Real Community Can't Be Faked With Rosie Sherry

02/07/20 • 33 min

Rosie Sherry is both an unschooling parent and the founder of the Ministry Of Testing. There's a disproportionate number of bootstrappers who homeschool their kids, and maybe it's for the same reason why they built something themself instead of fitting into the mold, they think they can do it better.

Ministry of Testing is a company Rosie founded, officially as an online community in 2007, but then formally as a business in 2011. It's a community of software testers who geek out on testing, host conferences, have online talks, host trainings, and participate in an online community.

You can't fake a community like that. You can growth hack numbers, members, et cetera. But, you can't fake community. A strong community has to have people who care, that's what it generally comes down to. The people who lead it have to care, show that they care, and care about the industry as a whole.

Transcript

"Real Community Can't Be Faked With Rosie Sherry" Transcript

Resources

Rosie Sherry

Joel Hooks

Transcript

"Real Community Can't Be Faked With Rosie Sherry" Transcript

Resources

Rosie Sherry

Joel Hooks

Previous Episode

Accessible Design Systems With Sarah Federman

Design systems are your component library, documentation, tools, et cetera. And then there are the operations of it. So like an agile team uses agile methodology, a design system is about making your teams work better.

After Bootstrap, we all ended up building our own Bootstraps. We all like to think that we're special and the problems we're solving are specific to our company, but the reality is the way that your system is built is probably not that special. It's the way that your system is used that's special.

Everybody should be able to access your products, and you can't just make a bunch of accessible components, you have to give your users guidelines on how to use them. Sarah says that accessibility should be considered in every step of development.

Transcript

"Accessible Design Systems With Sarah Federman" Transcript

Resources

Distilling How We Think About Design Systems

Sarah Federman

Joel Hooks

Next Episode

How Courtland Allen Grew Indie Hackers with Content, Consistency, and Community

"Indie Hacker" - An entrepreneur that is working to gain some form of independence.

Courtland Allen is the founder of indiehackers.com. He didn't take the venture capital approach. He just wanted to make enough money to support what he was trying to do. Courtland was trying to build a community of indie hackers who would share their stories, help each other, and support one another.

You can't force community growth. It takes good content, time, and consistency. At first, Courtland would make good content and share it with his mailing list, and he'd also make fake accounts and have discussions with himself on the indie hackers forum to try and spark real interactions. The efforts paid off. Over a year, a real community blossomed.

It's tempting to rely on your intuition when you are first starting as an indie hacker. But, Courtland encourages you to take a more thoughtful approach by relying more on the experiences of others. Over time you'll develop wisdom.

You can go too far, though. If you spend too much time preparing and learning, you'll realize how much you don't know, and it can be crippling. In Courtland's interviews with indie hackers, the most common advice people have is to go for it! Be okay with experiencing failures and starting over.