We recently connected with Stefanie Sorondo and have shared our conversation below.
Stefanie, appreciate you joining us today. How do you feel about asking friends and family to support your business? What’s appropriate, what’s not? Where do you draw the line?
As an new company, Barrio Comics has faced funding issues from almost the very start. As a result, Barrio Comics has been working hard to obtain funding from friends & family by promoting our content on social media. We gather up the funds to produce graphical bits to share with our social media audience in hopes that will gather the attention of our audience, which include friends & family.
Stefanie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My partner Gabe (a.k.a. Mike), co-founder of Barrio Comics, & I share an interest in horror stories & movies. We both grew up in Mexican-American Chicano families in Fresno, CA. Mike also has an interest in comic books, with an avid comic book collection at his side.
Mike & I created Barrio Comics to share a love of comic books, horror stories, & to promote Latino culture. Since Latino culture is not well represented in film, books, & other media, Mike & I feel like we are taking a rare opportunity to share some of the folklore stories that have been told from generation to generation in the Latino culture.
Mike & I are both proud to be able to entertain people by keeping them reading on the edge of their seats, & also that we get to share stories of the Latino culture with our readers. We are currently collaborating with Josiel Erasmo for illustrations to our stories. Barrio Comics plans on adding a female artist to the team as well.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
Building an audience on social media can be challenging, but also rewarding & effective. Barrio Comics began by building an Instagram page sharing new posts (with new paid-for illustrations & hashtags), as well as other content. From there, we set a goal to obtain so many followers, & at the same time experimenting with KoFi funding. The KoFi funding didn’t go very well, but we were slowly starting to reach Instagram users. We also branched out on Facebook, joined various comic book groups, & began posting in them. After meeting our Instagram followers goal, we set out to create our Kickstarter campaign. This included researching other Kickstarter pages for ideas, developing incentives to buy (example: Spend $50, get 1 copy each of La Cazadora Vol. 1 & 2, etc.), & acquiring new content relating to our comic series story.
If I could give any advice to any upcoming business, I would say try everything. See what social media platforms work for you, which ones don’t. Pay attention to your metrics, what posts are getting the most hits, which are not? The great thing about social media is that you can advertise to your customer demographic(s). No more wasting time advertising to whoever will listen, now it is about honing in on your audience!
We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.
So, Mike & I met in college. We were both in student government & soon after became good friends. Eventually Mike & I opened a computer repair shop down the street from the community college we both attended. We enjoyed working together in the tech industry & in student government. We reconnected several years later & co-founded Barrio Comics!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/barriocomics
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/barriocomics/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/barriocomics
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@barriocomics
- Other: Podcast: https://anchor.fm/barriocomics KoFi: https://ko-fi.com/lacazadora Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lacazadora/la-cazadora-the-beginning?ref=project_link
Image Credits
Josiel Erasmo