#The shade room ig feed code

Five thousand comments is “good,” while 10,000 is “a hit, like, ‘Oh, you did well.’” The focus on comments rather than “likes” is one way the Shade Room has built a dedicated community. “We have this saying where we just say, ‘Numbers!’ This post is going to do numbers,” says managing editor Tanya Payne, 28. As with most Internet companies, it’s immediately apparent how important the numbers are. She starts the editorial meeting by asking everyone to name their favorite Shade Room post of the week, why they liked it, and, most important, why they think it did well.

#The shade room ig feed code

While the office dress code is decidedly low-key, she wears a black strapless jumpsuit under an oversize gray sweater, plus large hoop earrings. Nwandu arrives, not a strand of her sleek honey-blond hair out of place. (As you might expect, staff members are on their cell phones as much as, if not more than, the laptops and desktop computers that sit in front of them.) The middle of the office is covered by green turf-like carpet, and there’s a wall-size painting depicting a host of celebrities-including Kendrick Lamar, Cardi B, Snoop Dogg, Colin Kaepernick, Wendy Williams, and Drake-outfitted as players, cheerleaders, and fans at a football game, all hanging together like some sort of modern-day, all-black version of Grease. Across the room is a large painting of Beyoncé in her iconic wide-brimmed hat and stacked silver jewelry from the “Formation” music video. The vibe at the L.A.-based office is a blend of professionalism and casualness that recalls a Silicon Valley startup. The staff now numbers 10 people and includes writers in New York and Pittsburgh. The Shade Room hired its first employee, a writer, in 2015 and moved into an office in 2017. “We’ve never had a red quarter ever since I started making money,” she says. It’s done big campaigns with companies like Toyota and McDonald’s, but Nwandu says the majority of the company’s ad buys still come from independent businesses. Cash flow is not a problem for the site today, which, like most media companies, earns the majority of its revenue from advertising. Nwandu has taken funding from just one investor-venture capitalist Bryce Roberts, who invested $100,000 after reading about the Shade Room in The New York Times. “At the time, I think I was making only $5,000 a month, but I wasn’t really concerned about the money I was more interested in his expertise,” Nwandu says of Roberts, who has invested in a string of successful startups, including Foursquare, Chartbeat, and Timehop. In 2014, the Shade Room expanded from Instagram to Facebook, where it now has 4.2 million followers, and a traditional blog, which has become one of the most popular black-culture websites. When she realized she wouldn’t be able to traditionally monetize the Shade Room (because you can’t sell banner ads on Instagram the way you would for a website), she put together advertising packages for small businesses, offering promotional posts that she wrote herself. She spent the first nine months blogging by herself and grew the account to half a million followers. (The film premiered January 19, 2018, at the Sundance Film Festival and won the NEXT Innovator Award.) She quit her job on the spot, with nothing more than a $5,000 writing grant that would float her for just a few months. Nwandu’s boss at the motorcycle shop where she worked as an accountant called her during the program, instructing her to return to the shop and miss the second week of the course. They decided to write it together, attending the Sundance Institute Directors and Screenwriters Lab, a two-week intensive program. They bonded over a screenplay Spiro was working on called Night Comes On that mirrored Nwandu’s childhood. Upon her graduation in 2012, she was introduced to actress and writer Jordana Spiro. Nwandu attended Loyola Marymount University, majoring in business administration she helped support herself by doing weaves for classmates for $45. At age 12, Nwandu joined Peace4Kids, a program for foster youth to tap into their creative potential, where she learned she had a knack for poetry and discovered her love of writing. At six, she lost her mother at the hands of her father and entered foster care. Nwandu’s childhood was difficult and checkered with tragedy.