Ministry of Testing
A community of practice for software testing and QA people
70% of our revenue pre-coronavirus came from physical events. Which has made things tough with having to cancel a few conferences.
However, we have a strong community behind us to help the team essentially go completely online.
Today they host their first online conference, TestBash Home, it's a crazy 24 hour marathon to cater for the 'global' community.
We were totally unsure if people would pay, but as I speak 1070 tickets have been sold. Each ticket was £49.
We live in hope everything will turn out ok. ❤️
Oh what crazy times we are in.
Earlier this week we cancelled our first conference (TestBash Detroit) due to coronavirus impact..
Then today we announced the decision to cancel TestBash Brighton. This one is a specifically hard one for the team. It is our biggest and longest running conference.
We have another conference in May in the Netherlands that is at risk too. 3rd time unlucky perhaps. 😭
The financial impacts are pretty devastating. The stress on the team is super hard too. Turns out it takes a lot of effort to cancel a conference that is due to happen in 2 weeks.
We remain optimistic for the future. We have a strong and supportive community behind us.
We're pretty well placed to do more stuff online, we've meant to do that for a long time, but we've often drowned in event organising.
Now we have no choice but to push that to happen quicker.
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I had no idea that you were coming to Detroit! I would have loved to come :)
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Tough times. What's the best solution for doing this online? Sure it would be a reduced experience, but running something will be better than nothing. Wishing you the best of luck in finding something that works out.
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Really sorry to hear @rosiesherry! I work for an event ticketing company and it's been bad for us as well. We'll all come out of this stronger in the end but it's tough right now.
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Hang in there Rosie.
I believe you and your team will learn tons from this experience and become even stronger!
I discovered that we have a Wikipedia page for our company and it was most definitely not created by me.
It's cool to see how people have tried to describe us objectively. I also got a lovely mention picking up on things that I would be too self conscious to mention myself. There are a few things that need updating, I'll need to have a stab at doing that!
I also note that it links back to my IH interview.
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This is awesome and well done. Would love to have similar :) But maybe not famous enough yet 🤔 Hat's off Rosie.
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You’ve hit product-market fit for sure in case anyone was wondering. 😂 People paying you they're hard-earned money. Then they continue to spend their free time to write an article on you. Only to boosts your credibility and SEO juice. Yeah, you know what you're doing! 👏🏾
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Congratulations! SEOs would kill for that link 😂
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Congrats! Having a Wikipedia article written about me or something I've made one day is on my list of "made it" milestones.
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Congratulations, @rosiesherry. And just to pile on a bit, I've come across multiple people in my region (Philadelphia) who attend and host the meetups. They're highly involved and it's got a life of it's own which basically means it has inherent value. Awesome stuff.
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Oh, thank you for that. We did a couple of great conferences in Philly, always enjoyed going there. :)
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Now that's a milestone! :D Congrats Rosie!!
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That is one helluva milestone, congrats!
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Such an exciting moment!
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Congrats!
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I can't think of a better compliment than someone thinking that your company needs to stand the test of time :-)
The content on Wikipedia is long term stored, so you will always live in the data archives.
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Congratulations @rosiesherry. This is indeed a great milestone and Great job with the MoT.
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That's great 😁
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Congrats. This is great! I remember how valuable MOT was during my QA career.
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Glad MoT could contribute in a positive way, thanks! :)
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Great! you've discovered :)
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That is so cool - and some serious validation!
We've been having fun with LinkedIn page growth. Back in June I wrote that we had 15k followers and now we've managed to double it.
What we've been doing:
- posting open questions seemed to work well, we aim to have 2 a day at the moment
- we cross post the same questions to Twitter
- we have been doing much less obvious promotion/marketing of our own stuff
- some of the questions have been posted to our forum too, need to up the game on that
- we also plan to start posting them to our Slack and Instagram.
- many of the questions are on what we see the community talking about and now we also base them on our upcoming conference talks
- we've had many positive comments about this approach and lots interaction from the community - our social presence are really communities within themselves
All of the above still takes significant effort, the reuse of content is key for the team as we have limited resources and everyone is a bit stretched.
LinkedIn Page - https://www.linkedin.com/company/ministry-of-testing/
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That's amazing, Rosie! Love what you're doing and the community IH is bringing together :)
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Sounds like 100 pieces of content/day. The Gary Vee fan in me applauds 👏👏👏
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That’s such a great milestone. Thanks for sharing your journey. I’m curious: how good is Linkedin as a marketing channel from traffic and/or conversions perspective?
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I value the number of comments over everything else, it's a shame it won't give me stats on that.
Here are the stats I can get, for past 30 days:
Unique visitors: 3.2k
New followers: 3.3k
Post impressions: 588k
Custom button clicks: 227 (this one in the hundreds not thousands!)
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Great strategy for driving meaningful engagement, well done!
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Interesting. What do you think the critical subscriber mass is to begin with this type of community engagement on linkedin?
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Impressive!
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This is a really interesting insight. Thank you for sharing. We are trying to work out how to use LinkedIn at the moment.
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I think there needs to be a certain amount of following for the open questions to work. I do similar for IH Twitter and it works great, I'd love to do the same for their LinkedIn, but it just doesn't have enough followers (yet).
I think the Ministry of Testing audience being focused on a 'career path' is also ideal for LinkedIn.
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Makes perfect sense. Adding value through content marketing is a good idea in my head but it is very time consuming.
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Only Buffer to schedule questions in advance. The idea is to post questions for the rest of the month at the beginning of each month. Fire and (kind of) forget. It gets a bit time consuming trying to monitor them too closely.
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I had a quick look at our life time revenue as a business and it was nice to see we crossed the £4 million total revenue - £4,375.307.25 to be precise. Our financial year begins in April.
This how it looked year by year:
- 2019 - 2020: £625,140.24
- 2018 - 2019: £1,203,218.03
- 2017 - 2018: £837,227.00 - 5th child born 😂
- 2016 - 2017: £709,253.00
- 2015 - 2016: £398,837.00
- 2014 - 2015: £237,201.00 - 4th child born 😂
- 2013 - 2014: £160,970.00
- 2012 - 2013: £144,971.00
- 2011 - 2012: £50,335.00 - 3rd child born 😂
- 2010 - 2011: £8,155.00
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I edited it to show the years I had children 😂
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Well that puts it in perspective, haha! Waiting patiently for, '6th child born' milestone. 😂
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Impressive!
Can you please share what you did in 2012 to observe such impressive growth over the previous year?
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Funnily, it's actually listed in the interview I did for Indie Hackers - https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/ministry-of-testing-596212dcdc
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Great, thanks, will read this ASAP.
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Congrats!
I thought I had it tough with 2 kids 😀
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Congratulations and thank you for the great post
I'm launching passportlist.co version one this week.
WIll be very grateful for your quick feedback on how to improve it and grow.
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What's happened last year? Why twice less than in previous?
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It's based on tax years, which at the time of posting was half way through. Our tax year ends on March 31st, so don't have figures for that yet.
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Dayum
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Awesome growth (both revenue and family-wise :D
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Inspiring to see your accomplishments Rosie! Thanks for making a great example!
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Amazing! Congrats Rosie! 🎉
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I'm in awe of you! 🔥
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So impressive Rosie.
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Wow this is awesome. Congrats!
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wow congrats, which business?
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wow this is amazing, I just love that it has been increasing every year.
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Haha love it!
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Congratulations!
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Hats off to you for sharing this. Really puts into perspective how hard it is in the initial years growing a new business. First 5 years, you got to 237K. Next 5 years, Boom. We can all learn from this not to lose hope early on and keep grinding.
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The growth has been amazing. When did you know it starting to grow exponentially?
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Congrats!
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Astounding! Well done!
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Congrats Rosie, very inspiring!
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You are a champion @rosiesherry . Congrats!
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Congratulations Rosie, that's an incredible achievement. Lovely interview on the podcast as well, absolute inspiration.
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Thank you.
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nicely done!
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Congratulations. Pretty inspiring milestone!
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Congratulations Rosie!
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Superb!
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just.... wow. #hat-tilt to fellow parent-indie-hacker
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Congrats @rosiesherry
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Amazing!
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Congrats! And bloody hell, your brave with 5 kids, I struggle to get work done with one around lmao.
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I call it stupid rather than brave :D
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Oh my goodness, congrats 🙌
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We keep saying no more TestBashes (our software testing conferences), but we caved in yet again.
When we do our conferences in new locations we typically look to partner with a local and loyal enthusiast of our community.
In this case Hilary had been nagging us for years to to a TestBash in her local city. She's spent the past few years running a software testing meetup community. Has spoken and volunteered at many of our events. She is also one with a Ministry of Testing tattoo.
We are hoping there is room to continue with both Detroit and San Francisco TestBashes for the foreseeable future. Fingers crossed!
https://ministryoftesting.com/news/tester-s-start-your-engines-testbash-is-coming-to-the-midwest
I mentioned previously we have 70 Meetup groups across the world. These are all volunteer led and supported by us.
We have a great fan base in across the world. Meetup groups vary in sizes. Brazil are big fans of ours!
But our Athens group is just nuts and mad crazy. Their last meetup had 300 people attend. That's the size of a conference!
I'll be the first to admit that I can't really remember much about what I said. And that I feel all kind of awkward and self conscious now that it is published.
I may have to go hide away for a few days.
But have a listen to how I try to explain how I focused on growing the Ministry of Testing community through being kind and putting others first. This stuff is really not measurable through traditional means.
We also talk about some aspects of the IH community and perhaps you'll understand why I'm Community Manager here and not heading up and leading Ministry of Testing anymore.
https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/097-rosie-sherry-of-ministry-of-testing
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I listened to the podcast yesterday, and it was great! I really appreciated your unique perspective on the process of being a founder, and your selfless/ego-free approach to what you've accomplished.
I only started working my way through the IH archives in the last week or so, and so far there have been a couple that I plan to listen to again, at a time when I can devote my attention completely. This is definitely on this list.
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Awesome @rosiesherry!
Really looking forward to listening to this later in the train :)
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I‘m so looking forward to listening to it!
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Congratulations! I love to hear it :)
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Rosie! Awesome congrats! I will listen to this episode!
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LinkedIn has done us well over the years, it can be a huge pain too, but overall for us the pain is worth it.
In the early days I started a group, this ended up driving many members to our online forum. The group still exists, at around 35k members. The discussions are not useful at all and we end up just deleting 95% of the as 'marketing spam'. Annoying.
We've been more consistent in the past year or two with our LinkedIn page. Mostly we use it the same way we use Twitter.
- We post open ended questions, these are great for engagement and usually end up driving 30-100 responses. Often we will post links into the comments a few days after the original post.
- Link to our discussions, resources and events.
- We tag people in where relevant, especially for our events.
We currently stand at 15k followers on our LinkedIn page.
It drives traffic and engagement at the moment, not sure how long that will last, but we'll keep doing it. Anywhere between 100 - 2000 clicks on the posts.
LinkedIn page for reference: https://www.linkedin.com/company/280998/
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I found my way here from your post about getting to 30k followers - congrats, that's an amazing milestone!
I'm working on building an audience on LinkedIn, but I don't have a lot of experience with social media in general. After two weeks I've reached the dizzy heights of 50 followers, the majority of whom I have a personal connection with. Do you have any advice / good resources you'd recommend for someone getting started?
You said in another comment that you target people directly based on job titles: did you just DM them, or engage with their posts, or just connect directly with them? I'm (clearly!) pretty clueless about the right approach to follow here, anything you could share that would point me in the right direction would be incredible.
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15k that's huge - awesome work Rosie!!
It seems like LinkedIn is a lot noisier/spammier in general these days...
Do you think it's worth starting to build an audience on LinkedIn from scratch in 2019? And would you recommend any tools (like Dux Soup?)
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I think it's worth it, but it depends on your audience too. The advantage for Ministry of Testing is that we can find our target people (software testers) pretty easily as we just need to search on job titles. And a lot of them tend to hang out there, especially those that find Twitter a bit overwhelming.
I've never used any tools or paid for any ads. I tend to just do things manually. I also have 11k contacts that I've 'casually' built up over the years.
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That makes a lot of sense, especially re job titles. Will def keep LinkedIn on the radar as channel for future projects then!
Appreciate the insight, thank you :)
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LinkedIn is probably the social network I know least about. How would I check out your page, just search for indie hackers?
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Oh yeah, I meant to add the page link into the post, I've added it in now.
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Congrats!
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