Roca Nation: We need your advice. Specifically, we are trying to figure out how to optimize our newsletters. Should there be two daily or one? What time should it/they go out? What topics should we cover?
Roca Premium Subscribers can let us know at the link below. And if you care about Roca but can’t access the form, please consider upgrading your subscription to become a Roca Member here:
Also, while you’re here, I’d like to tell you a story about a major Roca landmark and the people who got us here.
Last week, we hit 1,000,000 subscribers on YouTube. We launched our page just two years ago and are thrilled to have reached this benchmark so quickly. If you’d have asked us if it was possible in July 2024, we’d probably have said no. Getting a YouTube page to 100,000 subscribers is an extremely difficult task; getting it to 1,000,000 can seem impossible.
Compared to X, Instagram, or TikTok, it’s hard to get a YouTube subscriber. Quality – not virality – drives success on the platform. And when we started, our content was not quality. The first long-form, on-the-ground video we ever posted would be more likely to give you vertigo than induce you to “like and subscribe.”
Looking back on the last two years, our success largely came down to two things: Teamwork and dedication.
We started our channel as somewhat of a last-ditch effort. We’d spent most of the business’ money trying to build an app, only to end up with an app but no money. Facing a financial cliff and no clear way to stay in business, we had to shift our engineers to part-time and conduct some layoffs. It was excruciating: Our lead engineer was my roommate and closest friend in New York City. More than that, our team had spent nearly two years working endlessly, through nights and weekends, motivated by the belief that on the other end of this app sat a revolutionary news experience that would improve the world and pay our rent.
But we were wrong. The app didn’t die, it just didn’t make us money, and rather than moving up in the spring of 2024, we moved out. We gave up our office, lost our salaries, and pondered startup annihilation.
Yet during this period, Max Towey and I made a trip to Philadelphia to interview Carl Day, known as the “Pastor of the Hood.” He walked us through the infamous Kensington neighborhood, talking to people and helping us understand the area’s plight.
“We need to film this,” we said on the way back.
Our adjustments had managed to stop Roca’s bleeding, and by May 2024, we had regrouped and were thinking about what to do next. If we acted quickly and succeeded, Roca could still thrive. And on the drive back from Philly, we decided to try and hire Drew Braaten, a summer intern from two years prior who was weeks away from graduation at Notre Dame.
Drew agreed to come on board full-time in late June and came to work at Roca HQ in New York City, which is to say a tiny co-working office populated only by the founders – Towey, Billy, and me. A few days later, we set out on our first video reporting trip, crossing Pennsylvania from end to end and talking to voters along the way.
What started then was a sprint: From June through election day, we traveled nonstop through the swing states, putting out two or three videos a week. Sleep and socializing were not priorities, to say the least. But the work started to pay off: That August, our videos generated their first earnings, $600; on Election Day, we hit 39,000 subscribers.
We rested for a week, but the following Saturday we took the Saturday night flight to Chicago and then spent the week before Thanksgiving documenting life in places like Gary, IN; East Cleveland, OH; and the Appalachian Ohio town of Steubenville. Since then, we’ve been traveling for around 10 days a month.
Drew, 22 when he started, was instrumental here, helping turn our idea of a documentary channel that captured the world “without bias or fear” into a reality. Perpetually working, he fully embraced our mission and did all he could to make it a reality. And as we got traction, we somehow managed to find others like him to join.
That May, we hired our next cameraman (and second employee), Gus. A 21-year-old Roca follower fresh out of Iowa State University, Gus embraced the challenge with gusto, bringing new editing and videography techniques with a legendary work ethic to boot. A few months after that came our videographer Nik, a 24-year-old Roca follower whose persistence (he applied repeatedly, even when we didn’t offer him a job) eventually got him the position and never let up. We also hired the third Max – Hudgins, a 23-year-old UNC grad – who had been DMing Roca for a position since 2024. Hudgins took writing off our plate and brought fantastic ideas to the news side, while enabling us to travel more. Finally, Kira (my then-fiancée and now wife) came on board as our editor, bringing unprecedented attention to detail to our work (notice the lack of typos now?).
This team did phenomenal work for Roca, enabling our expansion into constant, on-the-ground original reporting.
In the last six weeks, we’ve had three new Roca subscribers join the team: Videographers Amalia and Eric and reporter Stefano. They quickly started drinking the Roca Kool-Aid and are now bringing their own remarkable skills, interests, and work ethics to the table.
I write this not to provide the full RocaNews IMDb page, but because a lot of people have been writing in, congratulating us on a million followers. We want to ensure that credit goes where it’s due: To our team, which is the hardest-working and most mission-focused in the news business (my unbiased opinion).
So thank you to the Roca Team, and thank you to all of you who have watched our videos, supported our advertisers, and subscribed to our newsletters. Without both sides, Roca would not exist!
While you’re here, we’d like your advice.
Given that our team has expanded, we’re looking to improve our newsletters and provide more to our Substack readers. Specifically, we want to know how our readers want Roca: Which newsletters they read, what times are best, what topics they want covered.
To solicit your opinions, we’ve put a Google Form below that is accessible to all of our paid subscribers. Please let us know your thoughts!
If enjoy reading Roca and want to support our journalism, AND you want to help shape the future of Roca’s newsletters, you can upgrade your subscription here:
Thank you all, and see you tomorrow!
Plus, for those of you who need a refresher on this past week’s articles, here they are:
Happy Friday!
—Max and Max
One thing I think might be good is to enable subscribers to share a newsletter- a limited amount each month. I recommend your newsletter to friends but sharing some of your stuff would be a way to illustrate your quality.
It's a crowded environment. Trying to get at the TRUTH has become an INFORMATION SAFRI It's EXHAUSTING!!
People become regulars when information impacts them, their family, friends, health wealth , makes life easier. Maslowe's hierarchy of needs.
Uncovering TRUTHFUL information as opposed to diatribe about candidates for office is almost impossible or to time consuming.
Stay away from hyperbolic Yellow Journalism which is all the Legacy media is today. There seems to be NO sources of accurate UNBIASED journalism anymore.
Watching YOUTUBE often gets frustrating because content creators won't get to the point. They have a headline but take 3-6 minutes introduction before the meat of the story. Then there is the endless plug for smash the like button etc. Some of their delivery is not focused or too low key monotone almost puts you to sleep. The word BOMBSHELL or this changes everything is overused .They go overboard like it's earth shattering only to fall into a dumpster of details that becomes complecated to mentally wade through and the message is lost in the weeds boring. I could write better copy than most content creators.
Make your content 1. RELEVANT 2. Interesting 3. Easy to follow