically streamers now. We have an audience, a setup, a camera, a mic, but we don't have software made for the professional, the creator, the independent person, the consultant. So I started building a virtual camera for the everyday streamer.
I'm non-technical, so this is kind of my era, my time to shine. For me, building products has always been a form of art. And the best kind of art is the one you can turn into a business, because then you can keep doing the art. If it's not making money, you can't do the art. That's what Boom is for me.
What’s Boom and what’s so cool about it?
Boom is a virtual camera for Mac. It sits between your hardware and whatever app you're using 〰️ Google Meet, Zoom, wherever, and you just pick Boom as your camera. From there, we can add things. The design space we've been exploring is: what can we add that makes you more engaging, makes you look better, makes you unforgettable? What makes your message land better, or makes someone smile on the other end?
It's technically an app, but also an extension 〰️ one that needs lots of permissions. So onboarding needs to be pretty clean. But once you're in, you can do things that are doable with OBS (the streaming software power users love), technically, but Boom is for everyone else. It's for workshops, webinars, group coaching sessions, all-hands meetings 〰️ not just the one-on-one calls, but those bigger virtual sessions too.
We have features like a timer, transitions, overlays. One thing I love showing off is our presentation mode. If you're sharing slides, you don't have to click "hey, I need to screen share." You just transition in and out seamlessly, we're adding animations, and it levels up your presentations on Zoom, Meet, and other platforms. No one can really do what we're doing live.
We also built this camera-off experience that I think is pretty cool. When you turn your camera off, instead of a black screen, it looks like a branded experience. And what we're working on is live captions 〰️ as you speak, the text appears in an aesthetic, branded way. Captions are becoming the norm in social media, and we love testing this idea of why doesn't it happen live? It's kind of funny making a camera that works when you're on it or off it.
We launched Boom 1.0 on Product Hunt in April 2024 and hit number one that day, which was really cool. Back then we were building foundational stuff and leaning heavily into the fun side, because I really believe work should be more fun. We got on Setapp, got on the Mac App Store. Now we have thousands of customers.
We've just launched Boom 2.0 and it's our next major step.
Tool Stack of Boom
What’s under Boom’s hood? Which technologies were used and why did you chose them?
Boom is built entirely in Swift 〰️ it's all native. We love making native products. Because Boom is technically a virtual camera, it's both an app and an extension that sits between your hardware and your meeting software. We've stayed close to Apple's ecosystem from the start and use Apple's own AI frameworks for things like virtual backgrounds.
More recently, we've been getting into the AI stuff. We've been playing around with Whisper Kit specifically for live captions 〰️ that's been top of mind. Those experiments are shaping Boom 2.0.
We're a small team 〰️ just one full-time developer, my cofounder, and a couple contractors. So Cursor has been a superpower for us. We actually had a Cursor meetup here in Toronto recently and showed off how we're using it. Beyond that, I literally have Claude and ChatGPT open all the time. I probably do the same thing in parallel with both of them. Now I'm adding Gemini to the mix.
We're using AI to make our products, and we're also using AI to make them better – doing it in a faster, leaner way. It's a great time to be building.
Do you use any other tools to run the business?
Linear is our main hub for managing work.
For distribution, we've figured out our channels over the past year. We launched on Product Hunt and hit number one that day. Then we got on Setapp, which has been great for discovery. Getting on the Mac App Store took a little more time, but now we have all of those channels in place.
We're trying to stay on the forefront of all the agent stuff. A friend of mine in Sweden is working on this thing called Stilla that I've been testing out. It's like Granola in that it takes notes from a call, but as it takes notes, it has these built-in agents that start creating Linear tickets (we use Linear pretty heavily). It can create tickets, update tickets, it's pretty smart. But here's the wild part: if you want to make a change in the app or on the website, in the code, it understands that too and can actually send it to GitHub. It'll submit a PR. By the time you're done your meeting and grab lunch, you have a PR waiting. It's wild.
What’s your personal stack? Which apps do you and your team love?
I'm always testing new Mac apps 〰️ all the time. But there's a difference between the timeless products that are just great and the new things that come and go. I have my staples.
CleanShot is probably at the top. I'm a total screenshot addict because of it. Raycast is another one, you can't go back after you start using Raycast. Same with Linear. Notion Calendar is still my go-to calendar. And Arc is easily the best browser for me. I know people have opinions on Arc, but it's still the best.
I love discovering little utilities that make the Mac feel more personal. A lot of that comes through Setapp 〰️ you find these interesting utilities that just stick. AirBuddy is a good example. It's such a simple app for controlling your AirPods, but it's pretty sick. Tuple is another favorite for pair programming 〰️ super clean, one of the cleanest Mac apps I've used in a long time.
Speaking of ChatGPT, I'm paying for it just to have the app. It got way better. Between that and Claude, they're open all the time.
The apps I keep coming back to all share something: they're beautifully made, and once you use them, you can't go back. That's the bar I try to hold Boom to.
Anything else you’d like to share?
Right now we’re focused on Boom 2.0 Notion Calendar it’s the biggest leap we’ve taken since launching. I honestly can’t wait for people to try it.
But beyond that, what matters most to me is staying independent and close to the craft. I’ve been around long enough to know how easy it is to lose that focus. I’d rather build something meaningful, sustainable, and fun, something that feels like art.
That’s the challenge I’ve set for myself and for Tomorrow 〰️ to keep making beautiful, useful tools that help people show up better, and to keep doing it on our own terms.
Now, discover Boom for yourself
Big thanks to Robleh for sharing the story behind Boom and everything that went into building it. Give it a spin, it might just change the way you think about video calls.