After the sale/success of the jewelry community, my mind was twisting with ideas around what we could do next—could this be a career path? How could I create a community around my passions? Could I monetize that without selling anything? Early YouTubers and Viners were monetizing their content with AdSense and brand partnerships. Could I do that as Shonduras, or was it too late to become a creator? Maybe I just needed to find the next big social media platform and grow my community on that.
10 seconds of fame
Snapchat was just getting started, and Stories weren’t a thing yet. It was very much a one-to-one communication platform which presented a really unique relationship for community building. There was less separation between a creator and a consumer. Everyone was sharing in real time—it felt more like an open conversation.
I began to build my community one creative Snapchat at a time, literally sending each masterpiece directly to each follower. At times, sending my snaps took longer than making them. When Snapchat added Stories, I could finally share them with my entire community. With one click, I knew this was it!
I started practicing my art to visually tell better stories and focused on getting my snaps featured in news articles. I really started to build out my Shonduras brand, and IT WAS AWESOME! All this hustle had eventually gotten me to my first collaboration with Vine, Jerome Jarre, and my first brand partnership with Disney. Right around this time, Snapchat was really becoming mainstream, and I was positioning myself to be the person pushing forward the creator narrative.
During this time, my CTA (call to action) had a 30 percent conversion ratio, meaning my audience was extremely responsive and committed to what I was doing. Feeling this momentum, we put everything we had into growing it. I was traveling more than I was home to do speaking and consulting. I was learning so much, and I was doing everything possible to build my brand across a platform of disappearing content.
It was such a complex situation; here I was at the forefront of influencer marketing, just awarded a Forbes 30 Under 30, and considered the “King of Snapchat,” yet deep down, I knew it was time to re-invest all that hustle, all my connections, and put all our resources into expanding the brand beyond Snapchat.
Scaling the Spacestation
This is where it gets extra exciting—our crew of friends was growing, and the Spacestation seemed to be working. We were streaming daily and building different types of YouTube channels, just constantly creating and learning tons. We started our family vlog channel the day Adley was born, which focused around making each day a BEST DAY EVER. We wanted to share a positive message along with our favorite memories. I think we uploaded a “BEST DAY EVER” almost every single day for 800-plus days.
Storytelling really became a passion, and this channel became the scalable Shonduras brand. During this time, we moved out of the basem*nt and into an office we called “Spacestation 1.5,” where our crew could grow. It was a brave transition to see if we could build a bigger Spacestation than we had ever imagined, but we could feel the creator economy coming to life, and we wanted to be ready for anything.
At this new office, we launched new YouTube channels, “Spacestation Stuff” and “A for Adley.” We even did daily livestreams at 5 pm with our crew! One time, we actually locked ourselves inside The Spacestation for a 48-hour nonstop livestream. We were committed to whatever we did—it was a grind but always felt fun, so we just kept going!
All of this momentum, along with an experienced new crew like my biz partner, Sean Holladay, gave us the confidence needed to finally take some of our ideas to the next level and create our first Spacestation companies. Obviously, we decided to try and create two at the same time, Spacestation Integrations, an influencer marketing agency that really understands creators because it was ideated around one, and Spacestation Gaming (SSG), an eSports organization with a vision to support streamers and our players’ brands. At least that was the vision till I met another biz partner, Shawn Pellerin, who showed us the real community side of eSports was around competitive game titles.
Investing in good people
Those first few years, the crew was so impactful in molding our Spacestation. Nick Russo, who started the “A for Adley” channel, still films each video—he’s like family to us and continues to build the brand by our side. I still have the original Brandon Garlik editing every single “Best Day Ever” video, too.
The same Marcos Chard is still the heartbeat of integrations and my best friend since forever. Parker Winchester is still stirring our SSG sauce with Gil and Ty White. My momma, “Momduras” still takes care of our office and our crew just the way she did back in our early days! Together, with the entire crew, we just keep creating more Spacestation.
We were learning that anything is possible when you surround yourself with the right people, so once again, it felt right to re-invest everything into building more Spacestation and more crew. Sometime later, we moved into a new, much larger building, but it wasn’t finished yet, so that summer we had 15-20 crewmembers all working out of the warehouse on plastic tables.
