From a Bethesda bedroom to a campus network

The origin (2018–2019)

At 15, Justin was reverse-engineering how limited sneaker releases actually worked. At 16, he turned that obsession into Boosted Notify, a consulting service that helped more than 80 clients a month purchase high-end and rare sneakers. In 2019 the business was acquired by the COOKLAB Group. It was a teenager’s company with a real P&L — and it taught him the lesson that still runs his career: distribution beats hype. The people making money in sneakers weren’t the ones camping outside stores; they were the ones who understood the machine behind the drop. The full Boosted Notify story →

Mission: Mentor (2021–2022)

In 2021 Justin co-founded Mission: Mentor, a nonprofit edtech building a free virtual college counselor. He grew a volunteer team of more than 30 and the platform reached over 10,000 students navigating applications, scholarships and financial aid — students who mostly couldn’t afford the private counseling industry’s rates. In September 2022, the company was acquired by Crimson. What he took from it wasn’t just the exit: it was watching how information actually spreads on a campus — club by club, group chat by group chat, RA by RA. What 10,000 students taught him →

MarkitAds (2020–today)

Justin founded MarkitAds at 16 as a PR and lead-generation agency. Today it’s a team of roughly twelve — including CTO Troy Smith — running two complementary lines: earned media and reputation work (client placements have included USA Today, The Washington Post, Fox 5, Mashable and Men’s Journal), and the campus activation network: trained student operators delivering verified student acquisitions for consumer brands, priced per result. Case studies: UNC Chapel Hill, Kylie Cosmetics, URBN Market, KORR Value, Community Musician.

Education & community

Justin studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, inside the 1789 / Innovate Carolina and Launch Chapel Hill entrepreneurship ecosystems, with a 2023 semester at Waseda University in Tokyo. Before that: Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, president of the Montgomery County Model UN team, and a policy internship at The Borgen Project. He’s mentored by Dennis Yu (BlitzMetrics), who published a verified positive-mentions tracker about Justin’s brand — built on the rule that nothing unverifiable gets published. This site follows the same rule.

Timeline

2018 — Founds Boosted Notify at 16 (sneaker consulting, 80+ clients/month)
2019 — Boosted Notify acquired by COOKLAB Group
2020 — Founds MarkitAds; president, Montgomery County Model UN (through 2022); Borgen Project internship
2021 — Co-founds Mission: Mentor
2022 — Mission: Mentor acquired by Crimson (September); 10,000+ students served
2023 — Semester at Waseda University, Tokyo
2025 — MarkitAds campus activation network scales to a trained multi-campus operator force
2026 — justinsonnenreich.com/ launches as his entity home

A note on claims: exits are stated as founder’s account and sourced to his LinkedIn and Crunchbase profiles; acquirer confirmations are in progress and this page will link them when live. Nothing on this site is published without a source.