FindU

Overview

FindU started pretty simply: a class project where we asked, why does figuring out college feel so painful for students who grew up with phones in their hands?

People joke and call it “Tinder for Colleges,” and honestly that is not far off from the early concept. Students make a profile, swipe through schools that actually fit them, and slowly build a picture of what life after high school could look like.

What began as a prototype in a Raikes classroom turned into a startup that I now run with my cofounder, Wilson Overfield. We raised $115K, built a team of 15+ people, and talked to hundreds of students who were all trying to answer the same question:

FindU focuses on the college path right now, but the bigger goal is helping students feel less lost when they think about “what's next.”

Problem

When you graduate high school, everyone asks the same thing: “So what are you doing next?”

Some students have a plan. A lot of them do not. The motivation for FindU came from watching friends and family stress over this decision, or avoid it completely. We did not want to assume what the problem was, so we started with interviews.

We talked to 50+ students from different backgrounds:

• honor-roll students
• athletes
• first-gen students
• kids who felt “behind”
• kids who felt pressure to be perfect

The surprising part was how similar the stories were.

The straight-A student and the student barely passing were both saying versions of the same thing:

“I know college is important, but I have no idea where to start and it feels like too much.”

They were not struggling with intelligence. They were struggling with friction and overwhelm.

The same themes kept coming up:

• “I don't know how financial aid works.”
• “How do I even find scholarships?”
• “I just don't know where I want to go.”
• “My parents want me to go to a ‘good school’ but I don't know what that means.”
• “I feel like I'm already behind.”

These sound like questions, but they are really symptoms. Underneath all of this, we landed on one core problem:

Students do not want to spend time researching colleges.

Not because they do not care. Because:

• they are scared of choosing wrong
• they feel overwhelmed by all the options
• they do not know how to compare schools
• the information is scattered across rankings, PDFs, and random websites

The information is out there. It is just not packaged in a way that feels approachable to a 17-year-old juggling school, family expectations, activities, and life.

Solution

This is where the “Tinder for Colleges” idea came in. Students already know how swiping works. It is familiar, low friction, and honestly kind of fun.

Most students we talked to mentioned sites like Niche or US News. Those tools give you lists and rankings. Students end up defaulting to “top 100 universities” and scroll, without much sense of whether those schools fit their life, goals, or financial reality.

So we flipped the model. Instead of asking, “Which of these top schools do you want?” we asked:

What if we only showed you schools that actually make sense for you?

That led us to focus heavily on personalization. Students build a profile and then swipe through schools that match them, not just schools that sit high on some generic list.

From here, the design became an ongoing experiment. The swiping concept was the hook, but actually making it useful took several passes.

Version 1 was our “get it working” phase. You can see all the rookie mistakes: inconsistent icon sizes, mixed icon packs, too much information crammed into one card, no real hierarchy. It looked like a swipeable info dump.

By Version 3, my design skills and our understanding of the problem both leveled up. This is the version we used for our beta launch. Students loved the swiping, but almost nobody clicked “More info” and the match score badge did not matter to them.

How do we help students actually learn about schools without overwhelming them or losing engagement?

The current version is the result of a year of iteration and hundreds of user conversations. The biggest change: we removed the swipeable card from the core experience and moved toward an information-first layout. It reduces friction, makes the experience less gimmicky, and puts the focus back on understanding schools, not just reacting to them.

We also broke information into scannable sections, added filters for location and costs, introduced a saved page, and dropped in lightweight question cards to improve recommendations over time.

Pretty early on, one thing kept coming up whenever we asked about barriers to college: students know scholarships exist, but the discovery process feels like a maze. The problem is not supply. It is signal. So we built a scholarship experience that understands each student's profile, surfaces relevant opportunities, and ties them directly to the schools they are already exploring.

The real unlock was integrating scholarships into the core college flow. Students see school-specific opportunities tied to the colleges they are already saving and considering.

If I go here, this is what it could realistically cost with the scholarships I am likely to get.

For most students, cost is the deciding factor. So connecting schools and scholarships in a single flow became a huge part of the value.

Once we launched scholarships, we saw a new pattern. Students were finding schools, finding scholarships, then leaving the app to manage everything in spreadsheets or notes apps. Liking a school is not the same thing as applying to it. So the task system separated “liked” schools from “active applications,” let students attach tasks and deadlines, and built a single view of what was done and what was left. This turned FindU from just a discovery tool into an actual execution tool.

Once ChatGPT became mainstream, students started using AI for everything. We knew we wanted to add AI, but not as “ChatGPT in a box.” Our edge was context. FindU knows which schools a student is looking at, which ones they have liked, their interests and constraints, and which scholarships they have seen. So we built an AI assistant that could answer questions about specific schools, help compare them, suggest matches, and surface fitting scholarships.

The AI was better at recommending schools than our first matching algorithm.

Long term, we see this evolving into something closer to an AI college counselor that walks with students across the whole journey.

The last major piece was acknowledging something we heard from almost every adult we interviewed: students do not go through this alone. Counselors, parents, coaches, friends. All of them influence the decision. So we built a messaging layer that lets students message counselors and parents directly, lets counselors nudge students or share schools, and lets parents stay in the loop. This turned FindU into a shared space instead of a single-player app.

Development

One of the biggest challenges was not actually getting data. It was figuring out what data even mattered. Most students could not articulate what information they wanted about a college.

We started with the College Scorecard API from the Department of Education. It gave us a foundation: tuition, test scores, demographics, graduation rates. Solid, but dry. The bigger challenge was everything the government does not track. For images, we built scrapers that pulled photos from school websites. For scholarships and deadlines, we used a combination of web scraping and AI to extract and structure the relevant information.

• 6,500+ schools with core data from federal sources
• 3,200+ validated schools with complete profiles
• 6,100+ schools with campus images
• 41,000+ academic programs mapped to schools
• 26,000+ scholarships with eligibility criteria
• 20,900+ deadlines for applications, financial aid, and housing

The first version of FindU had a classic mistake: a long onboarding flow. We asked students to fill out everything upfront. Students dropped off, and the data was static.

So we rebuilt the system around progressive profiling. Now the onboarding is short. The real profiling happens while students use the app through question cards dropped into the swiping flow. We also started learning from behavior. If someone consistently swipes right on schools with strong engineering programs, we do not need them to tell us they are interested in engineering.

The matching algorithm is the core of FindU. We went through two major versions. Version 1 used weighted scoring: academic (50%), major (25%), and financial (25%). It was fast (sub-100ms) but could not reason through edge cases. Version 2 rebuilt it around GPT-4o-mini. Instead of rigid formulas, the model sees full context and reasons about trade-offs. It knows elite schools are often cheaper for low-income families. It understands “Software Engineering” equals “Computer Science.” The tradeoff is latency, but the quality improvement is worth it.

Some decisions require understanding context, not just math.

The Startup Journey

In the beginning, there was no “managing.” I was just in Figma for hours, building screens, tweaking pixels, shipping features. Growing the team to 15 people changed everything.

The hardest part has been context transfer. As a founder, I spend 12+ hours a day on this. Every decision, every pivot, every user conversation lives in my head. But nobody else has that context.

• Writing things down matters more than I thought
• Repeating yourself is not annoying, it is necessary
• The goal is not alignment on tasks. It is alignment on why behind the tasks.

We have raised $100,000 in funding and won over $15,000 in pitch competitions. But running a business means making decisions that pure design work does not prepare you for. Our revenue model involves helping colleges reach students. That means we are sitting on student data. This creates real questions about how much information we share and what the line is between helpful and invasive.

Marketing has been the hardest part. Across all our content, we have gotten over a million views. But awareness is not the problem. Conversion is. So we are pivoting. Instead of going student-by-student, we are taking a school-first approach, onboarding entire schools at once through a counselor dashboard.

What's Next

We are still in the middle of it. Right now, the focus is:

• Getting more schools on board through the counselor dashboard
• Simplifying the product so users know exactly what they are getting
• Improving the matching so recommendations feel less like suggestions and more like answers

FindU is not a finished product. It is a work in progress, and so is everything I have learned building it.