Justin Sonnenreich

Tag: exit

  • Selling Sneaker Intel at 16: The Boosted Notify Story (and the 2019 Exit)

    My first company existed because sneaker drops are rigged in favor of people who understand systems. At 15 I was studying release mechanics, bot detection and raffle math the way other kids studied box scores. At 16 that became Boosted Notify: a consulting service helping clients purchase limited, high-end sneakers — over 80 clients a month at peak.

    In 2019 the business was acquired by the COOKLAB Group, an operator in the sneaker-tooling ecosystem. (Founder’s account; sourced on my LinkedIn and Crunchbase; acquirer confirmation will be linked when live.)

    Three durable lessons: 1) Markets where demand outstrips supply reward whoever understands the allocation mechanism — that’s most of marketing. 2) Recurring service revenue from a real problem beats one-time flips. 3) When your edge becomes a product category (bots, monitors), sell to someone who wants to own the category. The pattern repeated with Mission: Mentor, and it’s why MarkitAds prices per verified result: I like businesses where the value is checkable.

    Sources & mentions

  • Mission: Mentor — What 10,000 Students Taught Me About Campus Distribution

    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.

    Sources & mentions