![]() ![]() Nwandu's focus has always been on the news and celebrities that interest the African-American community. TSR attracted more than 700,000 followers within its first year, which led to he New York Times calling it the TMZ of Instagram. She'd spend hours scouring the social media pages of famous and borderline-famous people, and report on their lives based on their social media activity. Nwandu started an Instagram account and began to anonymously blog about celebrities. We’ve gone further into politics, we’ve diversified our news, we do inspiration, too, and people look at us as a reliable source.When she came up with the idea for The Shade Room (TSR) in 2014, a news site that follows trending stories and the actions of celebrities in real time, Angelica Nwandu was broke, unemployed, and had no blogging experience. Obama has stepped into TSR, President Joe Biden has stepped in twice, Stacey Abrams, and the list goes on. But, over the course of eight years, I’ve seen that we’ve done just that. The vision that I got was basically that TSR would become an information hub and be more important than just Black culture, but would go further into the news.įor me, at that time, it looked so crazy because we were very singular at what we posted. So, I asked God to give me a vision to transform TSR into something more important and better. ![]() ![]() It was at that point that I was like, ‘I need a vision.’ I felt like I had built up a community of people. ![]() It was very edgy and funny, and over time, not only was I not satisfied, but the roommates were no longer satisfied with that kind of content. When I first started TSR, it was just a salacious platform where I was sharing my opinion on everything that was going on. I needed to figure out what I was going to do. My purpose for creating TSR was because I was unemployed, and I was in a situation where I needed to find a hustle. When I launched it, I was moving on my own. Nwandu joined AfroTech in an exclusive interview to discuss how technology seemingly changed her life, the vision that led her to create TSR, and what’s kept her in the game so long after building a multimedia platform from scratch that managed to outlast some of its peers.Įditorial Note: Portions of this interview have been edited for clarity and length.Īngie: It wasn’t a vision from God. To date, they now have over 25 million followers who are affectionately known as “Roommates.” It is now one of the most popular accounts on the I nstagram platform. Little did she know, taking one leap of faith would soon propel her into a vision that was greater than what she had for herself.ĭuring its initial launch, The Shade Room (TSR) had around 300 followers. On the heels of quitting a pretty stable accounting firm job, Nwandu chose to follow her dreams of becoming a screenwriter, a passion she first discovered as a kid. At the time, she simply did not have the funds needed to afford the classes to prep for the exam. Building an empire is no easy feat, but for Angelica Nwandu, there was no other option.Īfter hitting a bit of a storm in her early adult years, Nwandu found herself flunking both the LSAT and GMAT exams while some of her peers went on to the next step of graduate school. ![]()
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