By: Ryan Johnston & Ryan Heafy | Co-Founders, 6AM City
Founded nearly a decade ago — in 2016, in Greenville, South Carolina — 6AM City was built on a simple belief: local news should be easily accessible, highlight the very best of the community, be engaging to read, and deliver early each morning, where people start their day — in their inbox.
While it began as a single city newsletter, GVLtoday quickly proved the appetite for a fresh kind of local media product: one focused on convenience, community, and positivity, with a side of personality. 6AM City’s signature format — a curated, conversational email delivering the day’s need-to-know local news, events, and civic information — resonated with locals hungry for better ways to stay connected and engaged in their cities.
Our very first edition of GVLtoday (look back here), remains remarkably similar today. We disrupted the norms of legacy media — sensationalism, crime, and politics — and delivered a product that consumers wanted to read and engage with, building trust and credibility in an eroding local media landscape. It was a little about a lot, featured positive and relevant news and events, was refreshingly useful, and it struck a nerve.
From 2017 to 2021, 6AM City rapidly expanded across the Southeast, launching newsletters in cities like Asheville, Charleston, Chattanooga, Columbia, and Raleigh. In 2022, the company scaled to 24 U.S. markets, including major metros and fast-growing secondary cities. Along the way, 6AM City established itself as the go-to morning read for over a million locals and became a preferred channel for advertisers seeking to reach engaged, high-quality regional audiences.
Fast-forward a decade, and we’ve grown 6AM City into one of the largest newsletter-first local media companies in the world, reaching nearly 2 million daily readers in over 400 cities. But that journey hasn’t followed a straight line — and the road to getting it right has been paved with a lot of speed bumps, potholes, and wrong turns.
What We Thought Would Work — But Didn’t
In 2022, we expanded from 7 Southeastern markets to 24 cities nationwide, growing our team from about 35 to over 100 people in just a few months. We scaled fast, applying the same product, playbook, and resource model that had fueled our early success.
We believed that by replicating our editorial and sales structure city by city, we could drive audience growth and revenue just as quickly in new markets. On paper, it made sense. We’d proven the model in the Southeast, so we doubled down, and we did it fast.
But we underestimated how different things would look at scale — and how quickly cracks would form when stretching the same model across a much larger, more diverse footprint.
We Were Wrong
We thought launching dedicated sales teams immediately after entering a new market — staffed with experienced talent from traditional media — would quickly unlock local advertising dollars. It didn’t.
We believed that a strong editorial product alone would be enough to fuel rapid audience growth and brand awareness, which would then drive monetization. It wasn’t. Even with distribution 4–5x greater than traditional local print, building local trust and commercial traction took significantly more time — and more deliberate audience development investment — than we anticipated.
We expected that by planting our flag in 24 high-growth markets, we’d attract major national advertisers. But the feedback was clear: while our reach was significant, it still wasn’t geographically expansive enough or niche enough to move the needle for most national brands.
For a time, we saw real promise from DTC brands that were early to embrace newsletters. But as market dynamics shifted, many of those brands pivoted from high dollar flat-rate advertising to performance-based buying, which impacted the trajectory of our national revenue forecasts.
Then came macroeconomic headwinds: COVID, inflation, recessionary fears, and tightening marketing budgets — all during a period of rapid growth, when our flexibility was more limited and stakes were high.
But perhaps our most sobering realization was this: the time it takes to mature a market to profitability in one region doesn’t easily translate to another. The operating costs of launching these new cities were often equal to, or greater than, those of our most profitable mature markets. But where mature markets were sustaining the business, new ones were burning cash. Multiply that imbalance across 10–15 cities, and the larger model became untenable.
We never lost belief in the potential of these markets. We still haven’t. But continuing to support all of them with the same resource-heavy model would have risked the future of the entire business before any of them had the time they needed to succeed.
That was our wake-up call. And it forced us to rethink our operating model.
We Realized: It’s Not Where or How Fast You Scale — It’s How You Scale
Rather than doubling down on a labor-intensive model, we took a hard look at what our audience actually wanted — and had been telling us all along.
Across millions of first-party data points, one insight has remained remarkably consistent over the past decade: readers value our products for convenience and discovery. Local residents aren’t looking for exhaustive coverage — they want a curated snapshot of what matters, or as Tim Huelskamp, CEO of 1440, puts it: “an inch deep and a mile wide.”
Today, more local content is being created than ever — often by residents, small businesses, nonprofits, and community groups sharing through social media or their own websites. In many cases, these voices have more reach and local relevance than traditional media outlets, which continue to be in decline and often overlook what people truly care about: how to invest their own time, talent, and treasure into their communities.
We Pivoted: From Costly Expansion to Sustainable Scale
We’re no longer scaling by simply adding people — we’re scaling by building smarter systems. We’ve aligned our technology, editorial model, and community engagement around what delivers the most value — to readers, to advertisers, and to the business. We’ve expedited our efforts through the acquisition of Good Daily, a thriving network of AI-empowered newsletters serving hundreds of small-population cities across the U.S. and bringing on Matthew Henderson, founder of Good Daily, as our VP of Engineering. Adding deep technical expertise in email deliverability, content curation, distribution, artificial intelligence, and process automation — Matthew is uniquely positioned to help us scale our technology infrastructure and positively impact profitability.
This strategic move positions 6AM City at the forefront of technology-enabled local media, allowing 6AM City’s editorial and revenue teams to focus on high-impact community driven work.
Operating Model Evolution
Good Daily’s markets will be integrated as “Seed Markets” within 6AM City’s newly formalized market lifecycle: Seed → Core. These AI-empowered newsletters will operate under the 6AM City brand and progressively align with our editorial, ethical, and advertising standards. As each Seed Market grows in audience and revenue, it matures into our Core Market model – gaining dedicated editorial and sales support, along with an expanded suite of products and services.
This model aligns with our 2025 Strategic Plan — focused around Product, Process, and Profit — and is designed to drive efficiency, scale, and sustainable growth. Every business decision is guided by a simple but essential question: “Will this have a near-immediate and positive impact on profitability?”
In furthering the Operating Model, we’ve transitioned the primary responsibility of social media distribution from local editors to a centralized Audience Development segment of our marketing team — strengthening both our newsletters and social channels, supported by automation and scalable resources. Most of our Core markets now operate under a single-editor publishing model, reinforcing our newsletter-first strategy.
As our VP of Editorial Erin McPherson noted, “We were working for social media, instead of social media working for us. Now it’s the other way around.” By the end of Q3, social content and distribution will fully transition from Editorial to Marketing, unlocking improvements in reach, subscriber acquisition, and brand awareness. This shift significantly reduces operating costs now and at scale as we expand into new markets and refocuses our local editors on the core newsletter product, while dramatically increasing our ability to expand reach across numerous discovery platforms.
A New Era of Local Media Is Here — And We’re Leading It
This strategic move positions 6AM City at the forefront of technology-enabled local media, serves almost 2 million daily readers, extends our footprint to over 400 cities nationwide, and adds 550,000+ new subscribers across all 50 states. This acquisition is just one part of the recent wave of growth and innovation at 6AM City. In recent months, we launched three new Core Markets — NOVAtoday (Northern Virginia), ORLtoday (Orlando, FL), and 865today (Knoxville, TN), bringing our signature daily local newsletter to even more vibrant communities. The editorial teams supporting our Core markets continue to deliver the most engaging, relevant, positive, need-to-know stories to inboxes in the cities we serve.
Fueling the Future of Local Media: New Tools, Products & Partnerships
We’re doubling down on tools that empower both brands and newsletter operators – fueling sustainable growth across the local media ecosystem. Our newly improved website showcases 6AM City’s expanded lineup of products and services, reflecting our shift from a media company to a full-scale platform.
- Our Newsletter Studio gives businesses and organizations a turnkey, white-labeled solution to launch their own custom-branded newsletters — built on a decade of operational and editorial expertise.
- Our Self-Service Ad Portal (SSAP) lets businesses buy and manage advertising on their own schedule — no sales rep or long term contracts required — making advertising accessible and more affordable for local businesses at reasonable price points.
- The Jobs Board simplifies local hiring by promoting job listings through our daily newsletters and social media — for free.
- The Buy, our curated commerce section, introduces product discovery directly into the newsletter experience — offering a more engaging and intentional alternative to legacy programmatic backfill models.
- For newsletter brands with 1M+ subscribers, we now offer Newsletter Revenue Partnerships, where 6AM City handles monetization end-to-end.
- And this month, we’re launching #behind-the-inbox, a free Slack community and Newsletter Resource Hub designed to support and connect the current and next generation of newsletter professionals.
This is 6AM City’s vision in motion: community-powered, technology-enabled, and human-centered — built to serve both readers and creators at scale. It’s Community, delivered.
Why Now?
Because everything has changed over the past decade and is continually evolving — we’ve positioned ourselves for the next chapter.
Technology has advanced, entry barriers have shrunk, audience expectations have evolved, and the economics of local media demand an entirely new playbook.
Our updated operating model reflects this reality. It’s built around what’s working, what’s measurable, and what’s scalable. We’re creating an ecosystem where:
- National advertisers can finally reach middle America at scale.
- Seed markets have a sustainable path to become Core markets.
- Small cities get the same visibility and value as major metros.
- Local content creators have a clear path to discoverability.
We’ve moved beyond the idea of just being in a few dozen cities. We’ve expanded our reach to over 400 communities, and we’re not slowing down. But this time, it’s not about how fast we grow — it’s about how we scale into new markets and the audiences within these markets.
By aligning technology, product-market fit, and sustainable operations, we’re not just building a media company. We’re building the infrastructure for the next generation of local content production and distribution — and we believe it’s the most exciting time in history to be doing so.
We Still Believe in the Same Mission
At our core, our mission remains unchanged: to become the most relevant local media brand in every city we serve. We’re grounded in the principles of Doing. Positive. Service. We achieve this by delivering uplifting, service-driven content that informs and connects readers, and inspires civic engagement.
We’re helping millions of readers stay informed, connected, and part of a broader community conversation.
We’ve gotten a lot right — and a lot wrong. But we’ve never stopped evolving and staying true to our mission. A Thank You — and a Challenge
To our team, our partners, our investors, and our readers: thank you for being part of this journey. Whether you’ve been with us from day one, just recently joined the ride — or even stepped off along the way — we get it. Building something meaningful, at scale, in a rapidly changing media landscape is complex, hard, and often unfinished.
We want to especially thank those who are no longer with 6AM City today as a result of the many assumptions we made while trying to figure this all out. Your contributions mattered deeply. You helped lay the foundation for where we are now, and we’re profoundly grateful for the role you played in pushing our mission forward.
Despite the missteps and course corrections, we’ve never stopped believing in the opportunity ahead.
Every day, incredible local content is created — by journalists, small businesses, nonprofits, and neighbors. But without a modern delivery engine, that content too often goes unseen. Readers miss out. Creators get overlooked. Communities lose connection.
We’re here to help play our small part in fixing that.
We believe local media can be more accessible, more empowering, and more sustainable — for everyone. But we can’t do it alone. This is a shared challenge — and a shared opportunity.
If you believe in rebuilding trust in local media… If you believe in tools that support the next generation of content creators… If you believe in building something that lasts…
Join us.
Let’s scale the future of local media — the right way.
To getting more right than wrong,
Ryan Johnston & Ryan Heafy Co-Founders, 6AM City