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Rosie Sherry

I'm Rosie, I've built a 7 fig business, led community at IH, now building a community @Orbit. AMA πŸ”₯

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Orbit
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Hey everyone! I'm Rosie Sherry and I love building communities. I started about 15 years ago with meetups, I then started Ministry of Testing and boostrapped that to $1.5M annual revenue over 10 years. I still (co)own, but don't run the business day to day. I led the community over at Indie Hackers for a couple of years. More recently I started Rosieland, a community for community builders. This has evolved over the past couple of years, from a newsletter, to a paid newsletter and now to a community with a 'community garden' approach. Rosieland is still my side-gig as I recently joined Orbit to lead up their community efforts. AMA!
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Nathan Challen
TimeToCoda
Hi Rosie, congrats! (and Orbit looks awesome!) Have you experience or can you point me to successes in community building for non-profit / environmental projects? I've just submitted https://GreenHabit.app in the PH makers festival Earth Edition but looking at the best way to grow a community around it. There are a lot of passionate people wanting to make a change. I want to enable them through the platform but it will only succeed to make a difference if there is mass adoption of that platform and I think you'd agree that that means community. I imagine it's hard to 'shortcut' community building but any 80/20 thoughts, actions or tips would be appreciated.
Rosie Sherry
Orbit
@emotf Talk to these people you say that want to make a change, do that for a long time and for the lifetime of the app, then the more you get to know them, the more you will understand and find opportunities to create community for them. Greta is probably the person I think of when it comes to the environment, I'd start there and try to understand how and what communities formed as a result of her work.
Nathan Challen
TimeToCoda
@rosiesherry thanks for the insights. Reading back through your replies on other questions in this AMA you have given a lot of great tips. I'll be bookmarking this thread πŸ˜‰.
Rosie Sherry
Orbit
@emotf Thanks!
Sagar
Hey RosieπŸ‘‹ I am building a community for technological progressives through a daily newsletter and have currently 10+ members, I want to know how can I scale it to a larger number?
Rosie Sherry
Orbit
@sagar_devkate a big part of growth is consistency, the best thing you can do it to keep showing up and build up trust. You could also try starting conversations with your current subscribers. Reach out to them. Encourage them to hop on a call. Make it clear that they can respond to the email and you will get back to them.
Greg Zen at StartupHeroics.com
Any words of advice for those overwhelmed with first steps of building a nascent community around a new niche or technology? Any encouraging sources of inspiration you recommend? Cheers
Rosie Sherry
Orbit
@mrgregzen I find things are overwhelming because of lack of understanding and knowledge of the space people are in. Therefore, the best way to get over that is to work towards becoming a real expert in the niche you are trying to serve. Be that persons who knows everything and everyone, this will really help you become a connector and a central part of conversations that will naturally occur.
Aaron O'Leary
Product Hunt
Hey Rosie! Big fan, my question is kind of simple I guess, any plans to make a book on all that you know about community? I'd definitely pre order it!
Rosie Sherry
Orbit
@aaronoleary Haha, yes. I don't know when, or how I will find the time.
Erin Mikail Staples
Label Studio
For those of you who know you, @rosiesherry, its of no mystery that you do *a lot.*. How do you keep things balanced, take time for yourself, and evaluate your own growth, and take time for your personal life.
Rosie Sherry
Orbit
@erinmikail I don't think I'm the best example, tbh, but I try. I still take life one day at a time, much more than that and it becomes too overwhelming. Also, yes I'm crazy, and have 5 kids who I unschool. Those who have kids will understand that actually time to myself is work, and some exercise too. :D Over the years I've also made sure that as a family, my husband and I share responsibilities for our kids equally. Also, mostly I feel fortunate that everyday I get to do work that I enjoy and always look forward to getting 'stuck in'. 😺
Erin Mikail Staples
Label Studio
@rosiesherry <3 "Get to do work that I enjoy" i think is such an underrated gem. Thanks for sharing and being you
Kishoraditya Chaudhari
Hello! 1. How can communities collaborate with each other, other than working on projects and causes? 2. Is community saturation a thing? How do we work out on increasing number of communities from the managerial/ creators end as well as member/ joiner's end? Should it be create many join as much as you want? before starting to create look out for similar ones and work with those kind of? idk. 3. A very obvious one, how do you increase communication between members, apart from general engagement tips, I want everyone to state views, debate with each other, which works for everyone for a certain days, and gets repetitive/ cold later, even though the topics are new, I tried collecting feedback, but was very generic, is there anything that can be done to improve this specific type of engagement/? 3b. How to take a better feedback, how to ask for better experiences or learnings and how to identify actual pain points?
Rosie Sherry
Orbit
@kishoraditya 1. How can communities collaborate with each other, other than working on projects and causes? You never know where relationships end up, all kinds of magic happens. I've seen people fall in love, get married, start new businesses, get new jobs and opportunities, make new friends, save lives. Honestly, the possibilities are endless.
Rosie Sherry
Orbit
@kishoraditya 2. Is community saturation a thing? How do we work out on increasing number of communities from the managerial/ creators end as well as member/ joiner's end? Should it be create many join as much as you want? before starting to create look out for similar ones and work with those kind of? idk. There definitely seems to be community overwhelm, hopefully in time things will find their natural balance. There's an excitement right now because of COVID, I think many communities will die out and the strong ones will remain.
Rosie Sherry
Orbit
@kishoraditya 3. A very obvious one, how do you increase communication between members, apart from general engagement tips, I want everyone to state views, debate with each other, which works for everyone for a certain days, and gets repetitive/ cold later, even though the topics are new, I tried collecting feedback, but was very generic, is there anything that can be done to improve this specific type of engagement/? There is no one way, the only thing I can suggest is to think creatively and to see the world from their view. You almost have to put to one side what you want, and try to create things that they want. Feedback is hard to get in the traditional sense (e.g. with surveys), but go have a real conversation with someone and you'll gain the most insightful feedback ever.
sulyman moyo
How do you get users to take action
Rosie Sherry
Orbit
@repreneur Understand their inner motivations. Easier said than done!
Thanh Nguyen
What’s your best approach to starting a community?
Rosie Sherry
Orbit
@thanh_nguyen13 there's a phrase I keep going back to. "study your people" Just because you want a community, it doesn't mean you should start one. Take time truly getting an understand of the world you are about to commit to for years to come. Who are the people that care and share about it? How can you build up relationships? What are they talking about? Then, where can you or your community fit into all of this? If you still want to start a community after spending weeks or months doing this, then start small. A Twitter account, a blog, an email list. Any tool that allows you to communicate with people is a community building tool. Don't fall into the trap of jumping to using a branded 'community tool' at the beginning. I have a few resources on starting communities here - https://rosie.land/posts?topic=s...
Mehrdad Pajuhaan
SELLDONE | Business OS
The community caught my eye. Today we put our product in ProductHunt, which incidentally has a community builder platform for merchants. This service allows each company to have its own community (on a custom domain). This is a live version of the community built with the Selldone community builder platform: https://selldone.com/community/ (We just started)
Ben Cotte
Hey Rosie, I'll meet Guillaume from Orbit today. I am super curious about Orbit's vision. Funny question, what should I ask him?
Rosie Sherry
Orbit
@ben_cotte1 Where does he envision Orbit to be in 5 years time? Then tell me what he says, because I don't know the answer to that 😻
Ben Cotte
@ben_cotte1 @rosiesherry haha πŸ˜‚ Yup I asked. But I can’t reveal it entirely. A few hints, though: it is big, bold, and bright!
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