How To Tell Your Story While Making a Living with Erin Bagwell

<p><i>Trigger Warning: this episode discusses postpartum depression and briefly mentions suicidal thoughts. </i></p><p>When <a href="https://www.erin-bagwell.com/" target="_blank">Erin Bagwell</a> decided to turn to Kickstarter to get her movie off the ground, she didn’t expect to raise over $100K in 30 days, but that’s exactly what happened. Erin’s movie, <i>Dream, Girl,</i> is about the real-life experiences of ten New York City-based female entrepreneurs, and it turns out audiences were hungry for this type of story. Erin watched as women who were longtime experts in their field would have to prove themselves to boardrooms full of men in order to secure funding. “Wanting to be seen as an expert, wanting to be taken seriously, that’s still a big one,” she says. She needed to tell their stories.</p><p>So she pitched it on Kickstarter, and supporters were here for it. Erin credits her “really fabulous video” as the prompt that got people on board. “I spent a lot of money and I had a gorgeous video because I wanted people to look at it as a trailer. A glimpse of what the film would look like.” Erin invested in audio mixing, color correcting, and all the standard-issue Hollywood things to ensure that it looked amazing. “If you’re investing in a documentary, you want it to look, you know, like a film.” </p><p><i>Dream, Girl</i> went on to premiere at the Obama White House in 2016. Erin was able to design a successful afterlife for her film. In her first full year of filmmaking, she made over $100K in sales and employed a team of two. She worked directly with her Kickstarter backers to bring the film in front of audiences and supplemented the screening income with a robust speaker’s schedule on top of that. </p><p>Erin’s twin inspirations for her first documentary had been her own experience being sexually harassed at work, and the collection of anonymous stories she collected into a storytelling blog called Feminist Wednesday. She was seen as a member of the entrepreneurial community, “because I had started this lit