Building Shepherd - Special Launch Week Edition :)

559 authors have created a book list for Shepherd (or committed to writing in). I am very thankful for the amazing response 😃.

Launch week was fantastic! No major bugs and the site handled the traffic spikes beautifully. What was traffic like?

This is a great start!

A huge thank you to all the authors for sharing their book recommendation pages (every bit helps the site grow). We also got featured on a few big sites like the Hacker News Tech Community. I am looking forward to growing this site as I really enjoy marketing!

A huge thank you to Márton Salomváry who is the developer I am working with on this project :). He wrote an excellent post on building Shepherd.com with a lot of technical details if you are interested.

We are currently testing the related book list feature and it is working well. We are building a map of the relationships between book lists by looking at 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree links between the books on the list. This feature will ship sometime early next month. For readers, this will allow them to follow their curiosity through the website. For authors, it will increase traffic to their book pages and give them more exposure and sales.

Also, I am restarting outreach to new authors as I work to add more book lists. I want to add more book lists in anticipation of launching topic pages come July/August. I’d like to launch with 100 topic lists ready to go from the start.

Anthony Bourdain is someone I’ve always looked up to. He seemed to have an endless capacity for curiosity and empathy for humanity, while also balancing his ferocious individualism. He would speak his mind but in a way that people respected. He was an amazing storyteller. This site is inspired by what he created on his TV shows, his interactions with people everywhere on this planet, and what I loved about his personality (that I could see from outside/afar).

When I heard the news of his passing it really struck me and my wife. We both love to travel, explore the world, and explore food. I hope this website lives up to what he has inspired.

Thanks, Ben