Hello, Greenville!
(OH, and Austin, Asheville, Boston, Charleston, Charlotte, Columbus, Columbia, Dallas, Fort Worth, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Lakeland, Lexington, Louisville, Nashville, Chattanooga, Madison, Portland, Raleigh, Richmond, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Jose, San Diego, Seattle, Tampa Bay and Winston-Salem)
At Endeavor’s January Collaborators and Cocktails speaker series, entrepreneur duo Ryan Johnston and Ryan Heafy, co-founders of GVLtoday and its parent company, 6AM City, sat down with a sold-out room full of founders, marketers, collaborative colleagues and company leaders for an insider conversation on what is today, the fastest-growing local daily newsletter company in the United States.
Despite sharing the same name, Ryan and Ryan couldn’t have had more different starts.
Johnston hails from a media family. His parents, Mark and Donna Johnston, founded and run Community Journals. He worked in commercial real estate in Charlotte but found himself gravitating towards his media upbringing with the idea of a luxury commercial real estate publication and returned to Greenville to work as publisher of Upstate Business Journal.
Heafy was a mechanical engineer from Connecticut. After making his way to Greenville, he spent a couple of years as the quintessential entrepreneur, trying his hand at a few different ideas and startups, and eventually giving himself 2 months before he left and moved back home.
So naturally, being as different as they were, the two Ryans crossed paths (and of course bonded) at the Greenville Chamber’s Leadership Greenville in 2014, and together, now run the fastest-growing local daily newsletter company in the United States that is active in 28 US markets, reaches 1.5 million people daily (and even more on social), operates 30 NBA basketball newsletters, and has plenty of new ideas on the horizon. Johnston operates as CEO, and Heafy as COO.
What is 6AM City?
Ryan Heafy: At its core, 6AM City is a locally owned and operated media property that delivers the most relevant need-to-know local news and events in the communities that we serve. It is a five-minute read, and it is conversational in tone. It has been designed to be digestible and to help you, the reader, learn how to spend your time, talent and treasure locally in the community that you live in.
You run all these markets around the country and so you have a ton of data. There are cities that are a lot like Greenville, both in size and soul. What do you know that we don’t know about these consumers?
Ryan Johnston: There are a lot of things that cities don’t know between each other, and so a lot of times we build city guides, market to market. If they have that— how are they doing that, how do we get that, where would it go. There are a lot more content differences market to market.
What are the highlights, lowlights, challenges, whether it was external or internal, that you faced?
Ryan Johnston: COVID was hard – the first thing people do when they don’t know what’s happening is to pull their advertising budget. But on the upside, because we only do positive content that rallies around things that are pulling the community together, we heard two things: 1. We love coming to you to get ideas of what to do outside and with kids, etc. and that showed us a massive spike in traffic and in new subscribers. 2. With people relocating due to remote work, many became newcomers to their cities, and nobody wants to be a newcomer. Everyone wants to feel like a local. They want to know what is going on and how to get involved – and that’s what our newsletter does.
Any kind of vision for the next 5 years?
Ryan Heafy: I think there’s a big opportunity coming with AI around media in general. 42% of ad agencies are already using generative AI to create and plan their placements. Generative AI is what you all probably know, but that’s not AI. An AI newsletter agent means we create tools with AI for other people to use that take away the entire processes – such as AI assisted workflows. We are trying to build and develop the skillsets with AI to make our processes more effective internally. But there is also an opportunity for us in the future to allow those tools to be made available to anyone who wants to be a creator in any city in the country.
From harnessing their differences (and commonalities) to build the 6AM City mecca we know today, to their calculated risk-taking, we look forward to see what Ryan and Ryan do next in the media world.
Join Endeavor for their next Collaborators & Cocktails event on Thursday, April 24, 2025 featuring a master class on collaboration with VisitGreenvilleSC and Taryn Scher of TKPR. E-mail [email protected] for tickets.
