“I hate being sold to,” says Rosie Sherry. That guiding intuition, a sentiment most developers would second, helped Sherry build the software testers community Ministry of Testing from day one to over 100,000 members, while also leading community at Indie Hackers and building side-communities like Indiependent for bootstrapped founders and Rosieland for community builders.
Emails, all too often, are mere tools for selling—selling subscriptions, SaaS, or at least subscribers’ attention to advertisers. Developers are the most sensitive to the first whiff of sales. They’ve been burnt too many times by email newsletters that ramped up the marketing overtime, making them the most skeptical of subscribing to your list—and the first to bounce and unsubscribe.
Sherry navigated that skepticism and built a churn-resilient audience of developers by writing for herself, with the community in mind. “I like to focus on delivering value and on what gets me excited,” says Sherry. “If I do the opposite, then that is when people start unsubscribing.”
Email for Community Building
“Great communities thrive on repeatability,” wrote Sherry. “The rituals, the culture, the gatherings, and the expectation settings.”
An email that arrives in your inbox every Thursday morning, without fail, isn’t a community on its own. But it can be the seed from which a community blooms, the repeatable ritual where early community members learn inside lingo and build camaraderie.
“It’s all one big community flywheel,” says Sherry, where the Ministry of Testers creates content for newsletters, tags and shares community content to raise interesting and new voices, and promotes events and conferences. The ideas from one feed into another, with email tying it together.
It’s not that email is the only way to build community. Rosie prefers RSS, shares content on blogs and social media as well, and maintains that “I’m not sure there is a best channel.” Comments sections, forums, ad-hoc groups in social networks, “wherever people come, community naturally arises,” says Sherry.
Email just has a few things that make it particularly conducive to community building. Emails arrive in one of the few chronologically-ordered feeds that’s not ordered by a social algorithm. They’re free-form, flexible enough to be anything you want. They’re easy enough to spin up, for the low price of the minute it takes to start a newsletter. They have comments built in with replies, sharing baked in with forwarding. They’re opt-in, so community members feel safe to subscribe knowing there’s always an out. And newsletters typically have an archive (including Buttondown, with customizable archives including comments and RSS feeds if subscribers prefer that over email), important as social proof, “that you’ve been around, which shows that you care, and hopefully that you or your company won’t disappear as soon as the next hype cycle comes around,” says Sherry.
Best of all, there’s no right or wrong way to build an email newsletter. You can make them as quirky or zany as you want, in the spirit that’s driven indie publishing from zines to blogs.
The only danger is when you have your eyes on the short-term numbers, on churn rates and subscriber growth and click-throughs, you lose sight of the uniqueness that got your newsletter subscribers in the first place. Then it’s a slow path towards irrelevance, as your core initial audience churns away.
Rosie Sherry keeps three core ideas in mind with her email newsletters to stay on track:
- Talk about your people
- Stay interesting
- Be you
Talk about your people
How would you start a developer-focused newsletter and get the first 100 subscribers? “I would start a weekly roundup newsletter and focus on sharing people’s work,” says Sherry. That kicks off a flywheel of growth, as you tell people that you featured their work, they subscribe and tell others about your newsletter, the new subscribers share your posts, the larger audience helps you invite more influential guests, and on and on it goes.
Not that the trick only works for the first hundred subscribers. Even with a thousand times as many followers, Sherry still sends a weekly “summary of the community” email featuring what’s happening in the world of software testers. “Being willing to spend time to research and share what is happening in the market is an act of love that most people aren’t willing to dedicate themselves to,” she says. After all, “the world is co-created,” says the Ministry of Testing’s About page.
Curating and sharing streamlines sending emails consistently even while struggling with writer's block, for one. It gives a dual-purpose to the time you spend learning and researching your vertical to stay sharp and prevent marketing creep. And it gives you an excuse to connect with the community.
Find something interesting. Feature it. Then let the person who created it know and thank them for sharing. Don’t expect anything, but the odds of them reciprocating, subscribing to your newsletter and sharing it, are far higher than they would have been without the outreach.
One share at a time, you’ll keep your existing audience engaged and grow a new following of people who are glad you shared their work or who are existing fans of that developer, creator, or product.
A share will spark more ideas you can expand on in your own writing. Questions you could ask that person, then expand into an interview with unique content for your newsletter.
“Share people’s work and bring them traffic,” says Sherry. “It never fails as a strategy.”
Stay interesting
Don’t obsess over numbers, Sherry advised the Indie Hackers community. Obsess instead over alignment.
There’s a reason people signed up for your newsletter. They agreed with your takes on software development, appreciated the community creations you shared, and wanted more. That’s your north star.
“People stay subscribed when they're truly interested in what you have to offer,” says Sherry. “Quality over quantity of subscribers, always!”
Dive deep into a code issue that’s bugging you, or go down a rabbit hole about why a technical standard is the way it is. If someone unsubscribes, they likely weren’t a great fit for your newsletter anyhow. That’s not worth worrying about.
Share a new feature with a bit more of an upsell than normal, then see your churn rates tick up, and it might be time for a bit of self-reflection on if you would want to read the emails you’re sending if you were on the other end of the inbox.
“Newsletters are there to deliver value and stay on topic,” says Sherry. “Developers don’t want to waste their time. Newsletters should aim to respect that and live it as part of their ethos” If you can deliver value and save them time, they’ll stay subscribed. If, more like social media, your newsletter feels like a waste of time, they’ll churn out.
The delivery matters as much as the message. Say your technical deep-dive is split into a 7-day drip when it could have been a single article; as Sherry says her reaction would be, “what a waste of my time!”
It’s not that you can’t sell anything, that your email needs to be purely altruistic. What is true, though, is you’ll only maintain and grow your audience if your newsletter is consistently filled with things people want to read. True for every audience, but especially for developers who are most likely to bounce at the first sign of sales.
Be you
Curation can get your newsletter started. Community-led content and interviews can elevate others’ voices and build your audiences together.
But you and your unique takes are the critical ingredients that make a newsletter unique.
“I like to focus on what gets me excited,” says Rosie about her newsletters. “This naturally ends up reducing churn.”
So it’s not just curating new things from your subset of the developer ecosystem, or talking to any new voice in your industry. It’s choosing the ones you find interesting, talking to the people you’re most excited about, then using their ideas as a springboard to dive into your ideas.
“Combining talking about your people with your own insights or takes gives you an added opportunity to stand out from the crowd,” says Sherry.
The goal is to create something only you could pull together. Write the newsletter you’d have subscribed to, if only someone else had done so first. Then, one insightful takeaway and one collaborative feature at a time, you’ll build an engaged audience of people attuned to your wavelength.
It’s not that you should only “scratch your own itch.” It’s that you should trust your instincts and be honest with yourself. When something feels like marketing and sales to you, cut it or rewrite it until you—even when you’re most honest with yourself, lying in bed at night—don’t feel like it’d annoy you if you received it. When something feels interesting enough to pursue it, trust your inner child on the bet that other developers in similar positions would find the same thing fascinating. When you’re having a bit of fun with your wording, when you’re sharing something a bit esoteric every now and then, go for it—it’s you, the people showed up to listen to you, and they’ll get bored and churn away if you lose your voice.
One email at a time added to the archive, you’ll build up trust, have your letters to point to as proof of expertise, have newfound connections who appreciate you sharing their work, have an audience waiting to see the next thing you’ll uncover.
“There are no cheap growth hacks to make the numbers look great.” That was the first thing Rosie Sherry shared when asked how to keep developers subscribed and interested. The path is showing up consistently, involving your community, and being yourself. One email at a time, you’ll build a community that trusts your emails enough to, perhaps, want to contribute their ideas or attend your meetups or use your APIs. And you’ll have fun writing that newsletter you wanted to read anyhow.