What's up, everyone?

This is Cortland from NDHackers.com, and you're listening to the NDHackers podcast.

On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes.

How did they get to where they are today?

How do they make decisions at their companies? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own successful internet businesses. Today, I am excited to sit down with Rosie Sherry. I've had the pleasure of working with Rosie for the past several months and her role as the community manager for Indie Hackers.

So if you're active in the community, you've certainly seen Rosie leaving comments, making posts and introductions and just helping people out in general over the past few months.

In addition to helping me out with Andy Hackers, Rosie is the founder of her own community. It's called Ministry of Testing. It's a global community of software

testers. Rosie got started working on this in 2007 as a side project, really, but she eventually

turned it into a business, and since then, she has bootstrapped it to over $1.2 million in annual

revenue. Rosie, welcome to the Indiackers podcast, and thanks to joining me.

Thanks, Gordon. It's great being here.

$1.2 million in revenue. That is a lot further than I ever got with Andy Hackers. Andy Hackers doesn't make money anymore, but before it was acquired, I was experimenting with all sorts of business models. I tried affiliate marketing. I sent a lot of cold emails for sponsorships and podcast ads. So I'm pretty curious about all this kind of stuff.

Can you explain to us how your community makes over a million dollars a year and where that money comes from?

So basically most of it comes from events at the moment.

So we run conferences across a lot of countries at the moment.

So we started out, basically in 2007 we started out just as a forum. And kind of as it the moment. So we started out, and basically in 2007, we started out just as a

forum. And kind of as it grew bigger and bigger, I felt like, you know, it was kind of sucking

the time out of me. And I was feeling not great about all the time it was taking and not having

that financial reward for it so that I could give it my focus.

And so after about four years of it running as an online community,

I decided that I needed to figure out a way for it to make money.

I had like dabbled in like some advertising stuff and like online ads and the promotions for companies.

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