Shepherd
Like browsing the best bookstore in the world.
Shepherd.com is now launched into beta!
I love reading and I am trying to create an online experience that is like wandering through your local bookstore. Along with little notes pointing out great books by people who really know that topic.
For the beta launch, I’ve got a little over 400 book recommendation lists by authors on specific subjects. These are all hand curated.
Here are a few of my favorites:
The Best Books On The Power And Wonder of Mathematics
https://shepherd.com/best-books/power-and-wonder-mathematics
The Best Books On The Meaning Of Life
https://shepherd.com/best-books/meaning-of-life
*Tom is one of my favorite video essayists and worth a watch.
The Best Books For Understanding Human Nature
https://shepherd.com/best-books/understanding-human-nature
This is just the start and I have a lot of improvements coming. In a few weeks, I will rollout related booklists so that you can keep following your curiosity from booklist to booklist.
We now have an official launch date, Shepherd will launch on April 15th!
I will spend the first two weeks of April talking to every author and making sure their book list looks great on the website. I want to make sure they are happy with how everything looks.
I spent the majority of the last two weeks inputting all the book and author data into our system. It is a lot of manual work to add all the book titles, book cover images, ISBNs, author names, and other data. I’ve paused emails to new authors until I catch up. And, I’ve been working with a developer to make some big improvements to this workflow. That will help me speed up this process and add someone to help eventually 😃.
More info here:
http://build.shepherd.com/issues/building-shepherd-launch-date-data-entry-and-marketing-474896
A little less than a month after we hit 100 launch authors we have now hit 200 - which feels awesome! And, out of those 200 authors, 100 have already turned in their book recommendations on a topic they are passionate about (with the rest coming soon). A topic page is something like: "The Best Books On Historic Accounts Of Plague Outbreaks" or "The Best Books On The Hittite Empire". The authors pick their five favorite books on a topic and why they love those books. Alongside that list, we showcase the author and one of their books to help them get more exposure as well.
We are working on the frontend of the site now and on track for an early April launch :). I am very excited to help people discover books in a new way, and we have a lot more features planned after launch.
I am doing updates every two weeks at Revue via email. You can sign up if you want to follow along as I build Shepherd:
http://build.shepherd.com/
Everything is going great! We've started working on the frontend and are on schedule for an April launch. I've finished the specs for some key features coming shortly after launch and I am starting to mock those up with a designer. Those will include the first steps in relating best book lists to each other and pages around big topics. We are calling those "Shelves" which will be collections of topics around things like "World War 2" or "Nose Mythology".
We now have 100 authors who have agreed to write a topic page or who have already turned one in. A topic page is something like: "The Best Books On Historic Accounts Of Plague Outbreaks" or "The Best Books On The Hittite Empire".
The more topic pages we have the more exposure authors get because we can relate different topics and help readers follow their curiosity along different paths. This is crucial for our beta launch in the Spring and a wider launch in the Fall.
I've spent the last 30 days reaching out to authors and I am blown away by the response! I've gotten to chat with some of my favorite authors which is amazing :). What else? I've designed a CRM system on AirTable, built out an email outreach system with Lemlist, hired several people part-time to help me with aspects of outreach, and built a pipeline that will add 100 new topic pages each month. The pipeline should scale further once we are ready to increase the volume.
What am I doing this week? I am adding data to the site's backend and testing for bugs and efficiency of workflow. After we get everything tested we can start work on the frontend (and connecting it to the backend).
What am I building?
Shepherd is like browsing the best bookstore in the world.
We are aiming to launch in Spring 2021. I started on this project full time in mid-December 2020. I am having a blast. I love talking to authors and I am excited about helping them meet more readers :). Right now I am working with an amazing developer on the backend. I will be doing weekly updates for myself and in case anyone wants to follow along.
Who am I?
My name is Ben Fox and I am a serial entrepreneur who loves to read. I want to help people find books as if they are walking through the best bookstore in the world. And, some of this is driven by frustration with Amazon and Goodreads and the experience they are creating for authors and readers.
What is the idea based on?
I love walking around the bookstore and browsing different shelves until something grabs my attention. I think that is poorly replicated online. I want to help readers bump into books that they would otherwise not find. Not only by related topics but in some unorthodox ways in order to meet books. And, I want to help authors meet more readers and to earn more. That means helping them market themselves and their books. My long term goal is to make marketing easy so that authors can focus more on writing and less on marketing. Especially with a channel that is independent of Amazon.
1 Comment
Let me know what you all think :)
The homepage is a bit rough, but improvements coming soon along with actual topic pages and search.