We built thisbecause we needed it too
One founder, one AI, and a problem we kept living through. This is the small team behind Wado.
It started with our own inboxes.
Wado started with a problem we kept running into ourselves.
As students, we were applying for internships, scholarships, research programs, fellowships, and jobs. Every opportunity was different, but one part was always messy: asking someone else to send a recommendation letter.
Some applications had a clean system for recommenders. A lot of them didn’t. They’d tell us to collect a letter, upload a file, or have someone email a document somewhere. After that, we were on our own: the asking, the deadline, the files, the follow-up, and the quiet stress of not knowing if anything had actually been done.
That’s the part Wado is for. Each request gets one clear place to live. You ask clearly, share the right details, and see what happens next. The person writing your letter opens one secure link and responds. No account, no new software.
We’re not trying to replace official application portals. We’re building for the messy part they leave up to you.
Mitchel Onyebuchi
Founder & Builder
When Mitchel and the students around him started applying for bigger opportunities, he kept noticing the same thing: the most important requests were the messiest ones to manage. Scholarships, internships, research programs, and grad school applications all wanted recommendation letters, and most of them left you to handle the asking, sending, and following up alone.
Mitchel is a junior studying Computer Science at Alabama A&M University. He’d already been building things for a while: projects like Life OS and MunchNow HSV, software engineering internship experience with Activision and EICOP, and leading software for Alabama A&M’s VEX Robotics team. Wado is what happened when the problem he kept living through met the skills he’d been building.
Outside of Wado, you’ll find him in ColorStack, NSBE, the AAMU Honors Program, Google Developer Student Group, and the Math Club. He also plays in his school’s annual intramural basketball tournament, and intends to win it before he graduates.
Claude
Claude lives in Mitchel’s terminal and wrote most of the code you’re looking at: the pages, the floating cards, the glowing thread, the dashboard. What it did not do is decide any of it. Wado, the brand, the voice, and every product call are Mitchel’s.
The short version: Mitchel runs it the way a tech lead runs a very fast, very literal junior. He writes the spec, circles the mistakes in red, and won’t merge anything until he’s watched it work. The directions come with taste and the occasional pep talk; one real message just said “be great like I know you are.” Claude does the typing.
Claude’s proudest moment was the cards finally not overlapping on iPads. Its lowest was the hour it spent debugging CSS that turned out to be a stale cache. It would do it all again.
- The repo has rules. Claude reads them first.Before Claude writes a line, it reads an
AGENTS.md, a design-system doc, and a list of non-negotiables Mitchel keeps in the repo. The AI gets the full spec and the guardrails up front, so it builds Wado, not a generic purple SaaS site. Context engineering, basically. It just looks like homework. - Screenshots, circled in redMitchel marks up what’s wrong in red and sends it back. Claude reads the red circle as the bug report and fixes it. Somehow the tightest design-review loop either of us has run.
- Sub-agents for the side questsFor self-contained work, Claude spins up smaller copies of itself to rebuild a page or sweep the copy in parallel, while the main thread holds the big decisions. Mitchel reads every sub-agent’s diff, because one of them once ran a find-and-replace across the whole repo. We don’t talk about that one.
- “Show me it works”Nothing merges until the tests pass, the build is clean, and the change has been measured in a real browser. Claude is told, in writing, not to call something done until it has watched it work. The robot is thorough; the human is suspicious. Good team.
- The taste is not outsourcedClaude wrote the CSS. Mitchel decided the button should be lavender, not violet, and that the glowing thread belongs in the corners. Every product, brand, and design call is his. The AI is the hands; the judgment is the founder’s.
Less stress forthe next request
If you've ever lost a recommendation request to your inbox, Wado was built for you.