Join the rebellion and create the indie book platform readers deserve!

100% of your membership goes toward new features.

What is our goal for 2024?

Reach 1,000 Founding Members!

As of Dec 2nd, 2024: 844 Founding Members 🥳

We’re on a mission to reach 1,000 Founding Members, which would allow us to cover the costs of our part-time developer and designer fully.

Your support means the world to me and will ensure we can keep improving and growing the platform for readers like you

Thanks, Ben Fox

Founding Reader Signup

Or, via Paypal: $25 a year, $50 a year, or $250 a year.

Why should I support Shepherd?

Invest in an independent book platform.

Your support keeps us independent and fuels our efforts to build new features and improve the ones you already love.

Plus, if we can reach enough support we can remove all the ads on the website.

We can’t do this without your support!

We have 3 goals for readers: 

  1. Help readers find books they will LOVE (not just like).

  2. Create fun and unique ways for readers to explore and discover books.

  3. Build a strong reader community centered around sharing books you LOVE.

We are just getting started; read more about how we will achieve these goals here.

This is not a Goodreads replacement.

We are reimagining what book discovery looks like.

While we might have some similar functionality, we are rethinking how books can be explored, discovered, and celebrated online. Goodreads and Amazon make book discovery about as fun as shopping for new toothpaste. Given the magic of books that seems like a crime against humanity 🤪. We want to fix that.

What are we adding over the next 12 months with our goals mind?

  • Launching our Book DNA review format that focuses on why you enjoyed a book. As we gather more data, the goal is to match you with readers with similar Book DNA, thus increasing the chance that you will love the books we recommend. We will learn and evolve as we implement this. 

  • Launching a massive revamp of our bookshelves so they can be explored visually and highlight the most recommended, trending books, and new books. 

  • Improving the accuracy of our genre & topic system.

  • Expanding book discovery to include mood, themes, tropes, time periods, and characters as we grow.

  • We need curiosity and wonder in our lives, and we have some unique features planned to help readers encounter things they don’t know about and connect those concepts to books. It's like wandering around a museum and finding an amazing presentation you want to learn more about.

  • We are launching a lot more reader features, and I’ll share more soon.

What perks do Founding Reader receive?

We are very new, and more perks are coming soon...

We just added user accounts in October 2024, and we are working to add more features and personalization for readers. As part of that we will be adding special features for our Founding Readers.

Ad-Free Browsing - Coming soon!

Very soon, we will have ad-free browsing for members.

Special Flair - Coming soon!

As we launch our user community, your account will receive a special flair to mark you as a Founding Member, among many other perks we have planned.

Help shape our roadmap + early access.

Our Founding Readers can suggest features and influence our roadmap. Plus, they get early access to new features, get to preview and give feedback on features as we build them, and more in our private membership group.

I also do videos and live Zoom events every few months.

How is Shepherd Funded?

We are bootstrapped & don’t waste money.

To start Shepherd, I funded it using my savings and sweat equity (more about me and why I started Shepherd). To achieve sustainability, I need support from readers like you. 

Everything you see at Shepherd was built with one part-time developer and one part-time designer. Goodreads has 347 employees listed on LinkedIn; imagine what we could do if we had enough money to hire one full-time developer (or two).

My goal is to break even on our costs this year and make enough to hire a full-time developer next year.

What are our costs?

  • 20% - Servers, software, and licensing costs.

  • 30% - Our small but mighty team that runs the day-to-day operations.

  • 50% - The cost of our fantastic part-time developer and part-time designer.

How are you funded?

Shepherd is primarily funded by our membership program.

In addition, we get a small amount of affiliate revenue from links on the website, which helps us pay for the servers. We also have ugly display ads on the website, which helps cover our server costs. I hope we can remove those ads once we have enough members. 

Is it easy to cancel (for whatever reason)?

Yes!

I hate when it is hard to cancel a subscription. So, I made it super easy to cancel your membership. You can cancel by:

  • Log in to our billing panel here and click cancel (if you paid via credit card or bank transfer).

  • Or login to Paypal to cancel there.