Photo Courtesy of Diddy/ Instagram
According to Hot New Hip Hop, a Newark, New Jersey teenager is calling out the P. Diddy for allegedly stealing his Circulate App idea, a platform designed to ease the search for Black-owned businesses for its users.
The high schooler Drixxon Kyser, aka Devin, has created a passionate video directed at the Bad Boy Entertainment CEO, asking the rapper to recognize his contribution.
“Have you ever had your heart ripped out of your chest?” asks Devin in the video.
“For the past year, I’ve been building, developing, and promoting a black business discovery app called Circulate. This past Wednesday, P. Diddy announces he’s creating a Black business discovery platform called Shop Circulate.”
“This is what a Black entrepreneur faces all the time. We go under-funded, we can’t get loans, we don’t have a network to get resources from, look man, I’m a kid from Newark, New Jersey. I can’t fight this machine alone. I need help. Follow us on Instagram, donate to our GoFundMe; links are in the bio. And if somehow, this reaches the ear of P. Diddy directly,” pleaded the teenager. “You can email me here.”
Diddy announced on June 1st he planned to release an app dubbed Shop Circulate, a digital marketplace for Black brands; however, Devin’s page had already launched a whole month before Diddy’s announcement.
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Devin later released another video directed at Diddy captioned, “Did you do your homework?”
In his video, Devin gives details on how he started his business and “did his homework” regarding respecting other entrepreneurs that were already working within the same digital space.
He ends the video by emphasizing that the “goal is to circulate the Black dollar and uplift the community.”