A roofer started a local newsletter. Here's why the math works.

Price Foulger is doing something I talk about a lot and rarely see anyone actually do. He is starting a roofing company and a local newsletter at the same time, on purpose. Low Tide Local covers Santa Cruz, California, and it was about a month and a half old when we recorded. It was already close to 5,000 subscribers. In this conversation he explains why a local newsletter might be the best marketing channel a home services company has, and how he plans to use it without turning it into an ad for his own business.

A roofer who found his marketing channel

Price has worked in roofing for the last couple of years. He had just gotten his contractor's license when we talked. While researching how to market the new company, he kept running into local newsletters. He talked to a string of local newsletter operators, including Ryan from Naptown Scoop, then wrote a post about what he was learning.

With about a thousand followers, that post got around half a million views on X. He took that as a sign people cared, and he and his wife decided to build one. She's a stay-at-home mom with three kids who has run her own small businesses, and she helps run the newsletter while he builds the roofing company.

Launching Low Tide Local in Santa Cruz

Low Tide Local is mostly events with a little news. They stay away from crime and politics on purpose, because plenty of other outlets cover that. The test for what goes in is simple: would they want to go to it as a young family?

The name comes from how people in Santa Cruz feel about being local. People are proud of it, and a little defensive about who counts. Price wanted a newsletter that lets even someone who just moved there feel local and in the know.

Santa Cruz County has about 250,000 people, and it's the beach town for the whole Bay Area. Crowds come "over the hill" from San Jose and San Francisco every weekend. That means a small area to cover with a big audience to reach. He admits it might have made more sense to start in San Jose, where his roofing office is. But newsletters are growing fast and he didn't want anyone to beat him to Santa Cruz.

How it grew to 5,000 in six weeks

They launched at the beginning of June. Price posted a photo of the family and a short story in Santa Cruz Facebook groups about what they were doing and why. Then they did the same on Nextdoor. Those organic posts brought in thousands of subscribers in the first week.

Growth then stalled for a few weeks while he learned Meta ads. Once the ads were running, the list started growing again.

He runs two campaigns. The main one holds the ads that work. A smaller test campaign lands around 60 to 75 cents a subscriber, and when an ad wins there, he moves it to the main campaign and cuts the weak ones.

Why the roofing math works

This is the part every home services owner should hear. Price says most roofing companies spend 5 to 10% of top line revenue on marketing. In his area, a roofing lead costs $150 to $300, because you're fighting every other roofer for the attention of people who need a roof right now.

His readers are mostly homeowners in their 40s, 50s and 60s, the same people his roofing company wants to reach. If they see him seven or eight times in the newsletter over two years, he expects to be the first company they call. His goal is that in a year or two, his roofing company won't need to spend much on outside marketing at all. It will market to its own audience. He plans to start a second newsletter in South San Jose, where the roofing office is, and he'll be its biggest sponsor.

He also thinks about trust. When you're the person who connects everyone in town, and people also know you own a roofing company, you become the trusted roofer by default.

Keeping the two businesses separate

I asked him the hard question: how do you advertise your own company without turning the newsletter into something readers feel is just trying to sell them a roof? He doesn't want it to become like so many real estate newsletters, where readers assume it only exists to sell them a house. He's still working it out, but he has some rules.

He builds every business as if he might sell it, even with no plans to. He says it forces better systems and tighter bookkeeping. It also takes pressure off. If an ad slot goes unsold down the road, his roofing company can fill it.

Automate the tedious parts

Price automated the event scraping and the first draft of each issue. Then he does a heavy edit and rewrite before it goes out, so the issue still feels personal. Ad sales are coming next. A few businesses have already reached out asking to post events or pay for a feature. He just built a media kit and is going after his first sponsors.

On referrals, he's building a system where roofing clients who send a friend get something like a $500 gift card. He already trades referrals with solar companies. He's also interested in charging high ticket service companies per lead instead of a flat fee.

A map instead of a calendar

Price doesn't love event calendars. They get messy, and Santa Cruz already has plenty. So he built a map that shows events, road closures, and every weekend's garage, yard and estate sales. He adds events on Fridays and removes them after Sunday so it stays clean.

He says he built it in about an hour with Claude Code. Pushing it in Facebook groups and on Nextdoor didn't bring in many subscribers. But the people who find it are obsessed with it. He also saw a New York newsletter put local discounts on its map, and he thinks that could become another way to sell sponsorships.

Why there's no playbook

Roofing has a playbook, Price says. Copy the best players, put your head down, work hard. Local media doesn't. There are a million ways to run it, and none of them are wrong. You decide what you want and what your community would like. For someone with a roofing company behind them and a long view, that freedom is the fun part.