I remind myself, it takes time to create cool stuff.

My new mantra :)

Every two weeks, I share my notes on building Shepherd.com. Shepherd makes exploring and discovering new books fun (while helping authors get their books in front of the most likely readers). Please join us as a founding member if you want to support us.

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March 13th to March 24th

My current mood is good, but wishing the universe would grant me full power over time, space, and matter for a month… 🤪

Adding genres and age data is a monster project.

I knew it would be. But it has taken longer than I thought it would.

Current status:

• Design - 90% done.

  • We are finishing some last-minute design tweaks.

  • We are trying to improve/simplify the filter feature (an utterly key UX element)

• Dev - 33% done

  • Backend - 100% done

  • Frontend - 0% done (work starts next week)

• Data processing - 10% done (Ben’s job)

  • Organizing age data - 95% done

  • Organizing genre data - 25% done

  • Building genre pages - 0% done

  • Building age pages - 0% done

  • I've got a lot to do over the next 30 to 60 days.

Timeline…

I’ll know more next week…

I am trying to ship the new book page + filter before Marton (our fantastic part-time dev) goes on a much-deserved vacation. I am unsure if this is possible, and I will know more as we break down the work next week.

If we can’t make that work, it could be late July before we launch this feature fully. There are a good 10 to 12 weeks of solid work here.

I am just reminding myself it takes time to build cool stuff :)

What worries do you have right now?

I need to 3x our traffic this year so that we reach break-even on costs and can keep adding new features at the same pace (or faster).

Google rolled out a big update this week and that has hit us with slowing growth slightly. That is normal and part of the process for a new website, but frustrating.

I am hopeful that April picks up on traffic and I am doing a lot of work to improve the experience for readers as always. Slowly but surely we will get there :)!

What is going on outside of Shepherd?

My lovely wife celebrated a birthday. I surprised her with a trip to the beach for the weekend. It was a bit cold, but we had an amazing view.

What am I reading?

• Savage Peace - I love this book! Hoping to finish it soon.

Thanks, Ben

P.S. View from our little beach cabin in Portugal.