We recently connected with Charnelle Asante and have shared our conversation below.

Charnelle , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

There would be times I’d be on Twitter around the time a popular show airs and I’d always run into spoilers, it’s like I had to avoid social media around that time otherwise someone would ruin the show for me. So I thought to myself I wish there was an app where people would go to discuss their shows without having to ruin it for everyone else who hasn’t yet seen it. Along with this, there was also moments I would be watching a show and was dying to have someone to discuss it with. But, whenever I’d go on Twitter I wouldn’t always find someone to talk with, or I’d have to use hashtags of the shows name just to find others are discussing it. The issue with this is that I didn’t always find someone to talk about that specific episode with, so that’s also where the idea came from. I wanted a space specifically for people to go and discuss their shows with others outside of Twitter, FB, IG etc. So that’s how the idea came up.

I knew this was a worthwhile endeavor when I started building and telling people about it and realized how many people faced the same issues and thought the idea was great. Even a year later, it’s still very relevant. I felt it the idea would work because there isn’t any other like it. Along with that, I use social media and see people discussing their shows, movies, books, podcasts on Twitter and FB all the time. They seek others who do the same thing and you can tell it’s a community, but it’s so scattered and unorganized so I knew this app would be the thing to bring it all together. I knew this was a problem no one else was solving. There were apps similar, but not the same surprisingly so I wanted to use that to my advantage.

I was offering a unique approach because this app isn’t based on reviews, it’s based on conversation with a community that shares similar interests to you. It’s specifically for this, not every thing going on in society. You come here to discuss shows, movies, books, and podcasts, thats’s it. The whole idea has me excited because I see the potential. At this phase it’s still very new, and It could look and function a little better, but the premise of it all is very relevant to today’s society and I’m excited for people to start finding out about it.

Charnelle , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a nurse, app founder, and aspiring philanthropist. I am born and raised in NY and currently living in LA. After starting my nursing career as a Med Sure use at the beginning of the COVID 19 pandemic, I accelerated pretty quickly in the field. After a year and a half I transitioned from staff nurse to travel nurse and decided to take my talents to LA and have been doing that since. During nursing school was when I came up with the idea for my app but once I started working is when I started to construct my idea and execute on building it. I didn’t have any previous experience with app building or business, so this was just an idea that came to life after deciding to shoot my shot after some time. Over the time of building the app and working with developers to get everything done, I learned a lot of about what it takes to build an app and run a business.

This app is solving the problem of not having one platform that’s created to provide a space for people to solely discuss their shows, movies, books, and podcasts with others who share the same interest. I wanted to provide a community and bring people together. I think what sets me apart from others is that I am not afraid of “failure”. I am not afraid to take risks and chase after dreams and goals that I have for myself. For this app, I saw something that I thought could change the way we interact on social media with others. I know it can bring people together and possibly build new connections from shared interests. I’m most proud of pushing myself to bring this platform to life and I want my potential clients/followers/fans to know that my ambition is going to allow me to continue further develop this idea and show people that this app is going to provide people with a new way of interacting on social media about their interests.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

While building this app, as more time went on I realized I didn’t know much of anything about all of this at all. I started to learn about the process of developing apps, creating a brand, building a business and how to manage it. Because I didn’t have any initial knowledge on these topics, I was learning along the way. There were times that I realized I could have done something so differently along the journey that would have saved me so much time or money. For example, I spent a lot on my developers, like A LOT. If I had taken some extra time to do more research into other developers or even no code I could have avoided this issue. But even after all the money spent I continued to go because I seen the bigger picture. After finally launching the app, months later I still had under 100 users and I felt like I had failed. I felt like I had let myself down and those who had believed in me because I had expected more of turn out. Even with this I kept on going because I wasn’t going to let that discourage me after building something I had dreamt of. I knew I needed some help so I started to apply for accelerator programs that could help me with the business. I have applied to almost 10 since today and have been denied to each one. I don’t let that discourage me though because the app is still early and small and it has a lot of growth potential. When I think of all of this, instead of me being down that it’s not where I want it to be just yet, I get motivation knowing that hearing “no” just means I need to work harder. All the time and money invested isn’t wasted until I give up. So I will continue to feed into this app and business because I know in the end it’s going to be successful.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

To fund my business I mainly did bootstrapping. I saved most of the money I made from nursing and used that to pay for the app. In total it was a little under $40K. It was very expensive, way more expensive than it needed to be. This is because I lacked the knowledge and also didn’t take enough time to compare with different developers. I found one person and the vibes felt right, the timeline and credentials were legit and they seemed like they could bring my idea to life the way I wanted and I’d still own the app source code. Some would say I got gipped, at this point, it’s already been invested so I try not to think much about it. I earned this money from my nursing income and about $3.5K came from crowd funding through IFundWomen. I got a lot more than I had expected to which was cool, but I still had came out of pocket way more than I had wanted to. I paid the developers by each sprint which was about every month, about $5k almost every month. I chose crowd funding as a way to raise money because I felt a friends and family round would be ideal and a more realistic way for me at the time to raise money. In the end I was able to get everything I needed and it took a total of about 8-10 months to complete the app.

Contact Info:

• Website: thespoilerapp.com
• Instagram: thespoilerapp
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charnelle-asante-3852961aa/