FindU

Why we built it

Kenny Morales and I were both valedictorians, and we both still ended up with a narrow picture of where we could go to college. Kenny was first-gen and figuring it out on his own. I was pushed toward a few prestigious names and missed a lot of realistic options. The information was all out there, it was just scattered across a hundred sites and none of it was about you.

FindU was our answer: one place where a high school student could find schools and scholarships that fit their situation, and where colleges could find students they were missing.

What we built

The first version was an iOS app built around swiping through colleges, with matching, real-time chat, and application tracking. Behind it ran a recommendation engine that pulled live data from the federal College Scorecard, and next to it a dashboard where partner schools could find and message the students they matched with.

In early 2026 we sat down with students one-on-one, and it changed the product. Nobody mentioned swiping as something they loved. What they valued was having the information pulled together in one place, in pieces small enough to make the whole thing less stressful. A lot of them were already asking ChatGPT. So we rebuilt FindU from scratch around an AI advisor that knew their situation and was grounded in real school data:

• An advisor available anywhere in the app, aware of what you’re looking at.
• A For You feed of schools, scholarships, and campus videos picked for you.
• School pages showing fit, net price for your family’s income, and outcomes like graduation rate and earnings.
• A Money tab of scholarships you actually qualify for.
• An application profile you could fill in by uploading a resume or Common App PDF.

It covered about 3,400 schools, 27,000 scholarships, and over 10,000 campus videos, on iOS and the web.

My part

Kenny led design, brand, and fundraising. I led engineering and most of what wasn’t design: the backend, the data, business development, and operations. I built the iOS app and the recommendation engine, moved our whole stack from Supabase to Convex, and led a small team of engineers through the rebuild.

How it went

Over 700 students used the iOS app, swiping through schools more than 13,000 times. We ran pilots with three Nebraska high schools, joined the Raikes School’s Startup Studio, raised over $120,000, and took second place at the Nebraska Governor’s New Venture Competition. Our content about the college search reached more than 500,000 views.

FindU wrapped up in 2026, and I’m proud of what we built.

What I took from it

The biggest lesson was to talk to the people you’re building for early and often. We built for a long time on our own assumptions, and a few honest conversations with students showed us the most important part of the product. I also learned how to ship something rough and keep improving it, and what it takes to build closely with a co-founder.

Thanks to Lance Buscher, Tatum Terwilliger, and Zak Rab for building it with us.