Full Transcript for Community is the future with Rosie Sherry

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Kate: Welcome to PodRocket. I'm Kate, the producer, and one of the hosts of PodRocket. With me today is Rosie Sherry. Hi, Rosie. How are you doing? Rosie Sherry: Hey, Kate. Thanks. I'm good. Good to be here. Kate: Thanks for coming on. Rosie is currently the community lead at Orbit. So yeah, Rosie, tell us a little about yourself and what you're working on. Rosie Sherry: Yeah. How much do you want to know? How far do I go back? But yeah, I guess to summarize me is, often I say I am community. Everything I do is community. I think about community by day, I think about it by night. I work in community. I work for a startup that builds community products or a product, I guess. I write about community by night at Rosieland. I've been building communities, I guess, about 15 years now. Kate: That's amazing. Rosie Sherry: So yeah, I love community. I think when I first discovered community, I knew that was me. Kate: Yeah. No, that's so awesome. And so it started with Ministry of Testing and that started 2007, I believe. Rosie Sherry: Yeah. Kate: Just thinking about it, I'm on the marketing team at LogRocket, and I think we talk about community a lot. We don't think about it maybe as a lot of other companies think about it, but I'm just curious, what was community building going that far back and now how has it changed. Maybe even with the pandemic going from an online community to then events then to back online. I'm curious about the story of the Ministry of Testing. Rosie Sherry: Yeah. So 2007 feels like yesterday, but it feels like so long ago, as well. So I think time has this capacity to do that. Often I like to visualize, like where was I in 2007 or what existed then. So 2007, it was like the early days of Twitter. It was like that kind of timeframe. And so if you think like what existed then? It was basically like the early days of a lot of the social tools that you see out in the world. It was early days of LinkedIn, early days of Twitter, early days of Facebook, even. I'm not even sure if I was on Facebook then, or if it was available. I was definitely early adopter of all of those things that as soon as they came out, I would sign up to them and try to use them, explore them as much as possible. Rosie Sherry: But yeah. So thinking about it from that perspective is like, there weren't as many tools out there. It wasn't as easy you just flip or put something together. But for that situation, there were thing coming out. And one of the things that did come out was a tool called Ning, which was basically a hosted forum. And that made it easy for me to set up the, I guess, foundations of a community. But even though that was like the homepage of the community, it looked nice for the time in comparison to like what was available. Rosie Sherry: It's like vBulletin was like the most common forum tool out there. And it's those old school forums that's what I was trying to avoid, that was like when people had forums or communities, it was just like thinking of what all these old school forums looked like. It was like, they're not nice. They're not nice. They're not exciting. They're not any of that. And I wanted to avoid that. So as new tools were coming out, I was exploring them and basically looking for excuses to use them. Rosie Sherry: And I was a tester at the time. I was a tester that had discovered community through going to meetups locally, stuff like that. I had discovered Seth Gordon. He was a big influence at the time. And I was looking for an excuse to do community. There weren't jobs out there that were in reach of me. So my solution was to build a community myself. So I did meetups, not for Ministry of Testing, but I did some local Girl Geek Dinner meetup. I ran that for a couple of years and that was great, but basically I was looking for any excuse to experiment and to try stuff out. And that's like how Ministry of Testing started. I knew a few people, a few people knew me. I hung out with testers online. There weren't very many testers, to be honest, there were a few people blogging, not many on Twitter. There was probably, I think there was like Google group, I think at the time, but it was relatively small community. Rosie Sherry: And I used Ning as a hosted platform to experiment with ideas and to connect with people. I didn't think much of it. And it was really just like a side project thing, but the whole reason I wanted to do it was because being a tester at the time, I was like... I was a tester and I was going to local web based community groups or conferences. And I was like, oh man, they're doing all this fun stuff. Why can't testers be doing this stuff as well? So basically inspired by a lot of, I wouldn't call it the early web movement, but the web movement of that time and thinking about how I could apply that to the world of testing. So it was basically like trying to be more creative and forward thinking in everything I was doing, because everything about the testing world was not that. And I was like, this industry needs us. So I feel like this is a way to go. Kate: Totally. No, that's interesting. So you took the framework that was set up in other industries and brought it into testing. Do you think it would've been... Or maybe have you seen it be different with other companies, industries? The initial setup is different or I guess, how is it different across the different positions you've had? Rosie Sherry: How is the community different? Kate: How is the setup of the- Rosie Sherry: You know to be honest, it's like the... I think communities is that they're all individual. I think this is what I've come to realize only over time and only as my career has changed and as my career is now a lot to do with thinking about community. And to be honest, I think everyone just makes it up as they go along. Every community is different, but I think at the heart of good communities are people trying to do the right thing and trying to create change and

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having the right motivations to do that. And I guess also perhaps having, I guess, the successful communities are the ones that have a goal or a vision to strive for, for the long term. So they always have something to encourage and to keep moving forward. Rosie Sherry: And I think that probably applies to much of the... Especially Ministry of Testing, but generally speaking is just like in community, you just need to keep going. You need to keep going and you need to keep creative. You need to keep thinking of new ideas. You need to keep thinking of ways to connect with people. You need to keep thinking, especially as you turn it into business, you need to find ways to make it sustainable. And I think that's probably been the hardest part for communities in general, is that everyone wants to make them sustainable, but very few people actually have done that. And it's sad, but it's also understandable because I think to make a community successful, you have to do the things that don't make sense and trust that it will work out. And a lot of businesses don't get that or are not willing to invest into that with that kind of mindset, I think. Kate: Yeah. And that's another question I had. I guess, building out a strategy around a community, I think that's a really big hold up for companies is just building. How do you build out something when it's a lot of different people and your community has stake in how you move forward. And so you have to be very flexible. I think that can be a big barrier. So how do you handle that maybe as a brand, how do you go from there? Rosie Sherry: Yeah. I think one of the challenges is being scared to do things. I've often felt scared making decisions to say, "oh, what if the decision I make impacts certain people in certain ways? What if they are unhappy? Or what if they kick up a fuss and march out?" And it's all those kind of things, way on the back of your mind is like, how can you keep everyone happy? And I think also, again, there's a lot of hindsight from this, but I think often we think about, well, what does a community think? But I think also at the heart of communities are the people that are leading the communities, whether it's an individual, whether it's a company, whether it's a group of people. Rosie Sherry: And communities have to serve them, they have to protect them as much as the rest of the communities as well. So if it doesn't work for the founders, that's going to be a huge problem going forward for the community as a whole and it's tough to balance it. I think it's tough and I've certainly had challenges over the years with that. And I think it's tough as well when you're building community and when you start community, you don't necessarily know where it's going to head or where it's going to be in the future. I started Ministry of Testing without any intentions of turning it into a business. It was really just like this fun side project. I was looking for excuses. I was looking for something for my CV. Rosie Sherry: It was like, look, I've built a community, maybe I can get a job doing this one day, or maybe it will lead somewhere else. But for me, it got to a point where after three years, I was like, I'm not sure I want to do this anymore for free. It's a lot of time. It costs me money, some money. I'm not really making any money from it. And if I don't do something about it, this is potentially like the most important time in my career, perhaps that I'm missing out on. Rosie Sherry: So it took me like three years to decide to turn it into a business. And I guess, that's challenging as well because it's like, well, how do you turn it into business after being essentially free for everyone? It's like what are the things that you can do? We ended out going for conferences. We did started doing conferences and that became our main income. And yeah, I guess the thing behind that is conferences... I guess in the startup world or the business world, they'll say, do your research, ask your people what they want, get feedback and all of that kind of stuff. But I think when you build community and if you spent the time in community like I had spent those three years building that community, I didn't ask people. I asked a couple of people or few people, whether they would attend a conference and pay for it. Rosie Sherry: And they all basically said no, but I was like, what? What you on about? I was like, "The industry needs this can't you see that?" And they were like, "No." And I was like, "No, you guys are wrong. You're wrong." So I just went ahead anyways. But I think that's the power of community as well. I don't think it's necessarily people all coming in and voting on an idea. It's people spending time and when you spend time together, you create understanding, you create research, you create... You get to know the industry and the people so much better than anyone else would and that empowers you as a founder potentially, or whoever's running it to make decisions. My decision was like, well, this needs to make money and I think conferences will work, so let's give that a shot. Rosie Sherry: And I had tried other things before. I had tried like a newspaper, an actual physical newspaper and it made some money not really profitable, but covered its costs. But I think we did it for like two years. It was so much fun. The physical aspect of it was like, I've got really fun memories of that, but it's just as a model, it just wasn't sustainable. And I wasn't really willing to keep doing that because it just sucked, sucked the life out me. But led on to the conference. So our first conference, we gave out the newspapers. So it was like this swag item, but it was really meaningful. Rosie Sherry: It was like people at the conference were in the newspapers. And you could take pictures of them reading the newspapers and stuff like that. So I believe everything's essentially interconnected and one thing leads to another. And these

days I would call it experimenting and/or creating like a NBC, minimum viable community just like you do that with a product, as in minimum viable in community, we need to be willing to experiment with ideas and try things out and see what happens, see where they lead and build upon the lessons we learn or the things that we build. Kate: So how did you create buzz for the newspaper or events? I think my personal biggest fear is that I'll create an event and no one shows up or something like that. How do you create buzz and then from there create traction? Rosie Sherry: Yeah. It's funny because it's like... My character is just such... What's the right word with the way of saying it... It just me doing events just seems crazy for who I am because I'm really introverted, I guess. I'm not one that likes to get up on stage. Even online these days, I'm more out there doing stuff, but in real life, it's just not me. But I've ended up doing events. And I guess maybe from the meetup experience that I had before, I guess that gave me some confidence that I could pull some events together. But I think when you're doing paid events, it's almost a different ball game. I really didn't know what I was getting myself into. Rosie Sherry: So yeah. How do you create buzz? I think the great thing for me with Ministry of Testing was that I was creating an event for people that we knew online and that we had conversed or connected online for quite some time. So actually the first event we did, it was like 70 people, so it wasn't huge. And it was actually quite cheap. I think it was like £100. I think it was like £60 to £100 that I charged. And I guess the fact that we all knew each other online and lots of us knew each other for years online. So the idea of people coming together for the first time and actually meeting for the first time really created this special bond and excitement. And then connecting with things like the newspaper thing is that people would come and say all these interconnected things that people would identify with and people would hold the newspaper and have pictures taken with the newspaper and the article that they had written. Rosie Sherry: And it just brought people together and it brought people together in a meaningful way. I guess as a community builder, we tend to do marketing things, but we're not marketers, but we do have to, at least sometimes in the case of a conference, we do have to sell tickets. So say how do you sell tickets without being pushy? And how do you keep the calm when you want more people to be buying tickets and they're not buying or you panic that not enough people are going to show up. So, yeah. And good answers for that I think is just to build traction is to build on the things that generate excitement and to reflect that back to the community and for the community to share that as much as possible. Rosie Sherry: So if they're having a good time, they'll go and tell their friends about it. And if they're having a good time, we can take pictures of them having a good time, or we can record the talks. We recorded all the talks from day one and we shared them with the community. So I always use that as... I spent a bit extra on getting the videos done because I knew that it would be beneficial longer term to actually show what the conferences were like. And I think as a basic foundation, that's worked over time. I've never invested in marketing per se. We've had an email list for years, it was just me doing it, sending out emails. Rosie Sherry: I ran a weekly newsletter from pretty early on. Probably it wasn't when I first started, but probably within the year or so after, I realized actually I need a way to continually tap into the community to make sure that, yes, we exist all year round, but also we do this conference. And that weekly newsletter helped promote the conference as well in a way that wasn't pushy as well. Rosie Sherry: And I guess announcement, emails, for example, they would be few and far between. So we would announce a conference and then we would literally just send out one email and then send out maybe one reminder a month before. But I was really keen not to be pushy. It wasn't my style, but yeah, it could get nerve-wracking at times. I think what I discovered over time is actually the people who pay for the conferences are essentially companies and companies need time to get... Employees need time to get approval, to get the budget to go. And so in time we built up processes that allowed for them to have that time to buy the tickets. And, yeah, it doesn't mean it's easy. Sometimes we would launch with early bird pricing and people would go to their bosses for approval with early bird pricing and it would take like three months to get approval. And by that time the pricing had gone up. So challenges like that is like, I guess it's good problem to have. But those are the things that you learn along the way. Kate: Totally. Yeah, conference tickets. Yeah, it's a whole nother ball game for sure. So I think with... I was listening to some podcasts you were on earlier and was looking at Rosieland and your newsletter, I think you do a really good job of saying, be authentic in your communities and your personal brand is so like, be authentic. I think you share a lot about your experience with Ministry of Testing and the challenges there. I think from what I can see your personal brand, it is then like a pillar of trust for the communities that you build. And I think that's... Did you like plan that? Or is it just like, that was organic? Because I think the people who attend these conferences are now webinars or virtual stuff. It's like, oh, well, we know Rosie and she's has a long pass with this and she always talks about being authentic and so maybe we're a little more keen to go to this one as opposed to maybe some other ones that we've heard of. Rosie Sherry: Yeah. It's a good question. I think for me, it's like, I can only...

I think in time, I've realized that the best way to be is purely authentic and the more authentic you can be, the better. I think earlier on, I probably didn't have as much confidence compared to now. Now I'm just like there's no other way. There's absolutely no other way. I have to be a 100% me or nothing else. I just can't do it. And I think life is too short to be anything else to pretend to be anything else. But it doesn't mean it's easy. So early on in my career, I hid the fact that I had kids because the moment people find out you have kids they don't want to employ you. Rosie Sherry: Or that's what it was like 15, 18 years ago. My eldest is 18. And so it's like those things make you not want to be authentic. It makes you not want to share about who you are. But over time, I've learned to embrace that and actually, I guess, advocate for people like me who have lots of kids and school their kids and create communities and bootstrap communities. I'm just like an advocate for it all this. It's just like, yeah, I'm going to talk about it. It's like, this is possible and I'm not going to hide anything. And it's not necessarily easy, but this is me. And I believe if this is me and I'm happy being me, which I am, I think then there's probably other people who might appreciate seeing that actually you can live life a bit differently. You can just be yourself. You can grow into roles and love what you do. And yeah, it's just like, there's no other way basically. Rosie Sherry: I get annoyed when people aren't authentic and I can see right through it. I don't know if I can see it more than others. I'm still trying to figure that one out. But sometimes I see things that I think other people don't see and I'm like, you don't see how they not being authentic. And it's frustrating because, I guess it's like ethics as well. I'm quite big on my ethics. I believe in doing the right thing. And I think it served me well. If we put it into business terms, it's my marketing strategy. The wrong way to put it, because it's not my marketing strategy, but it's helped me grow business. It's helped me do things. Kate: But it's worked, yeah. Rosie Sherry: It's worked and people love it. For one reason or another, people love it. So obviously, I think I'm doing something right. And I'm quite happy with that. Kate: So I guess, what would be the reason to not start a community, I guess, when should you not start one? Rosie Sherry: I guess you shouldn't start one if it's for your own personal needs, I think. You shouldn't start one if you don't truly want to help people. You shouldn't start one if you're not going to share the rewards and if you're not willing to invest back or give back. You shouldn't start one if you're not willing to do it for a long time, that's not strictly true. But I think if you want to build a long term community, you have to be willing to do it for five to 10 years at least. And stick through the times where you don't see growth. And yeah,

I guess that's always the hardest one I think, is sticking with it. I did ministry of testing for 10 years before I stepped back, for example, it's still going without me. And people would not understand me at the beginning, would be like, "What? A community for testers?" I'm like, "Yeah, can't you see it?" I don't know. I'm like, okay. Kate: That's awesome. Yeah, I'm curious. I know you're not involved in the day to day with Ministry of Testing now, but I am curious how going from... I think, Ministry of Testing did 1.5 million in revenue with a lot of events. I'm curious how COVID has not been kind to meetups nor events. So I'm just curious what with the COVID Ministry of Testing has looked like. Rosie Sherry: Yeah. It's been tough. It's been super tough. Ministry of Testing, I still own it or I co-own it. And I handed it over before COVID to a new CEO. The CEO is one of the co-owners. I see him as a late founder. So the deal was my husband was the tech guy originally who helped with all the tech stuff and business stuff actually. But the deal was basically like, he would take it forward. It's like we've done. We wanted to move on. I was a bit bored with testing. I guess I was like more interested in doing other things. Rosie Sherry: So yeah. He, so he took it over and he's been doing it for four years now. You know, the pandemic has been two years. He took over four years, over four years ago and I spent a year just hanging around supporting him, but he was like the CEO. And then after a year I took on a role at Indy hackers. And that was my way of saying I'm just actually stepping back from everything. I needed to do something else so that I would stop sticking my nose into it. Kate: I imagine that was challenging. Yeah. Rosie Sherry: Yeah. So it's like on one hand, it's like me stopping, sticking my nose into it, but it's like, I spent a year supporting Richard and we that's what we agreed. We were both happy with that it's like, I didn't want it to be something that I just dropped and left with him and doing a gradual handover felt right to us. And I was happy to do it, but yeah. So come pandemic, the business itself was 70% revenue from events. So I'll say, yeah, it's like shit. But yeah, basically. Rosie Sherry: So yeah, the first couple months of the pandemic, it was like, oh my God, we weren't sure what was going to happen. We had to cancel events. We had one literally in March, at the end of March and everything shut down one or two weeks beforehand. And we were like, oh my God, I can't believe this is happening. Had the event been two weeks prior, would've gotten ahead. I said, oh my God. And that's our biggest event as well. And its like how do you deal with that from an operations perspective? How do you inform people to give free funds, all those kind of things. Rosie Sherry: It's a nightmare to deal with, but then the nightmare to deal with ongoing is like, we employ 10 people. Are we going to be able to keep them going? And those within the first three months were like, we were generally just not sure what's going to happen. To our advantage, strong community pulls you through, I think. To our advantage, we had already started and built a membership platform with content and courses and stuff. We hadn't pushed it enough because we had been so busy with events, but COVID gave us a push to make that the core focus of prioritize, this has got to be it. It's like, let's make the membership the thing that sustains a community. So that's basically being the strategy out of that. Also just, I guess thinking about when you build community, it goes back to, well you want to give back to the community, you want to reward them. Rosie Sherry: In my opinion, one way of rewarding them is not taking more money than you should. And we had savings in the bank. I had business advice that not have more than three months of savings in the bank account, that wasn't efficient, but I'll say, no, I don't. That doesn't make me feel comfortable. I was say, I need at least six months, ideally a year's worth of money to keep, just to feel comfortable. Because I felt like if whatever happened, not that I saw COVID coming, but I felt really at ease knowing that there was money in the bank, knowing that I could turn away opportunities that I didn't feel that were the best for the community. Rosie Sherry: And I think that being able to turn away things because they're not right for the community is a very powerful and strong position to be in. So I believed in having that safety net in the bank and luckily that's what pulled it through partly. Another part is we applied for a loan and had that as a safety net as well, which we never actually used. So that was more just like safety net kind of stuff. And we haven't yet had to dip into it, but we still have access to it just in case. Yeah, the other aspect of it was just going in on, well, how do we make it sustainable online with membership? They've done membership, they've done some paid for events and actually they've pushed a lot more for market and budget from typically software companies and that's been a huge increase as well. Rosie Sherry: So yeah, all in all, small losses for two years overall, for a period of time, we all took a pay cut just to save money just in case to give us the runway. We took a pay cut. Me and my husband, we took a pay cut. We still haven't increased our income from it that we take back to what it was pre COVID. We'd prefer for it to just have the longevity than be too greedy. It's not the right time for that. But yeah, I think tax year, end of March, I think this year we'll make a profit. So I think that's a great sign. And the goal is it's currently almost at 2,000 members, paid members. Kate: Oh wow. Rosie Sherry: And the goal is to get, I think to 3,000, because if we have 3000, then that basically covers all our costs. Kate: Oh, wow. Rosie Sherry: So that the goal at the moment, but we get extra money

at the moment through marketing and advertising budgets as well. Kate: Sure. Yeah. Well, yeah. And with that, I guess what are your thoughts on the future of communities going forward, I guess, ministry of testing, Orbit, what do you think the future is? Rosie Sherry: I've been saying it for 15 years. I think the future of business, the future of the world is community. And I've felt that since I discovered community. I feel even more now. I think people still don't get it and they won't get it until they experience it. So it's almost my mission to help people experience it, to help people build communities well, build communities authentically. And I don't think there's enough out there. I don't think there's enough that are sustainable. So I guess the future community, what is it, is like it's going to exist everywhere, I think in some form or another. That is the future and people are going to get results from it, but it's going to take... I think it will take a good five to 10 years to see real change. Kate: Yeah. And I guess along those lines, what communities have you seen do really well? What communities have you seen? How do people build ones that are really great? Rosie Sherry: It's a tough question. I think these days communities exist in so many different ways. And I think, for example, you can have like communities of products, which are associated to products like Figma, for example. I think they seem to do quite well with community.Notion does quite well with community, I think. There's definitely big brands out there doing well when it comes to building a community around their product. So those examples are quite good. I think when it comes... What I'd really love to see more of is like independent communities, as well as this still feels like... Whilst they're valuable having community as a way of being as part of a company, I still think there's a big need to create independent, sustainable communities. Rosie Sherry: And that's what ministry of testing is. And I believe we need more of that. We need more communities that are striving for something without necessarily having this product to sell them at the end, but that doesn't mean that product communities aren't important either. They're just different. But I definitely feel like there's something special when the heart of the community is actually as long as we improve our industry and find a way to make that sustainable, it's going to be... We're going to build the right thing. Rosie Sherry: But I think the challenge is getting people to change their mindsets to support them as well. So I think that's the challenge we have. And I guess in my indie world, there's a few good examples of some smaller indie type communities, nest labs, springs to mind, it's run by Anne Laurie. And she started it during the pandemic, just at the beginning. And I just like the way she builds community, it's authentic, it's accessible, it's affordable. Then there's intellect as well. They seem to be doing really interesting things. And again, they're going trying to find ways to be sustainable and staying true to the things that they're trying to achieve. So they're driven for this need to connect and to share together. Kate: Yeah. No, that's awesome. Well, we are almost out of time. Is there anything you'd like to plug or have our listeners go check out? Rosie Sherry: I guess everything Rosie and little bit, and I guess, @rosiesherry at Twitter. I tweet a lot. I tweet about community every day, multiple times a day, rosie.land is where I write about community stuff and orbit.love is where I work. Great company doing good things. There's most places I would never consider working, but Orbit is one of the few. So yeah. They're worth checking out. Kate: For sure. Awesome. We'll include those links in our show notes. And Rosie, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, we'll see you around. Rosie Sherry: Excellent. Thank you. Brian: Thanks for listening to Pod Rocket. Find us at podrocketpod on Twitter, or you could always email me, even though that's not a popular option, it's brian@logrocket.

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