A social club for your neighborhood, built by a neighbor, not a corporation.

Why we’re building this

In October 2023, Marc wrote a careful, polite essay for his Marin neighborhood on Nextdoor, arguing that opaque moderation was the antithesis of community building. The post was deleted within 50 minutes. He posted it a second time. It was deleted again. A third time. Gone.

Eight neighbors had liked it. One commented, “My posts are always deleted too.” Another wrote, “I hope it’s not deleted, and I hope it is widely read.” A few minutes later, it wasn’t.

That essay became the founding thesis of Towne. If the platform meant to build community is actively suppressing community, something better needs to exist. Not a clone with a different logo. Something structurally different: ad-free instead of ad-supported, community-moderated instead of gatekept, built for neighbors instead of advertisers.

It is not one bad experience. In an informal poll of r/Marin residents who regularly use Nextdoor, only 8 of 111 said they like it. 30 said “meh.” 73 said no.

Later, Marc ran a simple poll on Nextdoor itself, asking neighbors how they access the app. It was removed for being “spam.” No explanation, no appeal, just gone. That is exactly the frustration Towne is built to fix.

Why free

Most free social apps make money by selling your attention to advertisers, or your data to brokers, or both. That is not a bug, it is the business model. Every design decision flows downstream from the need to maximize engagement and ad revenue.

Towne refuses that trade. There are no ads and no data sales. It is built and funded by a neighbor, not by advertisers, so there is no one to please but the people who actually live here. What keeps it real isn't a paywall, it's that Towne is built for the neighbors who actually live nearby, invited by the people they know.

Why it can actually work

Marc has built, funded, and lawyered for technology companies for over a decade. He has founded a VC-backed Series A jobs marketplace, run an autonomous vehicles podcast with 200 episodes, and currently provides fractional General Counsel services to AI and SaaS startups. He is a California-licensed attorney and the inaugural Chair of the AI and the Law section at the Beverly Hills Bar Association.

Axiomic, LLC is his technology company. Towne is one of its products. The legal, technical, and operational knowledge to build this right all live under one roof.

Why Marin (and why New England matters)

Marc is a Mill Valley native. During the pandemic, he and his wife took a chance on something different: a two-year stint in a small New England town above the Merrimack River, where their only child was born. It was there that he saw something he hadn’t expected.

A family on one side of his home was very liberal politically. The family on the other side voted for President Trump. They all got along and genuinely loved one another. Whenever they disagreed, they got a good laugh, often playfully teased each other about it, and usually talked it out. More often than not, they surprised one another with mutual understanding.

Nobody was scared to disagree. Nobody bit their tongues. And nobody was scared to ask questions.

If somebody asked how you were doing while passing by, it was a literal, actual question demanding a literal, actual response. You had to be prepared to have a conversation if you made eye contact and exchanged greetings. The local fish monger shared stories of his childhood. The wine and cheese shop owners compared notes of their travels to France. A bakery owner invited them to join her on their family boat. His wife, who grew up in communist Romania, said the cultural vibe of New England shared more in common with Europe than with California.

In June 2023, Marc posted this reflection on Nextdoor. It received 96 reactions from his Marin neighbors. 86 hearts.

Oddly, that post was never deleted. The one he wrote four months later, was.

When Marc moved back to Marin, he noticed what had changed. Not the scenery. The culture. The stifled conversations. The posts quietly deleted. The mandatory conformity. His wife recognized the pattern.

Towne’s mission: we should be one. Different views, different backgrounds, but one community all the same.

What’s next

Towne launches in Marin County first. It is invite-only and free to join: a neighbor vouches you in with a single-use code, and your feed stays free of ads, with no data sales. The first 50 neighbors to post in each neighborhood get Founding Neighbor status: a permanent badge marking you as one of the neighbors who started your Towne.

If Marin works, we expand neighborhood by neighborhood. No growth-hack contact scraping, no invite spam, no private equity pressure to dilute the mission for scale. Free, deliberate, slow, and real.

The FAQ has the details. The 2023 essay has the why.

Contact

[email protected] for press, partnerships, neighborhood requests, or just to say hi.