This social-first news outlet turned street interviews into a 600,000-subscriber YouTube channel
Roca News co-founders Max Towey and Max Frost explained how their popular Instagram account expanded into a newsletter, mobile app, and longform YouTube channel.
When Max Towey and Max Frost first started talking about launching a media company, they weren’t trying to disrupt journalism so much as escape it.
Both men had just graduated college and landed their first real jobs at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank known for policy papers and buttoned-up discourse. They co-hosted a neglected in-house podcast that, almost by accident, became their first exposure to what direct-to-audience media could look like.
“It opened our eyes to the idea that if you have a good pitch and you can portray yourself as having an audience that people want to reach, that opens a lot of doors in terms of people wanting to talk to us,” said Towey.
The experience planted a seed. If they could reach high-profile figures through a podcast barely anyone listened to, what might be possible outside the constraints of an institution whose core model depended on influencing journalists rather than audiences?
By mid-2020—amid the pandemic, mass protests, and a presidential election—Towey and Frost left AEI and launched Roca News. Their ambition was simple but contrarian: understand what was actually happening in the country and present it without a partisan filter.
“I think one of the biggest issues we identified in media is people sit in DC or New York, and they write about the world without actually going out and experiencing it,” said Frost. “A lot of people are very out of touch with what’s really happening. And that was one of the foundational ideas for Roca, especially in 2020 — during the pandemic, all the protests and the riots that summer, the election coming up — and we were just like, we need to understand what’s really happening and convey this to an audience and do it in a way that isn’t through a partisan filter.”.
Finding Product-Market Fit on Instagram
Like most early-stage media startups, Roca News launched everywhere at once. There was a podcast. There were social accounts across platforms. But it wasn’t until they focused on Instagram that the company found its footing.
The insight was straightforward. “We asked ourselves: where do people like us actually spend time?” Towey said. “The answer was Instagram.”
Working with their co-founder and designer Billy, they developed what became known as “Quick Cards”—carousel posts that broke down major news stories into short, digestible bullet points paired with visually arresting cover images. It wasn’t just news repackaged for social; it was news designed for the feed.
“When you’re scrolling past memes, no one’s stopping for a headline that says ‘Fed raises rates,’” Towey said. “You have to speak the platform’s language.”
The breakthrough came in January 2021 during the GameStop trading frenzy, when one of Roca’s posts went viral and doubled their following overnight. At the time, they had roughly 2,000 followers.