It Be Ya Own People Pt 1: How Three Black Men and One Black Woman Conspired to Steal Our Original App Concept and How We’re Fighting Back

Is it really that hard to cite Black women or come up with an original concept? This is gonna be a long read, so strap in and relax.

Hi. I’m Kiki. I am a designer, a children’s book author and illustrator, a podcaster, among many things. Of the things that I have done in my creative career so far, the thing that I am most proud of is this:

I am one of the Founders of The Cookout, the first-ever invitation-only social media app exclusively for members of the Black community. We are a post based app, not a voice-based platform like Clubhouse. Maybe you’ve heard of us… but not really have heard of us.

We will get back to this.

Typically for these newsletters (we haven’t had one in a while because we are focused on development), we try to stay more professional and focus on growth. This is not one of those emails, this is a more personal narrative that I feel our base deserves to be made aware of in-depth from my first-person point of view. I strongly believe that if you don’t write your own narrative, other people will write it for you. This is gonna be long, so get comfortable.

We (myself and my partners Atiyya Nadirah and Cassandra Osei) started the Cookout in Oct 2019 with just $3,000 and a vision. We have been bootstrapping it, intentionally keeping our community small and intimate and relying on organic word of mouth from real people rather than PR. Building a social media app is a monumental task; one that we do not underestimate at all. As we have been building the app and creating our policies, we’ve not promoted outside of our existing networks because we are aware that we have so much work to do to get our app where we want it to be.

To this end, we’ve invested tens of thousands of dollars on the next iteration of The Cookout App and have been developing it for the past 8 months. Since we know a major migration will be necessary to transition users to the next iteration of the app (which will have additional functionality like events and creating your own communities in addition to courses and a marketplace), we have done very little promotion, with our current community serving as a placeholder safe space for our base while we build.

Building a social media app is NOT an easy thing to do… which is why so few do it and even fewer do so successfully. Despite this, we’ve managed to amass over 7.5k users on our MVP in a year with organic, word of mouth promotion from the small community of loyal followers who enjoy the peace and values of the community we’ve built and this has resulted in hundreds of 5-star reviews on the app stores.

This is where we were prior to the events of this week, exactly where we wanted to be with a small, loyal community while we were building to handle more capacity. This is important to note because I am sure that someone will try to pretend that we are making this statement out of a place of spite or jealousy.

A little over a year ago when we started The Cookout, there was very little interest in a project like ours and many people tried to convince us to abandon our idea- claiming that Black people had no want of space away from everyone else and that invitation-only apps were not successful business models.

Nevertheless, we stayed the course and trusted in our vision, knowing that even if the idea was not ultimately profitable, it was definitely worthwhile and impactful to the people that we were building for.

We trusted in our idea, and we knew that we had to protect it at all costs.

We trademarked the first moment that we were able. We got NDAs from developers and other people attached to the project. We’ve kept as much labor as possible in house. We purchased every domain related to The Cookout App and also claimed the socials. We have a heavy presence of at least 1k followers outside of the app on every major social platform (besides Clubhouse, more on that later) and nearly 10k followers on Facebook. We are not rich. We each make good livings for ourselves, but we are not rich so this took some personal sacrifice and lots of time and strategy.

We have spent a great deal of the last year establishing a brand based on trust and our community values of Afrocentricity, Authenticity, and Accountability.

Our loyal users trust us to put them before profit because we have spent a great deal of time creating building and maintaining that trust based relationship.

As a values-based community, we are very careful about the people that we allow inside of our space. We screen using application questions for misogynoir, anti-blackness, colorism, homo/transphobia, and other adverse opinions that are counter to the values of our core user base.

We are not for everyone… and we are not trying to be.

Given this, imagine my surprise when we were tagged asking if The Breakfast Club had mentioned us on their show. The Breakfast Club, which is consistently a platform for everything that is counter to our values, is not a place that we would ever choose to promote. Their target audience is not our target audience. Many of our users are aware of this and were confused. And many people who were not our users came to our doors hoping for entry.

Turns out they were referencing an app also calling itself The Cookout, this is an app that is “borrowing” concepts from both Clubhouse and ourselves. This app is founded by two black men and one Black woman. We know nothing of two of the three- but TWO of their founders went to the same college as one of ours. We know nothing of the Black woman who is founding this venture with them and sincerly hope that she is unaware of the kind of people that she is doing business with and that she would not also knowingly conspire against other Black women. She has the benefit of our doubt at this time, but intent does not outweigh impact. 

Remember what I said earlier about protecting ourselves?

We became aware of these trademark infringers a few months ago and I signed up for their email and when they responded, I immediately informally informed them that they were indeed infringing on our trademark and that they would need to change their name to avoid legal action. They never responded, so I was hoping that meant that cooler heads had prevailed and they would think about the possible legal ramifications of blatant infringement prior to promoting their app. Clearly, I was wrong in this assumption. When you assume you make an ass-… nevermind.

Apparently, the past few months, our infringers have been promoting themselves on Clubhouse, a platform where we are not active, and pitching themselves to investors (as if they thought of either concept) without so much as a citation.

It’s the plagiarism for me.

I am frustrated. I am frustrated because we do not understand how, even prior to us informing the infringers that they were infringing, they could NOT know about us in this lovely information age that we live in?

When they went to register thecookoutapp.com… did they not see that it was already registered? How about when they tried to make an IG with the name? Do they have access to Google? We’re RIGHT there. TWO of the “founders” (Bobby Gay and Brylan Markel) of the infringing app went to college at the same institution (The University of Kansas) as one of our Founders.. do they expect us to believe that they did not know or hear about us from the jump?

The willfulness to blatantly attempt to step over our intellectual property rights and outright STEAL from us is part of a larger pattern of disrespect for the ideas and hard work that Black women pour into literally every industry, only to have someone (usually a man) pretend that they thought of the concept the entire time. It is maddening, but thankfully- we were prepared well ahead of time for this eventuality. Sometimes, unfortunately… it be your own people.