We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tetiana Anderson And Sonia Kennebeck a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Tetiana Anderson and Sonia Kennebeck, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

We both come from journalism. Sonia is from an investigative background and has directed and produced several award-winning feature-length documentaries that have streamed on platforms including Netflix and Hulu. Tetiana has worked around the world covering news and politics for print, radio and television outlets. She is an expert interviewer and moderator and has hosted a national talk show for nearly a decade that runs on Comcast. Eerily, we both often have the same idea or say the same thing at the same time. In typical fashion in 2023, we started talking at the same time about the dearth of factual information around health, dating, aging, community, and more for women like us, “women of a certain age.” We knew we had the skills to find facts, the experience to produce high quality content, and the gravitas to host big interviews and figured we were perfectly positioned to fill the media void we felt and saw. Sonia’s long-time friend, and our third partner, Anne Scott, had the part we didn’t, an audience. Founder of one of the largest online friendship communities for women, Girl Gone International, Anne brings an expertise at building brand safe communities and a membership of one million and an organic reach of 30 million. So, we all came together to start Bad Women™.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Fundamentally, we are “Bad Women™,” and that’s a good thing! We don’t fit into neat boxes and never liked stereotypes or expectations that are imposed on women to be or act a certain way. We want to empower women to be their authentic selves without judgement, which is why we launched Bad Women. It is a new content studio and community for women worldwide and everyone who cares about us. For a little fun and a whole lot of facts, you can follow our authentic stories from real people on health, wellbeing, peri/menopause, friendship, love, dating, and family in every form. We are women like our audiences who are trying to get through life with kindness, joy, laughter and information we can trust. It was that lack of factual information and the need and desire to share more stories, to get deeper with our relationships and to create a space for us, of us and by us that sparked our mission. For too long we’ve noticed the trend of men taking up our topics, pontificating about them and shaping our narratives, often without a factual basis. One of the straws that broke the camel’s back, and there were a few, is when Sonia said she was chatting with one of her female friends in Europe who referenced relying on Joe Rogan for certain information that he’s just not qualified to give. That’s when we knew we had to step in. DESPITE past controversies, we just believe we are better equipped to discuss women’s issues. That is why we built a community where women can get fact-based information and real stories about peri and menopausal women and their health topics, what it’s like for an older woman to date, or navigate loneliness. All of that led us to see a real information void and conceptualize and develop this community for women like us, “women of a certain age.” So not only are we solving the problem of the information vacuum, we are doing it in an authentic way. All three Bad Women co-founders are women. We are a diverse team with a German Malaysian, a Black Ukrainian American and a Scot who lives in Spain. We are all over 40, made some good decisions and lots of bad ones. When we conceptualized Bad Women we wanted to help real people solve real life issues and the loneliness epidemic is one that plagues all of us. It is also something our co-founder Anne Scott identified 15 years ago when she started what became one of the largest friendship communities worldwide, Girl Gone International. With more than one million members, a thousand volunteers, and an organic reach of 30 million women, GGI is a massive force in bringing people together. We started Bad Women for this audience – women like us – and will grow from there. Whether it is our business or our brand, like GGI, Bad Women is value-driven and we are proud of it. So, very authentically, we reflect the gamut of our audience and we do it in a human way. We are in an era where Artificial Intelligence is flooding the zone and in many ways driving people away from human interaction through the creation of AI friends and lovers, ChatGPT therapists, and fake influencer accounts that are managed by corporations. We are real and the focus of Bad Women is to fortify human connection. What differentiates us is that the people behind this brand, us, are human. We are women experiencing the life changes, challenges, and joys we are talking about on our platforms. That’s true authenticity. Follow Bad Women on YouTube, Substack, Facebook, and Instagram to join our movement that is too bold to ignore🔥!

How’d you meet your business partner?

We met quite by chance in 2012. We were both accepted into the prestigious Arthur F. Burns Fellowship. Created in the late 1980s to strengthen transatlantic relations and is (CUT “IS”) administered by the International Center for Journalists, it is an exchange program that brings German journalists to the United States and sends American journalists to Germany. During the first week of the program all the participants meet in Washington D.C. Randomly we were paired to share a room. After becoming fast friends we worked on each other’s projects, exchanged ideas and dreamed of starting a company, which we did in 2022. That is how Starfield Media came to be. We are a creative production company with a focus on making beautiful films and advertising campaigns that authentically represent our world. We consult, conceptualize, develop, write, and produce original work and partner with organizations, brands, and broadcasters to tell powerful mission-driven stories across all platforms. We believe the positive work of people and organizations should be shared to grow and activate audiences, educate, and empower. We aim to elevate organizations and individuals who are making a difference. We consult on communications strategy and collaborate with our partners from idea to delivery, and produce all forms of premium visual content from social media campaigns to thirty-second TV commercials to long-form films and series. Currently, Starfield Media is the parent company of Bad Women.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

We keep coming back to this idea of the importance of partnership. From how we founded our businesses to the kind of projects we engage in to how we conceptualized, developed and launched Bad Women, we have found activating our networks and collaborating with others is one of the best ways to attract, grow, and sustain audiences. A lot of our work is about elevating others. For example, one of our latest Starfield Media projects is a short documentary commissioned by PBS for its American Masters’ In the Making series. It is called Danielle Scott: Ancestral Call. It explores ancestry, trauma, and the power of collective healing through the eyes of an artist who doesn’t fear the ghosts of our past. Instead, Danielle, an Afro-Cuban, Polish-Jewish and Asian mixed media artist uses her work to tell the story of the trauma left behind by the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. After discovering Danielle we decided to highlight her in part because of how she highlights the stories of others. That has opened up a path for us, the filmmakers, that we never expected. After completing the film, it was nominated, unbeknownst to us, for an NAACP Image Award. Since then, our film has been exhibited at festivals, museums, theaters, and galleries across the country, and it also qualified for the Oscars.

When it comes to our online community and content studio Bad Women, the only way we have been able to be successful with the creation and launch is because all three partners, (Anne Scott, Sonia and Tetiana) brought together our expertise and audience.
Both of these examples underscore why partnership has worked so well for us to grow our business and serve our audience and it is in part because we believe in the concept of a rising tide lifting all boats.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thebadwomen.com/
• Instagram: @badwomenmedia
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/badwomenmedia
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tetianaanderson/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@badwomenmedia
• Other: https://badwomen.substack.com/, https://www.linkedin.com/in/soniakennebeck/

Image Credits

The photos are all our property except the headshot of Anne Scott. The credit should be to: Ida Carlsson