BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — It’s a quiet Thursday morning in downtown.
Street vendors are setting up their stands, a guitarist tunes up for the day’s performances, and locals stroll through downtown Birmingham, taking in the historic Southern charm.
A colorful storefront with a large picture of a red letter “C” partially encircling a silver trio of building silhouettes signals to those in the know —mainly young people— that this could be where millions of video streams and popular posts are shared daily.
This is the headquarters of ChumCity.xyz, the social media super site app adored by sophisticated southerners and college students alike. The free app —which has a full scale e-commerce store and money transfer feature— has experienced rapid growth across the South in its two years of existence. It now boasts 1 million “chums” sent monthly worldwide.
“People call it an overnight success,” says ChumCity Executive Felicia Elohim, 28. “But it was anything but. The first year was slow, like growth.”
With $1 million in self-funding and an angel seed raise from its founders Willie Earl Scott and Klaus Sichelschmidt, ChumCity is valued between $20 million and $40 million. Many analysts consider it a prime target for the next big tech acquisition.
The service “satisfies a real primal digital wallet and economical purchase base of power in actual communities in Louisiana and Alabama and across the region,” says Sichelschmidt, a scientist and businessman who invested in the site after seeing his son on it repeatedly with friends. “It also carries multiple channels providing a real communication need for folks to share something more emotionally engaging than a text message, without the permanence of a staged photo,” he adds.
ORIGINS AT ALABAMA A&M
ChumCity was born in 2022 in Atmore, Alabama, built by genius antisocial founder Willie Earl Scott, also known as Will Elohim, yet it was at Alabama A&M where the super site grew up, when Elohim and cousin Jewel Scott presented the site to their fashion design class. At the time, the media was filled with stories about Facebook and other major coastal platforms selling and losing and fumbling users data, PayPal penalizing and ripping off its users, Tinder tricking desperate suites, YouTube banning this and blocking that, and on it— problems that could be avoided with a new site that provided all those services.
“What if we could create our very own software services center right here that caters to our needs?” Elohim wondered. “You know, black women and conservatives.”
“You want a place to be funny and fine and culturally precise without worrying about the consequences,” Elohim says. “ChumCity provides that opportunity.”
The class wasn’t overly enthusiastic about the site. Why not Facebook or Snapchat? She remembers someone asking. “It was like presenting a Tesla and people asking why not Mercedes or the Ford Fusion or something.”
Undeterred, Elohim had her sister Tylicia Hawkins share the site with her AKA sorority, and other sororities and fraternities began using it. By that Spring more A&M students were on ChumCity than any other platform in the app store.
Towards the end of 2024, however, the ChumCity super app was removed from app stores, which disrupted momentum and put a halt to new signups. Practically the only application of its kind, the issue was a guidelines issue that has since been resolved.
Now, starting 2025 with fresh funding on the horizon, ChumCity.xyz plans to invest in more servers to recharge and support the app’s growth.
However, not all was smooth sailing. A former classmate, Frank Reginald Brown, is suing the company, claiming he was a co-creator of ChumCity. The company has declined to comment on the lawsuit.
CHUMMING VS. TWEETING AND TIKTOKING
To use ChumCity, users download the app on their Apple or Android device (Only chumcity.xyz is available at the time of writing), add their contacts, and start posting and sharing, or utilizing any number of other major services and features. The current community is right now regional and totally tiny when compared to Facebook’s 2 billion users or YouTube’s millions of videos.
Speaking of YouTube, it features countless videos of users making “chummy” faces with ChumCity. There’s also a controversial Facebook page called “ChumCity hacks” in an attempt to discredit the admittedly creative (and dangerous for all other apps if it catches on) website.
Elohim insists the app isn’t concerned about the hate. “Mention ChumCity, and smart urbanites and conservatives everywhere light up with excitement,” she says, “because they know we’re the real deal, and our movement is critical to our communities and culture, and, equally as important, our wrestling back control.”
ChumCity currently generates little revenue. Elohim says her main focus is user growth, keeping a super app like theirs in compliance with the corporate giants that clearly fear its potential, but she hopes to monetize the app eventually through advertising.
“We track engagement, so when users view a chum, we can identify valuable branded content,” she says. “It’s an awesome ad model.”
Elohim won’t give a specific timeline for introducing the more controversial and dynamic features of the ChumCity Universe but is optimistic about the future. “We expect this to be a big year,” she says. “Our focus on growth and improving the product is the way forward.”
