Local News Goes Viral

Graham Colligan is building Towns Of, a social media app for local news and events happening in your town.

Graham Colligan may not have the typical founder story that you hear on podcasts. Growing up he underperformed in school, struggling with learning disabilities and tried college a total of four times.

Graham realized that maybe school just wasn’t for him and entered the work force. He worked at a string of jobs that he wasn’t thrilled about, but in the background always had an interest in social media.

Graham followed this interest and ended up interning with a number of bands to grow their following on social platforms. Coming out of the pandemic, he wanted to start an agency and learn how to monetize the skills he had built up interning.

After hundreds of Indeed applications, Graham eventually landed a gig as a social media manager for a special improvement district in New Jersey.

Shortly after starting his role as a social media manager, Graham launched a TikTok account for the district. According to Graham, his bosses said something along the lines of “TikTok is a waste of time, no one will come to our town because of TikTok” Graham had a feeling that this was categorically false.

After leaving his position with the special improvement district, Graham created a post on TikTok that went viral, garnering him press coverage on Business Insider, Yahoo News, Fox, and more. This was the lightbulb moment for Graham when he realized that social media algorithms actually prioritized content for local news when done properly.

Graham has taken what he’s learned about going viral and combined it with local news to launch Towns Of, a social media app for locals.

Towns Of is essentially a media company focused on local content. The app launched mid October on the app store and Google Play, charting in the top 50 news apps with 200 downloads, all without posting about it on socialmedia.

The homepage of the app is a news aggregator that pulls RSS from Daily Voice, Patch, and TapInto. The app also offers a place to find and post local events. Graham envisions this becoming a great resource for folks looking to launch an events business.

The app also has a Submit a Tip feature which streamlines news data by providing up to date info in real time to the app.

Graham’s competitors (SmartNews, NewsBreak) have raised massive rounds from investors, and still aren’t profitable. The local news aggregator industry doesn’t seem to be viable – and Graham points out that it also has ownership stakes from foreign private equity firms.

Towns Of is differentiated as it’s a media company, meaning they’ll use outside monetization such as YouTube and TikTok. They’ll also target ticket sales for events to the revenue mix, as well as an under wraps project to help monetize outside local publishers.

As opposed to his competition, Graham doesn’t want to hyperscale out of the gate, preferring to start with New Jersey, then roll out to Pennsylvania and New York, and eventually the whole east coast.

Grahams overall goal with Towns Of is to connect people and solve the problems in front of him: community connection and local information. Have a listen to the episode to hear Graham’s whole story and learn more about Towns Of.