![]() The Shade Room has become one of the most popular non-personality driven Instagram accounts in the world. During this time, she also learned to trust the process of building her brand. She bootstrapped the company with one VC investment and reached 100K followers in less than a year. She says she often refers to scripture about small beginnings, and she explains why she chose purpose over a paycheck. When describing her life and the challenges she faced while building her empire, Nwandu is open about her spirituality. While her early success in tech led to her being listed in Techcrunch’s 18 Female Founders Who Killed It in 2015 and in Forbes’ 30 Under thirty, she is also looking to become a major media figure and run her own news network. While most successful tech entrepreneurs have their own business, Nwandu’s roots lie in the arts. This time, her strategy worked, as the content she posted was geared towards a majority Black audience.Īs the founder of Shade Room, Angelica Nwandu has a diverse set of backgrounds. It was a highly publicized demise and led to depression for Angie. The Shade Room had over twenty employees and more than 500,000 followers at its peak. The following quickly grew to over eight million and the page eventually reached seventeen million on Instagram. In a year, The Shade Room had garnered over two million followers. To submit ideas for features or keep up to date with new releases you can find me on Twitter. This article is part of a series featuring underrepresented people making a difference. She has managed to achieve the things that she never dreamed of in a field where she had no formal education or experience, something that’s we’re much more likely to see going forward. Angelica is proud of the team she has built, but also praises the community who have helped her achieve all of this as “most of the stories still originate from our community of roommates and we make it our duty to respond to every message”.Īngelica now has her sights set on writing scripts again and after, launching a successful pilot show on Instagram TV “which didn’t feel like a success at the time”, she recently signed a deal to produce the series. However, the team today consists of 20 people spread across writing, editorial, content and support functions, all based in Los Angeles. Angelica has spent much of her time hiring the right team to support her business, which she says is particularly difficult considering most people see “The Shade Room” as a blog rather than a business. Today, The Shade Room has an impressive 17.7m followers. However, Angelica recalls that she “was about to get evicted so realised I needed to monetise the blog or get a job” she says and “I posted asking if any businesses would like to advertise for $75 on the platform and got multiple DMs”, “ultimately we monetised out of desperation and have never actively posted since then”. After some time, celebrities started following the account and the engagement built up to a point where she had 500,000 followers. She jokingly remembers that she would pull over on the freeway when a story broke to upload a post and ensure that she was first. She doubled down and spent hours staying on top of stories and posting on the blog. Within ten days, she had 10,000 followers and knew that she was onto something. In the first post, she noticed her followers were commenting and tagging other people. Ironically the audience interpreted the tears as raw emotion and she was approached by Mic who offered Angelica a $5,000 grant to write a script “which was another sign from God this was the right path”. Angelica had a poetry recital later that day and broke down in tears during the performance. “I could not let this opportunity slip and decided to follow my dreams” Angelica says, although shortly after dismissing his warning, the reality of what she had committed to sank in and she was crushed. Partway through Sundance Labs, her boss called threatening to fire her if she didn’t return. She took a vacation from work during tax season, a notoriously busy period for accountants. ![]() To her surprise, Angelica’s script was accepted into Sundance Labs, an incubator programme for film scripts that worked with mentors such as Quentin Tarintino. It was a great opportunity for someone who had not written a script before, however “the story mimicked my life so well as it was about a girl who lost her mother through domestic violence, something I truly believe was a sign from God” she recalls. ![]() Struggling to motivate herself in her career, she decided to pursue writing again and an opportunity came up to write a script with Jordana Spiro.
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