Denzell Turner Built a Pathway to Black Entrepreneurship From a Detroit Living Room

“In summer 2020, Denzell Turner launched a weekly Instagram Live to spotlight Black entrepreneurs. Four years later, Black Fridays has 209 episodes and 400K views.”

It is a Friday in Detroit, and somewhere in the metro area, a Black entrepreneur with an idea they haven't told anyone yet is pressing play on a podcast. The podcast is called Black Fridays. The man who built it is Denzell Turner.

Denzell Turner describes himself as a media and community architect — the founder and host of the Black Fridays Podcast, a Detroit-based media platform now four years into what began as a single decision made during one of the most disorienting summers in recent American memory.

In Detroit — where 75.3 percent of residents are Black — the metro area has fewer than 2,800 Black-owned employer businesses (self-reported). Reaching ownership parity with the city's population would require more than 23,000 and could generate up to 460,000 additional jobs (self-reported). Federal Reserve research has documented that Black entrepreneurs face denial rates on small business loans nearly twice those of their white counterparts.

When Turner launched Black Fridays, he did not have a media network, institutional backing, or a blueprint. What he had was a laptop, a guest list he was building cold-call by cold-call, and a problem he could not stop thinking about.

The hinge came in the summer of 2020: he reached out to Black entrepreneurs in Detroit and invited them to weekly conversations on Instagram Live. No studio. No sponsor. No guarantee anyone would show up.

The production stack: Calendly and Google Calendar for guest coordination, Adobe Premiere Pro for editing, RedCircle and YouTube for distribution, Mailchimp for audience connection. Bamboo Detroit and Black Tech Saturdays became nodes in the network.

Black Fridays launched as a weekly Instagram Live series in summer 2020, became a formal podcast in November 2021, and has since published 209 episodes, interviewed more than 200 guests, and surpassed an estimated 400,000 combined views and downloads across platforms (self-reported). Partners have included Bamboo Detroit, Black Tech Saturdays, Creator Con Detroit, Hot Sam's Detroit, and The Lip Bar.

Find Black Fridays at blackfridayspod.com and wherever you stream podcasts.