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She has recently produced several pieces in the coastal Maine town of Wiscasset.

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Owner of a successful videography business in Syracuse, NY, Justin has recently begun specializing in social media content for independent restaurants.

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Every small town has the same problem: The local newspaper has faded away, and Main Street is struggling to be heard in the noise of the internet.

Local businesses, non-profits, and civic groups know they need to tell their story to survive, but they don’t have the time, the budget, or the technical skills to produce the quality video that modern audiences expect.

This is where you come in.

The Hero Network is launching a “Founding Cohort” to train a new generation of local media leaders. We call them Community Showrunners.

What is a Community Showrunner? A Showrunner is the person who takes responsibility for the narrative of their town. You aren’t just holding a camera; you are producing the content that connects neighbors, supports businesses, and strengthens the community.

While the Hero Tool is open to everyone for immediate use, the Academy is a 'Founding Cohort' designed to workshop the business models and strategies that will define the next era of local media.

We are looking for three specific types of builders:

• The Freelancer & Social Media Manager: You want to offer more than just static posts. Upgrade your agency with high-value video storytelling that your clients are desperate to buy.

• The Creator-Journalist: You are ready to launch your own independent news channel, build a loyal subscriber base on Substack, and own the beat for your town.

• The Civic Leader (Chambers, DMOs, Main Streets): You are tasked with marketing your town. Bring production in-house to create consistent, broadcast-quality content that drives foot traffic and delivers massive value to your members.

The Academy: The Blueprint for Local Media This is an exclusive beta program. We are opening our playbook to a small group of pioneers who will get direct access to our team and our tools before the public launch.

Module 1: The Production Toolkit Master the Hero Platform. We will teach you how to direct remote interviews, control lighting and framing, and capture broadcast-quality footage using the smartphone you already own.

Module 2: Post-Production & Storytelling Great video is made in the edit. You will learn how to use the Hero Tool for quick turns, and how to integrate with external editors (like CapCut) for custom work. Whether you edit it yourself or use Hero’s “Done-For-You” services, you will learn the art of the cut.

Module 3: The Platform & Distribution Content needs a home. We will guide you through setting up a dedicated publication (using platforms like Substack) to turn scattered video clips into a coherent media channel that locals will trust and subscribe to.

The Business Model: 3 Ways to Win The “Showrunner” model is designed to be sustainable, whether your goal is profit, impact, or both.

1. The Agency Path: Use the Hero Tool to manage video for paying clients. You charge the retainer; you keep 100% of the revenue.

2. The Publisher Path: Create an independent local channel and monetize through sponsorships, ads, or subscriptions.

3. The Community Path: For Chambers and DMOs, use the tool to replace expensive ad agencies. Create unlimited content for your members to justify your annual dues and attract visitors.

Join the Founding Cohort We are screening applicants for our inaugural class now. If you are ready to master these tools and become the voice of your town, apply below.

Apply

We see many use cases for our remote video storytelling platform. Whether you are a social media manager, a destination marketer, creator-journalist or a nonprofit, the tool is ready for you to:

• Capture remote video footage in high resolution.

• Crowdsource event coverage from your community.

• Edit professional clips without an expensive agency

• Gather stories without leaving your desk.

If you see yourself needing these solutions, we invite you to try our tool in creating conversation-based video. You’ll find that they hit differently on social media and perform really well.

The tool obviously expands your geographic reach. If you enjoy video editing already, you’ll see that it can combine and replace several apps you’re already paying for. If you’re not an editor (or your time could be better spent elsewhere), take advantage of our editing service. Presto! You’re in the video production business! We provide quick turnaround with one round of revisions.

For a limited time, if you set up an account and complete the setup wizard, you’ll receive one free video credit (a $99 value).

Building in Public

That phrase is all the rage in entrepreneurial and startup circles. Frankly, we’ve struggled a bit to define what that means for Hero.

We’ve started a couple of founder TikTok accounts in the past, but self promotion is hard (solving our own problem). Besides, the content is not about our journey, but that of others featured in the video stories we help tell. That’s where our users come in.

We realized some time ago that to achieve scale we could not be the bottleneck to the story running. As much as we enjoy meeting the subject, doing the interviews and crafting the videos, that’s a pretty limiting approach. Plus, they’re not really our tales to tell.

Our clients know the essential stories, and they have built-in access and affinity to share them effectively. That’s why we moved toward building a self-serve tool.

Our goal with this Substack, and more broadly across social media, is to amplify the videos and experiences as told by our users. We don’t commission them, we surface them and share with a wider audience. Not journalism, but observation and curation. You’re all invited.

Community Storytelling Initiative

In the coming weeks, we will be reaching out directly to creator-journalists and others from the list of professionals above and entice them to try the Hero tool. We’ll obviously gain valuable feedback on how the software performs, but we’ll also see the content they produce.

Our editorial team will consider which stories or ideas might be impactful to share more widely (with consultation and permissions of the Producers, of course). Our goal is a collection of stories that highlight a particular region or common theme.

We want to encourage and educate video storytellers, improving techniques and developing a shared sense of purpose. More to come in that regard.

In the meantime, if you are enticed by the tool or the mission, please reach out for a conversation.

Platform = matt@heronetwork.io

Editorial = dean@heronetwork

Chauncey Erskine’s roots run deep in the rocky soil of Maine, growing up around Damariscotta and the Midcoast. After spending significant time abroad and working across various fields, he felt the magnetic pull to return home. He realized that his true work wasn’t just about a job, but about planting himself back in the region to start his next chapter of entrepreneurship.

The Philosophy

Building a business here isn’t about rushing; it’s about “slow intentional growth”. Chauncey views his work as planting seeds, patiently watching to see how the community adapts and what naturally blossoms from the effort. He’s carefully navigating the unique intersection of tourism and local life, striving to bring those two worlds together right in the village.

The Community

Panacea is designed to be more than a restaurant; it’s a neighbor. From the communal tables to hosting poetry readings, Chauncey is dedicated to creating a space that community members can actively utilize. While he has exciting future plans, he remains grounded in gratitude for his team and the small communities that act as the “glue that binds together the state”.

- George Bailey

WHAT’S YOUR STORY?

You know the local legends, the hidden gems, and the community anchors. The Hero Network gives you the lens to share them.

Our remote production tools allow Journalists, Social Media Managers, and Civic Leaders to capture broadcast-quality conversations without the hassle and expense. You bring the access and the curiosity, we handle the rest.

Start capturing the stories around you.

The Community Kara isn’t just selling paperbacks; she’s solving problems. When an older gentleman without internet access came in clutching a worn list of out-of-print titles that big-box stores in Harrison couldn’t help him with, Kara didn’t turn him away. She hopped on eBay, tracked down the used copies, and secured a customer for life. In a post-COVID world where isolation is at record levels, she sees her shop as a remedy, using book clubs and events to help neighbors exchange phone numbers and forge real friendships.

The Philosophy Conventional retail wisdom advised Kara to install uncomfortable wooden chairs so customers wouldn’t loiter without buying. She did the exact opposite. Prioritizing community over transaction speed, she filled the space with comfortable seating, board games, and “sit and stitch” sessions. From stocking hyper-local items like a spiral-bound native plant guide to offering eco-friendly bar shampoo, Kara curates her inventory to serve the specific values and needs of the people walking through her door.

- George Bailey

WHAT’S YOUR STORY?

You know the local legends, the hidden gems, and the community anchors. The Hero Network gives you the lens to share them.

Our remote production tools allow Journalists, Social Media Managers, and Civic Leaders to capture broadcast-quality conversations without the hassle and expense. You bring the access and the curiosity, we handle the rest.

Start capturing the stories around you.

The interest-based algorithm contributed to our addiction. For the first time, it didn’t matter how many followers you had. “Influence” was no longer the determining factor for the reach of any particular video. It just had to be good, as judged by those who saw it. In the golden age of that platform, first-time creators often got millions of views.

The shift presented a great opportunity for small businesses. Suddenly, the power of story and authenticity was rewarded with lines out the door and bigger nightly deposits. The examples were many, and for those who follow these things the “greatest hits” are fondly remembered: Tacos don Gera, Charlie’s Chicken, and Horrornoments, to name a few.

TikTok is still my window to the world, and the feed now is either chaos, despair or frivolity. In the old days it was always heartwarming to witness the phenomena of a viral small business hit. The comments were fantastic.

Virality is never the goal and, unless you’re Mr. Beast, generally can’t be orchestrated. Consistency is key, building a conversation with your customers. And from the careful-what-you-wish-for department, the golden ticket can ultimately push you off track. Just ask Veruca Salt.

What all of those small-business viral hits had in common is that they were produced by someone who genuinely admired the subject and recognized the power of their story. Each video existed because someone felt compelled to capture it with an “everybody needs to see this” impulse.

Once empathy sparks, a rooting interest sets in. That’s where Hero Network fits.

Jon Henry is the owner of Jon Henry General Store (imagine that!) in downtown New Market, Virginia. He understands social media and generates a lot of content across platforms. His videos usually revolve around the store operation: what’s fresh and what’s happening.

He’s also a cornerstone of the community and contributes to several charitable causes, the definition of a small business hero.

None of us can see ourselves clearly or objectively. There’s a lot of “aw, shucks” in our favorite entrepreneurs. They’re too busy running the business to worry about self promotion. A curious interviewer can ask the right questions to scratch at authenticity and draw responses that make a connection.

The resulting video hits differently and outruns the usual performative selfies or AI slop. Jon Henry took part in an early Hero pilot, and his video was an outlier compared to his usual content.

“It’s easy to post ‘watermelons are 99 cents,’”Jon said after his Hero video treatment. “It’s much harder to talk about our impact on the community. Being interviewed and having the editing done was certainly easier.”

At Hero Network, we recognize the power of authentic video storytelling and its ability to elevate those deserving small businesses in our communities. Only you know the stories that deserve to be told. We’ll help you tell them well.

- Dean Gyorgy

Sander photographed subjects from all walks of life, capturing bankers and boxers, soldiers and circus performers, farmers and families, to create a catalog of the German people, arranged by their profession, gender, and social status. First imagined in the 1920s, he pursued the project for more than fifty years during a politically charged and rapidly changing time, fraught by two world wars and the devastating repercussions of Nazism.

Sander never finished the seven-volume, forty-nine portfolio magnum opus, continually refining and shaping it to convey an understanding of the world in which he lived. The photographs, remarkable for their unflinching realism and deft analysis of character, provide a powerful social mirror of Germany between the wars and form one of the most influential achievements of the twentieth century.

The Craft At El Titan de Bronze, they refuse to take shortcuts. While many factories use an assembly line method where pairs of workers split the bunching and wrapping duties, this shop adheres to the traditional Cuban method. Here, a single roller crafts the entire cigar from beginning to end. These artisans are “Level 9” rollers—the highest level of craftsmanship achievable—who began their training in Cuba as teenagers. Manufacturing in the U.S. is expensive and logistically challenging, but they accept the cost to maintain this specific art form.

The Legacy Today, El Titan de Bronze stands out as a successful woman-operated business in a heavily male-dominated industry. Giselle Herrera joined her mother full-time about 10 years ago, wearing every hat from tobacco buyer to blender and quality control manager. After surviving 30 years of business, they have built a deeply loyal team, with many rollers working alongside them for over 15 years. For Giselle and Sandy, the reward is seeing raw leaves transformed into something beautiful that honors their Cuban heritage.

- George Bailey

WHAT’S YOUR STORY?

You know the local legends, the hidden gems, and the community anchors. The Hero Network gives you the lens to share them.

Our remote production tools allow Journalists, Social Media Managers, and Civic Leaders to capture broadcast-quality conversations without the hassle and expense. You bring the access and the curiosity, we handle the rest.

Start capturing the stories around you.

“I like your service because I forget what I do is interesting.”

- An early Hero Network client

Self promotion is hard.

Small business owners, nonprofit leaders and community advocates have amazing stories that can inspire us all. When we know more about their passion and motivation, something clicks. We often recognize a piece of ourselves. Storytelling creates a connection and a rooting interest, which drives patronage and support.

Telling our own stories is difficult for a number of reasons. We often can’t see ourselves objectively or think there’s much value for others in our experience. We’re not comfortable with tech or don’t know where to start, and all these newfangled AI tools are head-spinning. Lastly, we’re just too damn busy with everything else to worry about video marketing.

So the stories go untold, and opportunities for business growth and deeper community connection are lost.

Hero Network provides a unique solution. It’s a platform built on curiosity and conversation. “That’s amazing, tell me more,” generates a genuine response from a passionate subject that no scripted selfie video can replicate.

We as consumers are ready to embrace the small business and the bold visionary. We hunger for compelling local news that keeps us connected to our neighbors.

The clear medium of public choice is short-form internet video. While we agree that we all spend too much time on our phones, and Big Tech algorithms have a deserved reputation for dividing us, there is still goodness and discovery to be had there. The new social graphs have shifted away from “influence” to prioritize stories of local interest. The old knock against social media not driving business through the door is debunked.

Through the Hero Network platform, community storytellers can easily reach anyone for a video-chat conversation. They can flip to the back camera and guide the subject around their environment. Upload and manage files, submit for professional editing, and share stories of authenticity that make an emotional connection.

Remember, for all the faults of big social media, the distribution is free and it will find your audience for you. Compelling content wins.

We are already seeing a backlash to “AI slop” on social media. Local news is reinventing itself. These are turbulent times, to say the least. We believe the next big social platform will be “100% verified human” and optimized for the common good. Creating that platform is punching above our weight, but our content is aligned.

The Hero Network team has anticipated this powerful convergence of technology, target market, and societal need for quite awhile. It’s been a steady march to this moment, and we are excited to broadly share our solution.

- Dean Gyorgy

The video above is taken from a Zoom call with my staff in March 2020. Our three-person Hero Media Arts agency had just discovered the power of video storytelling for the “normal heroic” - the small business owners who contribute so much to the fabric of community. The videos were shot with DSLRs in a cinematic approach, but it was the character they revealed and the viewer appreciation they sparked that made them outsized performers. “Non-commercial commercials,” we called them.

In a changing, remote world, could we crowdsource that approach? Harness the cameras in everyone’s pocket, inspire them to the see the worthy characters around them, build a platform for easy file upload and editing, and find a cost structure and target market that made sense. How hard could it be?

We started with Skype and Zoom, along with everyone else. Since we were no longer bound by geography, could we find a random small business owner to interview and get them to Dropbox some homemade video files? We did, and our test with Bonta Gelato from Bend, Oregon told us to keep going.

The rise of social media video during that time was allowing for a lower-fidelity approach. We discovered that the emotional response of our DSLR pieces could be replicated in short form on a phone. It doesn’t need to be cinematic, we said, it just needs to be real.

The entire video production world was scrambling for new options. Some promising startups failed before their time. Other solutions were abandoned when the pandemic dissipated.

But the Hero mission was set: build a community storytelling tool to benefit small businesses and local economies. Allow their stories to be recognized as valuable and elevated by others, at an affordable price with a seamless workflow. Community video production at scale.

Dedicated to phone-based capture, we embraced technology as it advanced. We experimented with proxy files uploaded through third-party apps and tried to source local mobile videographers to shoot b-roll.

We adopted and modified a podcasting software for higher video resolutions and to allow live direction from a producer.

We were confident in the mission but patchworking a substitute for tools that did not yet exist.

Artificial Intelligence was the afterburner.

Suddenly we could clean up audio files that before would have been unusable. We built a RAG system that would generate interview questions and strategic briefs based on a URL input.

As a bootstrapped startup aiming for scale through a marketplace, we needed a software product that we didn’t have the money or expertise to build. Vibe coding changed that over a weekend, and suddenly a new path of self-empowerment opened.

We expect an AI rough cut engine trained in the “Hero Way” will be incorporated soon, further reducing costs and opening more storytelling opportunities for our network.

Much has been written about the future of work and how the adoption of AI will impact both nimble entrepreneurs and battleship enterprise companies. Not only can we do more with less, (which is a broad sweep of a deep subject), it’s not overreach to say that AI is making the Hero Network mission possible.

The irony: a video company based on human connection relies on AI for its underpinnings. We see it as a magical means to an end, and its adoption into our company will remain an interesting dance.

Society is wrestling with the fact that we can no longer believe our eyes. But here is a brand promise: any human visage you see in a Hero Network video is a real person, in conversation with another.

We believe that curiosity and encouragement, nods and smiles, is the currency of the common good.

- Dean Gyorgy

• Smartphone and internet-browser based, so you can connect to anyone, anywhere for high-definition capture of conversation and live b-roll.

• Easily upload from camera rolls or crowdsource event coverage to your personal production hub.

• Manage all files and edit them yourself, or submit to the Hero team for professional, affordable polish and ready-to-post content.

No, there is nothing else like this in the marketplace. We would know.

Our first “Lobby Level” Substack issue covers some company history, mission and vision. We’ll share it for posterity and as a framework for community engagement, and then look forward together in sharing the stories of our time. Welcome to the journey.