Our Mission
A social club for your neighborhood, built by someone who actually lives there.
Towne is a paid, ad-free alternative to Nextdoor. No ads, no tracking, no opaque moderation. It is built by Marc Hoag, a Mill Valley native and Marin County resident who got tired of watching the platform meant to connect neighbors silence them instead.
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: paid instead of ad-supported, community-moderated instead of gatekept, built for neighbors instead of advertisers.
Why paid
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 on every free social app flows downstream from the need to maximize engagement and ad revenue.
Towne flips that. The $10/month membership fee is the product. It eliminates ads forever, funds a platform that works for you instead of advertisers, and filters for neighbors who are actually invested in their community. Think of it as a premium social club, not a free-to-play game designed to keep you scrolling.
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.
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. The first 50 members in each neighborhood get Founding Member status: your first year is free, then $50/year locked for life. After that, standard memberships are $10/month or $100/year.
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. Paid, deliberate, slow, and real.
The FAQ has the details. The 2023 essay has the why.
Contact
hello@towneapp.com for press, partnerships, neighborhood requests, or just to say hi.