In 2021, while running MarkitAds, I co-founded Mission: Mentor — a nonprofit edtech with one idea: college guidance shouldn’t be a luxury good. Private counselors charge thousands of dollars for what is, mostly, structured information and accountability. We built a free virtual college counselor to deliver both.
What we built
A volunteer team that grew past 30 people. A platform that walked students through applications, essays, scholarships and financial aid. And reach: more than 10,000 students used it before the company was acquired by Crimson in September 2022. (Stated as my founder’s account; sourced on my LinkedIn and Crunchbase; acquirer confirmation will be linked here when live.)
The distribution lesson nobody sells you
We had no ad budget worth mentioning. Growth came from watching how information actually moves through a school: one counselor recommends it to a class; one senior posts it in a group chat; one club president puts it in a newsletter. Campus distribution is a graph of a few hundred high-trust nodes — RAs, club presidents, team captains, TAs — and if you win them, you win the campus for free. If you don’t, no budget saves you.
That map is the intellectual foundation of MarkitAds’ campus network today: operators are chosen for their position in that graph, not for their follower counts. Mission: Mentor was the research project; the activation business is the productization. And the mission stuck with me too — a meaningful share of the students we serve now get their first paid work experience running our activations. Full story.