Building Shepherd - 1,000 published pages!!! 🥳

1,606 authors have turned in a book list for Shepherd or committed to writing one(amazing 😃).

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July 26th - August 6th

1,000+ published pages!!!

Woohoo!! 🥳

As of Monday, August 2nd we have over 1,000 published book lists (1,030 to be specific). Very cool and I am looking forward to the next 1,000 book lists. My aim is to reach 2,000 book lists by the end of the year.

Feature Timeline...

Shelves

The Shelf feature (aka topic pages) is underway and we expect to finish the backend portion by the end of September. My hope is we can launch the front end by the end of October with at least 25 to 50 topics (and a lot more to follow)...

Search + Totally New Frontpage

This is up next and my hope is we have it ready for a December launch. I won't know the specific timeline for a while though (we need to dig into the search technology a bit more).

What type of searches will we do?

• Searching for topic or keyword

• Searching for your favorite book

• Searching for your favorite author

For all these searches we would return related Shelves and Book Lists to help people start browsing for amazing books based on what they are looking for or what they love.

Quick updates for the last 2 weeks...

New Author Outreach

I decided to slow down our new author outreach by ~40% for now. That should give us some time to improve workflows, train Jessy on a few more things, and give me at least half the day for other work. Plus, we are starting to receive more referrals from authors, publishers, agents, and publicists which is great as they are already pre-sold on the idea and don't take as many emails back and forth (more efficient).

Traffic For July

For July we had 28,000+ unique visitors and 50,000+ page views. That is a 33% gain over June’s traffic. Very close to my short term goal of 1,000 unique visitors a day and I am curious if we will hit it in August (August is usually a very slow month with everyone on vacation).

Search Engine Traffic For July

Traffic from Google was up 39% month over month which is what we want to keep seeing. To really push that forward faster we need to get topic pages shipped and a new front page. Once we have those I can start going after higher volume searches (which are also more competitive).

What else is going on?

I got my 2nd vaccine shot! Science is amazing :)

And, now that I have that I am planning a vacation for September :). I am planning to take 2 to 3 weeks for a solo bike trip somewhere. Viva la adventure!

Thanks, Ben