We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Troy Snead. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Troy below.

Troy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you come up with the idea for your business?

As a young black boy growing up in Baltimore, I was always fascinated by math and numbers. I had a high iq, and an exponentially growing imagination but was rarely challenged. My family referred to me as the quiet one. Little could they know that my young mind was racing a mile a minute. With Besosian ideas I’m sure. Wisdom and hindsight has shown me how spiritual and technical I had been at an early age.

Unfortunately, in the early eighties, spiritual, mathy kids, whether they were fulfilling their potential or not, were what we called nerds. There was nowhere to fit in.

After subsequently moving to Bethlehem, PA (culture shock), I learned I had a new commodity. Just by virtue of being black, I was cool now. I know, right? So this new found propulsion into cool, buried the true nerd. The true future entrepreneur.

This was all unbeknownst to me at the time…

How powerful would it be to see the future? What if you always had the benefit of hindsight? You do. It’s called vision.

At Black Nerd we believe that no vision is too distant. We believe that only by true self expression can one obtain one’s dreams. We believe that education and entertainment go hand and hand. It’s all fueled by helping others, spirituality, family, and the life long obtainment of wealth.

These are values we want to instill in our youth.

Troy, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

At Black Nerd we understand how important education is to advancement in any undertaking. Life, is the biggest undertaking of all. We feel that by informing young Black entrepreneurs that their dreams are possible, that they will overcome the fear obstacle that holds so many of us back. We support our community by putting real life examples of successful Black business owners in the forefront and spotlight their accomplishments as well as provide their experiences and words of advice. We do this with our Black Entrepreneurial Spotlight on our website. We also plan to visit HBCU’s and engage with students and talk to them about their options. We will teach them that a career is not the only path, and teach the importance and necessity of owning an asset in todays economy. We also raise awareness with our Quotable Tee offering. We attempt to motivate and educate others with our wearable quotes. These full cotton breathable t-shirts are comfortable and display a motivating and memorable quote from a familiar Black Nerd! Our vision is to turn this motivation into future business ownership where we become minority stake holders.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I am a veteran of the United States Marine Corp. Marine Corp Boot Camp was my crossing of the Middle Passage into adulthood. i learned a lot of valuable lessons there. However, one lesson, while important in the area of battlefield warfare, required a huge paradigm shift out in the real world, and on the battlefield of life. In warfare, failure is not an option! You fail, your brothers die. Plain and simple. So thats what drill instructors convey to new recruits. Many of us take these lessons with us as we reenter civilian life. But as any successful entrepreneur knows, failure is on the path to success. Its not the end. We must learn from our failures; and go after the goal without making the same mistakes. This is the lesson that i had to unlearn.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Persistence and consistency are the keys to building a social media audience. I may have boosted a couple of popular posts, but i never paid for followers. Whether you decide to post once a day or week or even month, make sure you do it. Stay on brand and stay on topic. Use a lot of relevant hash tags and filter out spam and bots, and be sure to reply to real people quickly. Its simple if you are committed.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.blacknerdinc.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blacknerdinc/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064278484436

Image Credits
Troy Snead