Justin Archer

I didn’t begin my career, I had to build it. Before I ever called myself a marketer, an entrepreneur, or a founder, I was just a broke college kid in Flint, Michigan, trying to outrun the gravity of my circumstances. I grew up in a home where structure and stability were inconsistent, and safety wasn’t something I could rely on. So I entered adulthood unprepared, carrying an invisible weight even I didn't fully understand. I dropped out of college. Not because I wasn’t capable, but because life hit harder than most midterms. At 23, I found myself homeless. No safety net. The part of my brain reserved for growth, curiosity, and academic ambition had been hijacked by survival.

In just six years, I went from surviving with nothing but grit, to building a life I designed with relentless self-education, resourcefulness and clarity under pressure. Entrepreneurship asks for grit, resilience, self-direction, systems thinking, and the ability to move forward without certainty. Homelessness taught me all of it. The stakes were higher, the pressure was real, and the outcomes were entirely on me. That mindset, forged out of necessity, is the same one I’ve brought to every startup, every project, every system I’ve built since.

It was in those moments, when the future was just a question mark, that I found my edge: the ability to build from zero, to solve problems others can’t even see, and to bring structure to chaos. That’s not just my backstory. It’s my blueprint.