Student records, document approval, visa tracking, host-family placement, flights, insurance, and role-based access for agents, managers, parents, and students, replacing a process that lived in WhatsApp groups and someone's memory.
Exchange Student Company places Brazilian students into US exchange programs, through ICES and sponsors like Troika ISE and Master Studio, but the real process lived in scattered WhatsApp messages: documents sent as photos, powers of attorney typed by hand inside a group chat, vaccine pending items as loose texts, and no answer to “where's my kid's passport” beyond someone remembering to reply.
We read the literal WhatsApp history of a real cohort, 15 group chats, and turned every repeated pain point into a field, screen, or alert. The first prototype already shipped student registration, Google Drive sync, Notion-sourced partner guides, and login with password recovery; visa workflow, a shared calendar, and centralized manager/master_admin permissions followed over the next two weeks. A concentrated wave then shipped eight parallel improvements, planned and executed across seven isolated worktrees and merged in one pass, while a real cohort was actively arriving, so most of the roadmap was answering a specific family's problem that same week, not a hypothetical one.
A 30-minute diagnostic call, no deck, no pitch, just the project.