Rosieland ☁️

Writing and research in community building.

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My little space on the internet to explore writing and creating around indie community building.

September 5, 2020 50 paying newsletter subscribers! ⛅️

It's been 2 months since I started my paid newsletter and this is where I'm at.

50 paid subscribers (I have one away for free), $8k+ annualized revenue, creeping closer to 1000 email subscribers in total.

Rosieland

I won't lie.

It's been tough, but it's also been amazingly rewarding.

Some interesting points to take away from it:

  • I've never written so consistently in my life
  • I hosted a meetup, got more to come!
  • I continue to add to my Notion resource weekly
  • Wondering whether to call paid members Rosielanders or Prosies, what do you think? 🥴
  • I'm now often referred to as someone who builds in the open
  • I get tagged into posts alongside Lenny (who has done amazing stuff with his paid newsletter + community)
  • I have a guest post coming on Monday, helps me breathe a bit.

I had opted to make my curated newsletter free and add in other stuff (articles, meetups, Notion) for paid subscribers. It has worked well so far, though a little manual of a set up for coordinating things.

I need to ramp up my promotion of it, mostly I wanted to focus in on the habit of writing and delivering things of value.

My dream is to get 1000 subscribers, slowly but surely!

AMA!

July 10, 2020 10 paying customers. And 500 email subscribers.

It seems like I naturally check in here every couple of months or so. And each time I've made progress. This time I've more than doubled my email list.

I've not done a huge amount to promote it. I decided to use Notion for my website, which some people can't understand, but other people seem to love it. 😆

For me, I love it and it's super easy to update. And anything that saves me time is a massive bonus for me right now.

I've also started talking more, gone on a couple of podcasts and done a couple of talks. This all helps build up general awareness.

Writing has been something high on my wishlist for a long while. I've struggled how to make progress with it. Part of me wanted to do an (e)book, or maybe a course. I thought about preselling something. But I didn't make any progress.

I realise now that I have to do it in steps, life is just too busy for me to make a full product. Hopefully in time it will evolve into more. For now, I will commit to writing 1-2 times a week.

This is why I've chosen the newsletter route. I've shown up weekly for over 40 weeks now doing a free curated links newsletter for community building. It's become enough of a routine that I felt ready to do a bit more.

The weekly curated newsletter will continue for free as it is, and is essentially a lead magnet.

Also, I'm conscious about not doing too much for free, I decided to go down the paid route. Opting for Substack mostly because I already used it my time is seriously limited to set up anything else.

Of course I'm going to treat my newsletter list as more than just an audience. I'm throwing in access to a private Notion database – I pulled some of it off from my main site and I'm adding in more areas for paid subscribers. I also plan to do video/meetups, still need to figure those out, but they will come.

I launched on Monday with a simple tweet and haven't done much else, and I'm now at 10 paying subscribers, the majority of them paying annually which is nice.

I opted for a $200 per year or $20 pm price. With a current 25% off until the end of August.

But honestly, I feel in my element at the moment. Whilst I did some great things at Ministry of Testing, I never felt able to step up and do things with my own voice. So now is my time, I suppose. 🤷🏽‍♀️

Substack link: https://rosieland.substack.com/
Website link: https://rosie.land

May 8, 2020 My email list is feeling rosie.

Last time I wrote how it took me 6 months to get to 100 email subscribers.

2 months later I'm at 207. So I guess I can make myself look good and say I more than doubled it. Clever me, eh? 🙃

Growth is slightly faster, though that is not my focus. These days I'm just pleased I can keep it going. And that I keep showing up with everything else that is going on in the world.

Also, important to me at this point is the face that people recommend and open the emails. I average 55% open rate, and people are increasingly recommending it.

I've been chipping away, trying to improve things week on week. Most importantly for me is to just have the consistency on improving and creating value.

I feel everything about Rosieland is still very much in 'figuring stuff out' phase and I've been reluctant to push or promote it too much. Lots of ideas that I like to slowly think upon and figure out how to juggle alongside my current and more important commitments.

A couple main things I did:

  • I moved over to Substack, it feels easy and much more like blogging, which I like.
  • I've started posting a question a week, Substack has a nice 'Threads' feature for that. Essentially, it enables me to start building more of a community. I really dig this. Simple, yet powerful.
  • Revamped my Community resource using Notion. I'm quite pleased with it as it really is a bit of a second community brain for me.
March 1, 2020 It took me 6 months to reach 100 email subscribers

I've been building communities for a long time, but I always failed (or found an excuse) not to participate in the communities for community builders.

I know, kinda funny.

As part of my own personal progression I wanted to change this.

Any new landscape can be hard to get a true understanding of. Often information and people scattered. It takes time to find out what is what, and who is who. Then it takes time to organise this into something meaningful.

As part of this process I set up a page of resources to help myself. I also decided to set up a newsletter, this was mostly to help keep me accountable of staying on top of current news.

I started from scratch 6 months ago:

  • I set up a single page with useful resources
    added my newsletter sign up to there
  • tweeted a few times
  • shared on LinkedIn a few times
  • I hang out on a couple of community slacks and a FB groups, participating and occassionally sharing the link where relevant
  • first 15 or so newsletters were completely automated via RSS from blogs, websites, podcasts and things I had stumbledupon that I had bookmarked/saved on weekly basis.
  • I've had great and positive feedback on the actual newsletter (via Slack, FB, Twitter and personal emails)

Now, reality check: it took 6 months to get to 100. It feels slow, but really it's ok.

It makes me laugh, but I'm honestly in no rush, and really it's a way to force me to learn more about the community building world and network with others.

The design isn't anything special, there's lots I could do to improve it.

I'm starting to get recognsied more (never had the time in the past), been invited to speak on an online thing and had compliments that people love the newsletter.

Also upon reflection, the professional 'community building' world isn't massive and really I see it as a place where lots of growth needs and will happen over the coming years.

Overall I feel like it is providing value, so I'm happy.

Here it is for reference: https://community.rosie.land/

February 23, 2020 I signed up as a mentor at MentorCruise

There are two things I've wanted to find more time to do. One is writing. The other is helping other people.

I do a lot of helping people as my role in Indie Hackers, but I'd love to find someone that I can help and follow through with over a period of time.

A while back I listened to Dom's Indie Hacker podcast and thought that would be a good place to find someone to mentor whilst also supporting and indie business.

I'm opening one spot at the moment.

If this sounds of interest then head on over to here https://mentorcruise.com/mentor/RosieSherry/

June 15, 2019 Bought the domain

I had actually just bought recklessrosie.com as a domain to use as I wanted a fresh start. There is a bit of a story behind the 'reckless' thing.

However, just as I was about to start my writing efforts I got an email out of the blue from an indie hacker who had listened to my podcast and recommended I get the available rosie.land domain.

I felt it was perfect.

I've also heard said person has gone on to recommend similar .land domains to other (now) happy people. 😊

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My little space on the internet to explore writing and creating around indie community building.