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; acquirer confirmation will be linked here when live.)
How it actually grew
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.