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I’m Rosie Sherry, I build communities and I'm the founder of Rosieland. AMA 🔥

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I’m Rosie Sherry and I’ve been building communities for quite some time! I’m here to answer anything and everything I can about community building. Here are some of the things I’ve done: - I started back in 2006 with a local Girl Geek Dinner Meetup - I founded Ministry of Testing, an indie, 7 figure revenue and profitable community of practice for software testers. I handed this community over for someone else to run (I did not sell it). - I led the community at Indie Hackers for a couple of years - I started Indiependent, a small community for indie founders where people get kicked for inactivity - I’ve been writing about community at Rosieland (covering community growth, flywheels, Minimum Viable Communities, Community Discovery, and much more!) - I breathe, eat, sleep community Ask me anything about community, I can cover things like: - Tools to use, or not - Community on a budget - Community as a business - Minimum Viable Communities - Community Discovery - Community Growth & Flywheels - Building a sustainable community - Community trends - Why so many people are getting community wrong! I'll be answering questions on the 7th of September!
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Hi Rosie. Thanks for doing this AMA! My question is do you have any experience in building community on Discord, and also make it sustainable? I've build two communities so far on Facebook and Discord respectively, yet both end up as ghost towns. So wonder what would do to warm-up the community and ensure the high engagement of it? Thanks! Frankie
People don't understand how hard community is. Ask yourself: - why would they go back? - is it worth their time? - Is what exists inside helpful? - what are you doing to build up their habits of coming back? - how are you investing into growth? I find that a lot of communities are just not very interesting or helpful. Often they have *too much conversation and not enough action*. Conversations are key to community, but you have to find ways to make it into something more. No one wants to go to their 'local town hall' and be forever discussing things, they want outcomes and change. It's really hard. ❤️
how do I contact you ?
Twitter DM, LinkedIn, contact form on my website -
Hi Rosie! What articles/videos/resources could you recommend for building a community from scratch? Context: I started building a community of web3 open-source contributors a week ago (website — contribute3.com)
honestly, there is so much on , I'd start there :)
Rosie, when there's a community that supports a business, how do you measure return on investment for the business? Especially with communities that are not vendor neutral, what metrics do you use?
I just don't think it's worth measuring ROI. I'm still developing thoughts around this, but it feels so unhealthy, you just can't measure community effectively. I feel disheartened by it all. It's probably better to focus on the positive outcomes that the community creates and to not let marketing/sales take all the credit for the community work that has been done. To get better at this I think community people need to get better at showing their work. Taking credit where credit is due. The positive feedback. The (word of mouth) recommendations. The back channel conversations. The inbound SEO. The innovation. The research we do and pass back to the company. Marketing would kill for the insights community can get. And community. needs to get better at passing back those insights to those that matter.
Hey Rosie, Thanks for doing an AMA session. Few questions for you: 1. How to engage the community without being noisy? Esp when the community is made up of professionals like founders & CEOs? 2. Any tools you recommend for good community engagement? 3. How do you manage hours to shut down PC and mobile notification as a community manager esp when it is a global community? Thanks again. Looking forward to your answers.
1. How to engage the community without being noisy? Esp when the community is made up of professionals like founders & CEOs? Don't be noisy? Focus on being relevant. Saving them time. Bring them new insights and different perspectives. Help them achieve what they want to achieve. 2. Any tools you recommend for good community engagement? Honestly, good conversation and community discovery. There are no tools for this, only your mind and creativity. 3. How do you manage hours to shut down PC and mobile notification as a community manager esp when it is a global community? Create boundaries and live by them. We all need them. Community builders are so prone to burnout because of this. We have to get better at creating boundaries. And honestly, your members will appreciate and understand. Fast responses are not necessarily better ones.
Hi Rosie, If you were starting a community today (for a non-tech audience of 50/50 English and English as second language speakers) what platform would you choose and why?
I honestly struggle with questions like this. It feels like too much to bite off in one chunk. Partly the language thing is so complex 🤯 Another part is that I don't have direct experience with different language communities. I'm sure there are (enterprise) tools out there that cater for this (and likely cost a lot of money), but that's not something I directly know about. Another part is that I'm a sucker for the Minimum Viable Community approach. I've only ever been able to build community slowly, tackling one thing at a time, and often these things don't actually rely on a 'community tool', it's more about figuring out what people want. I'd go where your people are, embrace conversations that are happening, start something low risk, don't assume you know what they want and aim to build with their input.
Hi Rosie, I am building an anonymous community of entrepreneurs ()- to enable honest and open discussions about VCs, hiring, and business problems. I would love to listen to your take on how different it is to grow an anonymous community compared to a non-anonymous one, given the dynamics will fundamentally be different. For e.g., in our community, networking might not happen among the members but they find value in having open discussions.
I love this. I'd definitely go there and rant about tech bro and lack of diversity anonymously, I'm too scared to share my thoughts and experiences openly. 😅 Facebook groups has an anonymous feature and I've seen it work really well. It's scary talking real. People like to think we can be open, but often we can't. There is often a lot at risk, or we need that confidence to find ways to talk about things. Especially as a woman in tech, often I think it's all in my head (when it's not really, it's the self doubt creeping in). Personally, I'd embrace the fact that it is anonymous and the strengths that it gives you. Also to be frank, people are probably tired of networking these days. We're tired and have had too much of it and they are so hit and miss with value. The power of anonymity is that you could potentially have many interesting and spicy stories to share. I'd personally look at tapping into that and see how you can share them to a wider audience.
Hi Rosie, What's your suggestion for running cross-language communities?
I don't have any direct experience with this unfortunately. It sounds complicated, and I guess I would question the value of it, or perhaps find smaller scale experiments before committing to full scale cross-language community. You'd need moderation for each language (for example) 🤯 It's hard to comment further without further context, but as a mindset I think as community builders we need to ensure we provide great value for money. We should question our actions/projects accordingly.
Hi Rosie! Do you have any suggestions for startups aiming to engage with online communities for the purposes of building product awareness? For context, we (Meadow) are a platform that helps students build their college school list to understand and compare the all-in financial costs. There are vibrant communities surrounding this topic (both for students and parents) across a number of platforms - Reddit, Discord, Facebook Groups, etc. Thanks! Gareth
Support communities without selling! It's amazing how many companies insist of starting their own community (and spending lots of time and money on it), but they don't consider the option of being a good supporter of what exists out there. The biggest problem it the transactional nature of support, companies are always seeking the immediate returns and this pushes them down the path of spammy and unhelpful content. The more people can show up just to help people, the better off communities will be. The more companies can show up with financial support to these communities, the more these spaces can grow into something even better. People who run communities should be respected and compensated too, often they fail because people burn out from doing 'free' work. It's totally worth approaching the people who lead these communities and asking 'how can we help?'
Thanks!
Hi Rosie, How do know when to get a community manager instead of trying to get engineering teams to build out "community" when working on OSS? Also, what should they avoid doing when building community? TIA
Community is a team effort, I think it would be really hard to build an authentic community without the engineering expertise. The best communities are founded and started by the experts and I think it's a big reason communities start to fail, we need those 'passionate' experts to keep driving communities forward. However, the amount of 'operations' required to run a community often goes unnoticed, there's probably a lot of day to day community admin stuff that could be allocated to a community manager rather than an engineer. That would at least start to free up some of their time to perhaps work on more valuable or impactful things. And what should they avoid? Mostly being wasteful and vanity metrics (and in contrast focus on solving problems and being creative/refreshing in the work being done).
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