We're building a media platform for understanding and engaging curious locals— the leaders and tastemakers who are powering growing cities around the world.
The opportunity
The future is built in cities. Cities capture our imagination. They’re centers of innovation, creativity, and exploration, solving the world’s problems, and attracting the most promising minds of our next generation. That generation is reinventing everything from business to politics to culture, and building the ideas that will shape the future of where and how we live.
Millennials are moving to emerging cities more than any generation in history, creating a new demand for local information while rejecting old media models. We’re here to help them keep up, get involved, and make connections that accelerate their vision — and have more fun in the process.
We’re here to help a generation of digital nomads live like they live here.
National brands and local small businesses want to connect with this valuable and influential audience, but the local model is broken. Costs are inefficient, and results are unpredictable. Display and social ads are challenging for local businesses, and often don’t generate deep engagement. National brands work through disjointed networks of local PR/marketing firms to engage in their target cities, with questionable results that rarely last.
Our solution
We create local digital publications that use multimedia content and community data to engage locals who care about their cities. Our platform lets us understand our users better than anyone else, build loyal communities, and create measurable, meaningful engagement for our cities and our customers.
Since starting in 2015, we’ve launched publications in Miami (The New Tropic) and Seattle (The Evergrey), acquired 10% of our target market as subscribers (ages 25-45, educated, living/working in the urban core), built a rapidly growing business model, and developed a technology platform and growth approach to efficiently launch and gain market position in cities around the world.
Each of our brands creates three things:
- Daily e-mail newsletters— focused on deep engagement with a loyal audience, our newsletters provide a look at the day's local news, a curated planner of local events, and original conversation.
- High-impact social content— we use video and other multimedia to tell stories about what's happening in our cities, in formats built for social consumption, conversation, and sharing.
- Engagement events— we activate our community for in-person experiences we create with local partners, helping our users find ways to get involved and explore.
The business model
We have four channels for using local engagement to create scalable revenue.
- Creative Studio— a service that helps national brands and large local companies create the same kind of engagement we create for ourselves. We deliver multimarket campaigns that use research, custom content, and creative activations to generate awareness and conversion for clients with scalable efficiency. Our major customers include tech companies like Lyft and Airbnb, corporations like Citi, and public institutions like Miami-Dade County and the Curaçao Tourist Board.
- Automated newsletter advertising— our proprietary self-service ad platform lets small and medium businesses buy personalized ads in our newsletters to reach the locals they care about at competitive cost, and automates the process on the backend for our team.
- Membership— subscribers become paid members, giving them access to special content, giveaways, and events.
- Events and E-Commerce— our Community Creators program works with local creatives, whose content, merchandise, and events we market through our local sites. This program helps us tap the engagement value of events in a way that scales more effectively than producing events in-house.
