"We've always had to fight for our worth. We know the value is there."
How The Shade Room Founder Angelica Nwandu Went From the Brink of Eviction to Collaborating With Issa Rae
Angelica Nwandu didn’t always have a way with words.
Nwandu, who grew up in Los Angeles’ foster care system, performed at poetry slams with the nonprofit Peace4Kids and recalls that her first piece “was pretty much a poem that said, ‘Fuck social workers.’”
But the founder of The Shade Room—which now has over 22 million devoted followers on Instagram—has since found her voice. After nearly seven years at the helm of one of Instagram’s most trafficked pages, which runs the gamut from covering celeb gossip to tracking Capitol Hill chatter, Nwandu now has a feature film writing credit under her belt and a screenplay in the early stages of production.
Despite her growing empire, Nwandu has held on to her down-to-earth charm. She’s upbeat, funny, and gives off girlfriend vibes from the moment we begin chatting. Her publicist and assistant are on the line, but it feels like it’s just her and me—two Black women in media, talking about the nuances of our chosen profession and the lessons we’ve learned along the way. It’s encouraging to hear how the entrepreneur, who’s been featured in publications from Essence to Forbes, found success on her own terms.
She spoke about realizing your value, keeping a dream alive in the face of rejection, and what it’s been like working with Issa Rae and LaLa Anthony on her horror-comedy film, Juju.
Lean in to what you do well.
I was always interested in stories, whether it was people’s love life or what was happening in the media. So when I was unemployed after I had lost my job, I just started telling stories and then relaying those stories to my friends who were too busy to engage in that type of stuff. It was after college. Everybody had graduated, and all my friends were in grad school. At that time I just remember one of my friends saying, “You tell stories so well, why don't you just set up your own site?” And that was what led to the start of The Shade Room. What I was doing for my friends wasn’t in a proper format, with all the journalistic standards for grammar, but they were entertained. So I just said, “Okay, I’m going to tell these stories exactly the way that I would tell it if I were talking to my friends.” My friends want their news short, sweet, and to the point. I see Roommates as my friends, and I relay stories to them like I would in a text message. It works.
If there is a will, there is a way—the payoff only comes once you’ve put in the work.
I didn't know what The Shade Room would be, but I just knew it would be something—that it was worth putting all the time in. And so it took eight months of not making any money, because I didn’t know how to monetize it yet. For eight months I was just working while my money was running out—working, and working, and working, and working, and believing in something. But I did it because I had so many people who were talking me up every day. When I wanted to quit, they were there to say, “No, this is going to be big.”
Sometimes a crisis will be your best motivator.
I knew there was a way to monetize The Shade Room because I had an audience. So as long as you have an audience, you have the ability to monetize. But I just didn’t know how to make it happen. It wasn’t until I was about to be evicted that I figured it out. I had to pay rent and I knew when I wrote the check to the apartment manager, I didn’t have the money. I wrote it to her on Friday—this was on the first—and I told her, “Cash it on the last day of the grace period.” So I had less than three days to figure out how to make money.
AdvertisementI did what I had to do at that point, which was I put up a post that said “I’m doing $75 ads.” I got that idea from following Instagram models who were selling products that way. So I thought, I’ll try doing that too, since I was already like an influencer on the platform. It worked. That day I made my rent money and a little bit over. After that time, I never had to say, “Hey, we’re doing ads.” It created its own system. I ended up hiring someone to manage that system, and we were able to, then, grow and hire, and actually be a real company from that point.
Don’t be afraid to walk away from opportunities that devalue your worth.
I run a Black-owned media company. And it’s not just Black-owned, but I'm also a Black female, and we do Black media. That’s constantly being discounted in our space. Now we have a website. We’re on multiple platforms. We’re the publishers on Snapchat, and we’re everywhere. But oftentimes social media influence is discounting in itself. So it can feel like a double whammy. We’re discounted because of Black media. We’re discounted because of social media. So I think that we’ve always had to fight for our worth. Even when they don’t see the value outright, we know the value is there.
It is very hard to establish that. But we’ve had to stand our ground and really say, “Listen. This is what we know we’re worth. This is what we know we can do for brands. And this is the influence that we know we have. We’re only going to work with those people who respect that.”
It’s been hard. It’s meant losing potential clients. It’s meant having to pass up on certain things. It’s been having to stand up and have faith that something better will come. And so it’s been a battle. That’s actually one of our toughest battles—being able to be respected for what we bring to the table. I think it’s an ongoing process.
Continue to build on your success.
When the opportunity to work with Issa Rae and LaLa Anthony on Juju came about, I already had The Shade Room, so I wasn’t hungry for money. What I was hungry for was an opportunity to write again. Because the last time that I wrote a screenplay was before The Shade Room, and that led to me even being able to do The Shade Room, because I had a grant. [Nwandu received a $5,000 grant from Sundance for her project Night Comes On.] I had written that script. That was my ultimate dream. The Shade Room was something that came out of someone saying, “This is what you’re good at. Why don’t you try this,” and it ended up being really good for me. Writing has always been my ultimate passion. And writing movies has always been what I thought I would be doing with my life.
My life detoured and changed in such a beautiful way. I’m happy about that. But I wanted to return to that because that’s my passion.
Bury your insecurities and lead with confidence.
I was going to do the Juju script for little to nothing. I didn’t care. Just so I could get that opportunity to write again. And I remember my agent, who was also a Black woman, said, “No. No. This is what you’re worth.” She was asking for all this stuff, and I was so scared that her asking for that was going to ruin my deal. But that’s the thing, though. That’s what a lot of Black women go through. We always discount ourselves just to get in the door. Because we’re like, “Oh, I don’t know if I can ask for this. I don’t know if I’m worthy enough to ask for that.” Yes, you are. Because you know what I did? I said, “Okay, girl, just be quiet because this is your insecurity talking. You’re telling her to discount you because you don’t think that they will accept this level from you, because you feel like, Oh, you only wrote one script before.” I had to tell my doubts to be quiet. And my agent got it. It went through.
AdvertisementOnce it happened, I was amazed that I got it. But I was also ashamed that I didn’t think that I could. We have to have that faith that says, “What’s the worse that can happen? They’ll say no, and we’ll negotiate from no.” We can’t let irrational fears keep us down. It’s very necessary to stand on our value and really just say, “No, this is what my project’s worth. This is what I know I bring to the table, and I’m not accepting anything less.” Life changes after that.
Trust the timing of your life.
For five years I had ideas for scripts and had been writing little scripts while working on Juju. But when I was trying to pitch it, nothing would happen. So one night I’m having dinner with LaLa [Anthony] and I tell her about my idea for this horror-comedy. She thought it was a dope idea, so she called up Issa, and Issa was like, “Bitch, let’s do it.” Boom. It was just like that. But we had to work on the idea and put it on paper. That took about two years. That was two years of us going back and forth on this script. I remember complaining at a point about the number of outline versions I had to write.
But this is why timing is so important. Because when we finally were finished with it and ready to go pitch, the Black Lives Matter movement was happening again following George Floyd’s death. The story fit the time we were living in, and here we are.
Sometimes we think we’re not prepared, or we’re not doing well enough, that we put all of the blame on ourselves. But we don’t realize that sometimes you’re waiting because the timing needs to be aligned. When is the perfect time for this project to come to fruition? I think that’s so important for people wanting to be a writer, wanting to be anything, to know—never underestimate how important patience and timing are in our careers and in our endeavors.
Tanya Christian is a writer and editor based in New York City. Follow her on Twitter @tanyaachristian.
This story originally appeared on: Glamour - Author:Tanya Christian
