When Ryan Johnston and Ryan Heafy describe 6AM City’s expansion from seven cities to 24 in nine months, the discussion quickly moves beyond the growth number. They had to prepare a repeatable product, fund new teams, train editors, and trust people with decisions the founders once made themselves.
Their Founder Factor conversation follows the company from an email experiment inside Community Journals to a distributed local media business. It also shows a tension that remained after the playbook worked: how to make the product consistent while giving employees enough room to improve it.
What you'll learn.
- Test the economics of one market before treating expansion as a repeatable process.
- Document the work in enough detail that a new employee can learn without relying on a founder.
- Give employee ideas a review process, an owner, and room for small experiments.
- Build shared expectations so co-founder disagreements produce decisions the team can act on.
The email became the publication.
6AM City started with an observation about how people consumed news. Many publishers used email to send readers somewhere else. National newsletters such as theSkimm, The Hustle, and Morning Brew were putting more of the reading experience directly in the inbox. Johnston wondered whether a similar model could work locally.
The product they describe is a conversational weekday email that takes roughly five minutes to read. Its focus is local information that helps people participate in their city. The founders deliberately excluded politics and crime coverage from that product, giving it a defined purpose rather than trying to reproduce every function of a newspaper.
Johnston and Heafy met through Leadership Greenville. Heafy brought a quality systems engineering background to the project inside Community Journals. He says the team designed the product and pre-sold about $500,000 in advertising between February and June 2016, then launched GVLtoday that July. That first market supplied a place to test both reader interest and a commercial model.
The founders worked out the model before accelerating.
The early years involved refining the product and working out the economics of operating in an individual city. The business became 6AM City and began raising funding around 2018. Heafy says it expanded from one market to seven between 2018 and 2020.
The next phase moved much faster. A larger investment around the middle of 2021 supported expansion from seven to 24 cities in nine months. At the time of the interview, the founders describe a team of 115 employees plus more than 35 part-time employees. Those figures describe that stage of the company’s history.
They credit preparation during the pandemic with making the expansion manageable. While timing delayed some growth plans, they refined processes, leadership, and culture. They also saw demand for information that helped people understand a city as residents moved and communities began gathering again. Preparation met a market opening, rather than eliminating the need for one.
Growth created a continuing funding decision.
Rapid expansion increased costs as well as reach. A larger team could support more markets, but it also required revenue and cash before every part of the operation had matured. The founders describe estimating those costs, managing the pace of spending, and deciding how much runway the next stage would require.
By the interview, they were leveling off after the expansion and considering whether to add more cities before another funding round. Their questions were concrete: how many additional markets could they support, how quickly would cash be spent, and when should fundraising begin?
Their account gives scale a financial dimension that can disappear in a headline about new locations. A repeatable process does not make growth free. The number of markets, the timing of hiring, and the funding plan need to work together, and the answer can change as the business grows.
Delegation required the founders to change their own habits.
The founders could no longer remain involved in every detail. One describes allowing another person into his inbox, even though he had treated it as a personal task list. The other recalls being told to stop reading the newsletters for two months so he could concentrate on a different priority.
Those examples show why hiring experienced leaders is only part of delegation. The founder also has to stop doing work that now belongs to someone else. Johnston describes handing content leadership to a person with deeper experience managing a content team, while he concentrated on the work the company needed from him.
Expansion also changed recruiting. A footprint that included larger markets made the opportunity more compelling to senior candidates. The founders wanted people who could make a meaningful contribution at that scale. Having attracted them, they then had to give those people the responsibility they were hired to carry.
Culture became a repeatable part of the work.
Early in the company, the team worked with outside support to define its mission and values. Employees contributed to that process. The founders describe keeping those values present in meetings, training, feedback, and a role dedicated to culture and team development.
They also invested in bringing the distributed team together. At the time of the interview, they had recently gathered 115 employees in Nashville for four days of team building. They viewed that time as a substantial investment in relationships across locations and functions.
The longer-term aim was for employees to explain the culture to new colleagues themselves. A new hire should hear shared expectations from a manager or teammate, rather than depending on the founders to retell their story. Both founders finish the interview by emphasizing contribution, openness to feedback, and a constructive attitude as requirements for staying on the team.
Detailed documentation supported consistent local work.
Each city needed its own reporting and local knowledge, while readers and advertisers needed a recognizable product. Heafy describes documenting work in a training platform, including where content comes from, its length, its formatting, and everyday administrative processes.
That detail made onboarding faster. He says an editor could complete the initial training in about two weeks, while acknowledging that learning continued afterward. Some editors joined only two or three weeks before their city’s newsletter began publishing. Daily publication then gave them frequent feedback.
The founders compared the system to a franchise playbook: the next market inherited a tested way to operate. Heafy says a new city could launch in about 60 days at that stage. The underlying lesson is the preparation behind that claim. Consistency depended on explicit instructions, capable staff, and a process that could be taught.
Employee ideas needed a path into the playbook.
Johnston also saw a risk in excessive standardization. If everyone simply followed the existing instructions, next year’s product might be identical. Employees needed permission to notice what other publishers were doing and suggest changes that fit 6AM City’s purpose.
The company used a Slack channel for employee ideas, but the founders admit that suggestions had sometimes gone unanswered. They brought the channel back with a clearer process: the management team reviewed ideas monthly and decided which teams should act. Some ideas only needed confirmation that an employee could proceed.
They wanted small experiments to produce evidence. An employee might try a referral mechanism or appear on a local broadcast. If the attempt had a useful lesson, a disappointing result did not automatically deserve a penalty. Feedback framed around what went well and what to do next helped convert experimentation into better work. The process itself could then change.
Co-founder disagreements worked because the destination was shared.
Johnston and Heafy describe different instincts around experimentation and process. One might want to try an idea immediately; the other would ask how it could work across 20 cities. Their disagreements could be energetic, but they say shared intentions allowed them to resolve the issue and move on.
As the company grew, decisions included more leaders and more evidence. That created opportunities for a founder to discover that several colleagues saw something differently. They also acknowledged that a leader sometimes has to make an individual call after listening, with others supporting the decision.
Outside mentors, coaches, industry peers, and support at home helped them carry that responsibility. Their partnership offered another benefit: someone who understood the stakes could examine a difficult choice before either founder had to live with it. That did not guarantee the right answer, but it made the reasoning less isolated.
6AM City’s story connects expansion to everyday operating decisions. The founders tested a local product, documented its production, hired people who could lead, and built a way for those people to change the system. For another founder, the useful question is which parts of the next stage can already be taught, funded, and trusted to someone else.
