Building Shepherd - New Hires & New Feature!

910 authors have turned in a book list for Shepherd or committed to writing one(which is amazing 😃).

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May 17th - May 28th.

Crazy 2 Weeks + New Team Member

It has been an intense two weeks. I had a health scare on the 20th and spent all day in the emergency room getting tests done. Luckily everything was normal and I probably just had a bad muscle pull (it was causing a lot of anxiety given it was in my pelvic/intestinal region). And, of course... the weird spasm/twitch went away a day later :). That knocked me quite a bit behind and I am still working to catch up.

Team update!

You might remember from the last update, but I hired Joy to help me with data entry on books and author profiles. She is doing amazing and that has freed up a lot of my time.

New hire!

I hired Jessy to help me with the editing process with authors, author follow-ups, and a few other items. She started last Thursday and she is doing fantastic. Her job is very challenging so I will be training her over the next few weeks. Once she is up to speed I will focus more of my time on growing traffic/marketing/features.

New Feature - Author Order & Relationships

We just finished a feature to set the order of authors in a specific way. We also took the time to better-set relationships to the book such as lead author, author, translator, illustrator, and so on (as eventually, we will display that on the frontend better). We are working to fix the books we already have in the system now.

What's next for Shepherd?

The amazing developer I work with on Shepherd is on break for June. So we won't be tackling any new features until he is back in July. At which point we will be working to add full topic support and topic pages (a monster update that I am very excited about!).

I am working with a fantastic designer to figure out the UI/UX/design for the topic pages as well as search and some other design improvements.

I am working to improve our author outreach and hopefully increase author referrals. My hope is to start adding 80 to 100 book recommendation pages each week. The more we have the stronger our overall network and the more sales we can drive for authors.

Since we launched, we have sold $10,000+ dollars worth of books through our affiliate partners. It is a great start and one I'd like to be doing on a daily basis in 18 months or less.

I missed this on Friday as it has been so crazy, I hope you all had a great weekend,

Thanks, Ben