🌊 Thank You, Roca Nation!

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Good morning, Roca Nation. Here are today’s four need-to-know stories: 

By Max Frost, Max Towey, and Billy Carney

We know many of you are currently driving hours to aunts’ and uncles’ homes; rushing for flights; and hunching over kitchen stoves, preparing feasts for friends and family. So we’ll keep today’s email short and share a few things we are thankful for. 

Yesterday, Max Towey and I went back to look at old Roca emails. We often do this, looking to see how our product and audience have changed over time. This week, we jumped back to the Max@RocaNews inbox from November 2020, three months after Roca launched. 

The week of that Thanksgiving, we received a grand total of …. two emails, both from people we personally knew before starting Roca. We’d hire one of those people, Jen, as our first employee one year later. In 2022, she cracked the code on how to market this newsletter, growing it by 100,000+ readers in a matter of months. She’s why many of you are here today, so we are thankful for her. 

That leads to our next point: A bigger audience leads to more products and higher standards, which necessitate a bigger team. We are incredibly thankful to have found that team, which now numbers nine, more than double our four from just a year ago. 

It’s hard to comprehend the level of dedication from our staff, who all work a minimum of six days a week; have a reckless disregard for their sleep cycles; and not just a willingness but an eagerness to head into places like the Church of Scientology (Thank you, Max H!); Osama Bin Laden’s compound (Thank you, Drew!); Canada’s “zombie town” (Thank you, Gus!); and DC’s most notorious neighborhood (Thank you, Nik!). Those stories will all be available for Roca Members soon, courtesy of our endlessly diligent manager and editor, Kira, who ensures this email gets out each morning (Thank you, Kira!).

Then there are Calvin and Taylor (thanks, guys!) who make sure our app works, and Johnrey and Rogelle (thanks!) who get all the content out. We are so thankful for all these people who support our mission and enable Roca to deliver the news. 

We’ll wrap this speech up in just a minute, but two last important points. 

We are eternally grateful to our families, significant others, and friends who have tolerated our bizarre passion for the news, encouraged us to take the risk in starting Roca, and have continued to provide valuable suggestions to the business. Without them, Roca wouldn’t have made it out of the brainstorming phase, let alone turned into what it has.

And lastly, we are thankful for you all.

We have to give a special shoutout to the Roca Members, who have helped turn our business around. With each membership, we have become less reliant on advertising and more able to invest in our content, conduct original reporting, and plan for the future. 

When we were writing to an audience of 500 people five years ago, our mission was to take down Big News by creating a better, non-partisan alternative. Today, we’re getting closer by the day because of the Roca Members. 

But members aside, we are extremely grateful for all Roca Readers. We used to send our articles, emails, and videos into a void, spending days on them only to hear crickets in reply. Then we found you – an audience who cared as much about having an impartial and non-sensationalist news source as we did. Growing an audience becomes a virtuous cycle: The more people reading your stories, the more you want to write, and the more they want to read. In our case, our audience doesn’t just give us meaning and inspire us, but holds us to account, ensuring we never stray from our mission of delivering impartial information. 

And Roca doesn’t just have readers, we have a community. In the last year, we’ve met Roca readers around the world, from Pakistan to Scotland, California, Canada, and Mississippi. They’ve shown us their towns, hosted us at their homes, cooked us meals, and invited us to tailgates. It never ceases to amaze us how similar Roca people are, regardless of where they are: They are defined by curiosity, friendliness, intelligence, and open-mindedness. They are the antidote to the unhappiness and partisanship that we are told defines the modern world. 

So thank you, Roca Nation, for giving our lives meaning and making our business idea a reality. We hope you have a great Thanksgiving.

Editor’s Note

That’s all we’ve got. Travel safely, enjoy the time with your friends and family, and turn off your news notifications.

We hope you have a great holiday, and we’ll see you on Friday. And from the bottom of our hearts, thank you!

And as always, here are our most recent articles if you missed them:

Happy Thanksgiving!
—Max, Max, and Billy