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The shade room9/19/2023 ![]() By bypassing the need for a website at all and streamlining the user experience of publishing celebrity news, Nwandu, a millennial, changed everything. But Nwandu didn’t have the resources to create a website at the time, so she started curating news directly on Instagram. It was a traffic driver, not a brand builder. Until then, legacy news outlets used Instagram to push users back to their websites. When Angelica Nwandu started The Shade Room, back in 2014, she had no idea how drastically she was about to change the entertainment news landscape. The most important thing is to be flexible and be authentic to your audience.Tune into We Should Talk every Thursday, where In The Know’s Gibson Johns interviews your favorite celebrities and influencers. If we say tomorrow we want to do something different we can. Because we don’t have people over our heads saying give us our money, we can transform our company however we want it to be transformed. When you take a lot of investment money they're going to restrict your content because they want their money back. And instead of relying on programmatic ads, The Shade Room created its own ad network (out of necessity after getting kicked off of Google Ads). According to Nwandu, every DM is responded to. The followers aren’t followers, they’re roommates. She credits the community around the brand as a major reason they’re able to do what they do independently. But something she does on purpose, which is considered unheard of in media, is bootstrap. Nwandu says she disrupted with her company by accident. So what I learned is when you hire, the environment you ant to create is more so a team. But the only problem with making your team feel like a family is that you love your family unconditionally right? So from the beginning that can create a weird environment where people feel like, well we’re family right, so you should unconditionally love me regardless of what my behavior is. ![]() ![]() They want their team to feel like a family. Once I got rid of the fear my mind was able to be creative and I was able to think about how to make money from The Shade Room.” It will block you from where you need to go. And my friend ‘well, what do you need to pursue your dream?’ I, ‘I need internet, I need a laptop and I need a phone.’ And she was like, ‘so you don’t need your apartment?’ And I was like ‘no, as long as I can get to a place where I can get wifi.’ So then she said, ‘take the fear out of your mind, because if you lose all of those things, you still have what you need to continue going on in your business.’ Even though that’s a scary thought, it was what freed me.”Īfter that pep talk, Nwandu had an aha moment, she put up a post about advertising on the Shade Room for $75 and made her rent money in an entire day. I was going to apply anywhere, McDonald’s. I had one friend who really believed in me, her name was Bria, and I I might really just have to apply to work at Pinkberry. Today, people are writing checks to that very company.Īnother pivotal moment happened when Nwandu couldn’t pay her rent. The woman suggested she change it because no one would write checks to a company called The Shade Room. Nwandu recalls the moment she went to register the business name. You can’t despise a small beginning, because anything great has to start small. “I’m very spiritual, there’s this scripture in the Bible that says, do not despise small beginnings. On having faith and staying true to yourself:įrom the very beginning Nwandu was tested from the money down to the name of her company. ![]() It was one of the most embarrassing times of my life but I kept telling myself, just keep going. I had just graduated and all my peers were going to grad school, law school and here I am at home. ![]() “ eight months looked a lot like a lot of crying. With no money, and essentially at the helm of a one woman show, Nwandu admits she cried, a lot. Nwandu’s hoped the money would last her six months. “For me that was a sign I was on the path to what I was supposed to do.” When she got off stage, Michelle Satter (Sundance’s founding director) runs up to her and gives her a $5,000 grant to write. my life is falling apart behind the scenes.” And they think I’m crying because I’m into the poetry. I got myself together, I got on stage and I performed this poem called ‘Behind Bulletproof Glass.’ And I’m crying. I hung up the phone, and I was like wait, ‘ you don’t have any money in the bank, you have to pay rent, like what’s going on?’ I just started crying. “There was no way I was picking that job over Sundance, so I said well I’m done then. ![]()
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