EP9: Premium value adds and community building with Rosie Sherry of Rosieland
Everything is here is from the perspective of Rosie Sherry and the interviewer.
Why you started Rosieland? What is the newsletter about? After the Ministry of Testing, I wanted to focus on Community Building. Create a name for myself as a Community Builder. Not a lot of people didn't know me. I started the Ministry of Testing as a community because the Software testing world was neglected and today it's the same case with community building.
<aside> 💡 People think they understand community building but they dont. They try to force tech onto it and create communities with heavy tech influence. I don't believe that create sustainable communities. So I wanted to dive more into what community building is.
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The easiest way to start is to create a curated newsletter, do it weekly and that would help me keep accountable to continuingly produce something every week and force me to learn about things going on or people who are speaking about community stuff. I've been doing that now for 43 weeks that's almost a year 1 year and there are 560 Subscribers. It's been 2 weeks and I've launched a paid newsletter with a total of 15 paid subscribers. Half of them have paid yearly subscription and half of the monthly subscription. Going along whole community stuff it's more than writing. I've built up Notion resource. It was free and now it's behind a paywall. When people subscribe to the paid newsletter they also get access to Notion resource. Chats, Meetups, Podcast and all other community focus thing with community members is something I'm working on.
Difference between free and paid option newsletter? What's the value add? The free option is once a week newsletter on Monday sending interesting things around community building. I spend probably 4 hours a week to curate all information. I'm seeing a 50% open rate which is cool. The paid option is that I've got a lot of opinions and insights into building communities. My experience with Ministry of Testing and I have got a lot to share. In addition to this, my experience with Indie Hackers. This is more about in-depth writing about communities, how to build communities, what you should be thinking about, future of communities.
<aside> 💡 The more I research into it the more I feel no one is talking in depth. People get stuck. They dont know how to build communities, how to start. I'd really like to address those things every week where I write one thing and share added value resource with Notion's knowledge hub which includes questions, articles, tools, etc and is an extension to the newsletter.
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How well do community building and newsletter fit with each other? To me at least, building a community and creating a newsletter kind of goes hand to hand almost. Definitely.
<aside> 💡 There's a saying: to build a community, first build an audience. I don't think it's essential. Ideally, you need a level of trust from people if you are building a community. You need people who have faith in what you are trying to do what you are trying to achieve.
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The whole idea of creating a newsletter is you want people to know that you are serious about what you are doing, you are committed to it. I wouldn't have gotten subscribers straight away if I hadn't spent 43 weeks doing a curated newsletter. 500 subscribers is not a lot but a reasonable number to start with.
How can a newsletter creator leverage community to add more value to newsletter? How can newsletter creator leverage newsletter to build a community? What are the tips? My plan with the newsletter is to engage with every subscriber. Send manual intro email and ask questions of what they interested in. I'd like to do online videos, chat, discussion, etc. One of my members wants to launch paid communities. Maybe we will get on a call to discuss how he could do it. After our conversation, we can share either highlights or podcast with the whole community so others can benefit. Podcasts are great but people don't always have time to listen.
<aside> 💡 Substack is a great way to start a community, gather people around a certain topic on what you write about. Lenny started a community on Slack for his paid subscribers. The opportunity to talk with your people, the more you talk with them and find out what's on their mind which generates ideas of what you should be writing about.
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What are some tips for newsletter creator to grow their community? I think to grow any community you need to know who your people are. My first post for my newsletter was about, "Getting to know your people." I've done this at Indie Hackers and Ministry of Testing. In 2007, when I started MOT the same principle applied.
<aside> 💡 If you are interested in starting a community for certain niche or people you need to know who they are and they need to know you exist as well. The way to do that is to get to know them. To get to know them, follow them on Twitter, subscribe to their newsletter or blogs, join other communities that might exist, you need to know who is talking about what. You need to develop some kind of system to make sure you are in the loop about all of that. If you are first to know about things that are going on then share it with your community.
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This is what I did with my newsletter. I've gathered information and resources. It's not that it's hard. It's just that you need to go down the rabbit hole discovering new things, people talking about something you never knew existed. It takes you by surprise. By discovering this by sharing what you discovered you end up becoming that person who knows about a community or that topic. People come to me now for all things community building because I've been doing this, gathering new sources and sharing it.