SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Queen of Community Rosie Sherry Reveals Secrets of Engagement, Growth, Monetization
22 Jan 2021
Chapter 1: How did Rosie Sherry bootstrap Ministry of Testing to seven figures?
I made a bit of money along the way. We're talking like maybe $100 here or there for advertising, like testing companies who come to us and want to advertise. But nothing significant, nothing that would really cover the costs.
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My guest today is Rosie Sherry. She previously bootstrapped Ministry of Testing, a community for software testers, to seven figures. Now she leads the community over at IndieHackers and is building up RosieLand, a community for community builders on the side. Rosie, you ready to take us to the top? I'll try. It requires a special amount of patience to build a really great community.
So talk to me. Let's go back to Ministry of Testing. How much of the success of that software was based off the community you built around the product?
I'd say pretty much. Well, it wasn't software-based to begin with. It was all kind of just like patching things together with what I could find. So kind of like hosted solutions. But yeah, the community behind it was the reason it succeeded. And I spent quite literally a few years building that up before I kind of turned it into a business.
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Chapter 2: What strategies did Rosie use to grow her community at Ministry of Testing?
And I was like, oh, I can do that. I did that for Ministry of Testing. I did all the marketing stuff. and growth kind of stuff in the industry of testing. So I just reached out to him and said that I would be up for that. For me, I saw it as a learning opportunity to see how IndieHackers was run and how they manage stuff.
So I thought, if I want to hang out there, then I might as well get paid to hang out there.
What was the first thing you did once you joined IndieHackers to start looking at driving more engagement, more growth?
Um, yeah. So when I joined, I ended up joining as, as like a community manager. Um, even though like Cortland wasn't like hiring for that specific role, that's kind of how I joined. Um, and I think like the most important thing as a community person is, is to kind of what I call study your people and get to know your people.
So rather than like jump in and, you know, try to do exciting things, it's like, you know, hang out with them, um, see what they're talking about, you know, have discussions with them and then try to, I guess, like work with Cortland and make decisions on what are good things to do right now.
Everything I've done has been very kind of like practical and hands-on and very just like, let's see what we can do right now to improve things and you know, help us go in the right direction to where we need to go.
For folks listening to this, wondering that just the blocking and tackling of launching a community, you know, one of the articles you just promoted on IndieHackers was Daniel Vassallo's story. It looks like he launched his profit and loss newsletter using Circle.so.
Do you like Circle.so as just like the software to run a community on, or do you prefer people build it inside of Slack or Facebook groups, et cetera?
I think it depends. I think the problem is, people think about the tools first and then the community second. And I'm trying to encourage people to not think about the tools first because, I mean, we get the questions all the time. Anywhere you go, you say, what tools should I, you know, people are always asking, what tools should I use to build the community?
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