How an 18-hour road trip led to a groundbreaking app for queer-owned businesses

Portlander Charlie Sprinkman has extensive road trip experience — he spent most of 2019 on the road for a job delivering organic beverages, driving more than 80,000 miles and traveling to over 40 states.

The now 28-year-old said the first thing he’d do when he arrived in a new city is look for other members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community to connect with.

“When I would search through queer spaces, it was always the gay bar,” Sprinkman recalls. “There wasn’t much more than that — and I was eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I wanted to just be around queer people.”

All that travel and the desire for connection to the queer community laid the groundwork for Sprinkman’s pivotal road trip in 2021. That’s when an ambitious idea took root in his mind: a digital map that helps travelers all over the world find businesses owned by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer folks.

Less than four years later, Sprinkman is an award-winning entrepreneur and the Everywhere is Queer map has evolved into an app listing more than 15,000 LGBTQ-owned businesses around the globe. The platform also offers virtual networking opportunities for queer company owners.

The concept came together in summer 2021 while Sprinkman was on a solo 18-hour drive from the Los Angeles area to Boulder, Colorado. He had just spent nearly two weeks as a counselor at Brave Trails, a leadership camp for queer teenagers near LA.

“I thought, ‘how can I build that euphoric feeling that I had at Brave Trails at a global scale for our community?’” Sprinkman remembers asking himself. “Which, to me, was allowing the queer, trans and ally community to be seen as our most authentic selves every day of our lives. How can we put people in those scenarios?”

For Sprinkman, who studied entrepreneurship and sustainability at Colorado State University, the answer was to help connect the LGBTQ community with queer-owned companies and services.

“I thought of the name ‘Everywhere is Queer’ and a worldwide map of queer-owned businesses,” Sprinkman said. “I ended up pulling over my car, Googling on my phone to see if it existed, didn’t find anything on the first three pages. And I was like, ‘alright, I got this long drive — let’s think about how we could maybe approach this, what would need to be done.’”

Sprinkman set out to create the app he would have appreciated during his time as a delivery driver. Originally from Pewaukee, Wisconsin, Sprinkman moved to Fort Collins, Colorado for college. After graduating and spending 2019 driving a delivery van, Sprinkman took what he calls a “corporate job” and was able to work from home. He moved around a little, and after the critical road trip from LA to Boulder, Sprinkman found himself living in Bend, Oregon.

In late 2021, a friend connected Sprinkman with a queer graphic designer who made the Everywhere is Queer logo. Around that time he also applied for limited liability company status. On Jan. 2, 2022 Sprinkman made the Everywhere is Queer map available on Instagram.

Businesses are able to get on the map by filling out an application. Sprinkman reviews and approves every application himself — and emphasizes that, for safety reasons, the map only lists businesses that apply.

That’s also how listings on the map grew. Once a business was approved, Sprinkman would personally send them a message saying they were added to the map and encouraging the business to share it on social media. That created a cycle where more LGBTQ-owned companies saw the map, applied to be on it, then shared on social media, and then the cycle started again.

Eventually, an app designer reached out to Sprinkman and offered to help move the map onto its own platform. Up until then, Everywhere is Queer had been Sprinkman’s side hustle. Morphing the map into its own app has allowed Sprinkman to quit his corporate job and focus solely on growing Everywhere is Queer. He is the app’s only employee, but he has three contractors who work a few hours a week.

Before the map was upgraded to its own app, Sprinkman would strike short-term deals with other companies, which inconsistently generated income. Through the process, Sprinkman said he’s learning how to make money in a way that matches his values.

Now Everywhere is Queer is able to offer featured listings in the app for an added fee. Plus, when companies upgrade to the featured listing, it gives them access to a private social network with other queer owners and business founders.

“They’re able to connect within the same industry of other founders,” Sprinkman explained, or they can find other queer business owners in their region.

As the app has grown, Sprinkman has picked up a few accolades along the way. In June 2022 NBC News named him an LGBTQ trailblazer. He was among 30 people chosen for the list, which includes pop musician Lil Nas X and WNBA star Britney Griner, who spent nearly a year wrongfully detained in Russia. More recently, the national nonprofit Human Rights Campaign awarded the app funding through its LGBTQ business preservation initiative.

Sitting in a queer-owned coffee shop in Portland, where he moved three years ago, Sprinkman explains his hopes for the app in the coming years. Businesses are facing all sorts of challenges: rising costs, changing consumer behavior and supply chain snags. Queer-owned companies have the added concern of potentially being targeted for their identity.

For this reason, Sprinkman acknowledges that there are some companies that just don’t feel comfortable being listed — and might never feel safe doing so.

“We understand that there is a lot of privilege to live in places where you can be out loud and proud,” Sprinkman said.

But he hopes to soon have the capacity to add a feature of the app that shows businesses owned by allies of the LGBTQ community.

“I’m from rural Wisconsin — I fully understand folks not feeling safe to be out and loud and proud,” Sprinkman said. “That’s a huge reason why we want to add our ally-owned section to the platform. Maybe you don’t want to be out loud, proud as queer-owned, but you want to be a safe space on our platform. We absolutely want to welcome that.”