Why I Built StageBlind

I have people in my life who act. People I care about. And I kept hearing the same stories over and over.

A friend gets a casting call that looks legit. She can't find anything about the production company online. She asks around in a Facebook group, but the director is in that group, so she can't really ask what she wants to ask. She texts another actor friend. Nobody knows anything. She takes the gig anyway because she needs the work.

Sixteen-hour day. No meal breaks. Paid three weeks late, less than what was promised. When she brings it up, the producer says “that's just how indie works.”

I heard versions of this story so many times. Different people, different cities, different productions — same pattern. No information before the gig. No recourse after.

The thing that bothered me

It wasn't that bad gigs exist. Every industry has bad employers. What bothered me was that actors had nowhere to talk about it honestly.

In tech, people use Blind to share salary data and vent about their companies anonymously. In corporate jobs, there's Glassdoor. Even restaurant workers can look up pay data online.

Actors have Facebook groups where the people who hire them are reading every post. You can't be honest in a room where your next paycheck is watching.

The information exists. Actors talk about pay, conditions, and red flags all the time — in private texts, in whispered conversations at wrap parties. But that knowledge never makes it to the next actor who needs it before saying yes.

So I built it

StageBlind answers one question: “Should I take this gig?”

You can paste a casting call and get the red flags in seconds. You can look up what actors actually get paid on different platforms. You can check if a production company has a history of underpaying or overworking people. You can track your own gigs privately — payments, hours, expenses — and export it all for taxes.

And if you want, you can share your experience with other actors under a pseudonym. No real names. No directors or producers allowed. Just actors helping actors figure out which gigs are worth taking.

Why it starts with a tracker, not a forum

I thought about this a lot. Most community platforms start with the community and hope people show up. But that never felt right for this.

When I talked to actors, what they wanted first was something personal — a way to keep track of their own career. Who owes them money. What their real hourly rate is after expenses. Whether they're actually making progress or just staying busy.

So the gig tracker is the heart of StageBlind. It's private by default. Your data, your dashboard. The community is an optional layer — when you have something worth sharing, you can publish it. Your anonymized data joins the bigger picture and helps everyone else make better decisions.