After we started Shepherd Dog we got out into the local community through volunteering, going to meet ups, and figuring out the people and companies that were already established in the local technology industry and setting up meetings with them. We still haven't met everyone, but this story starts with one of those meetups, in particular Little DOCC.

The Little DOCC is a biweekly meeting for Denton technology...

Leslie Forsyth, the owner of Healing Arts, is my mom. Most of my life she has been the breadwinner of the household and for years she has owned her own business. She shared her entrepreneurial spirit with me...

It has been six months since we created Shepherd Dog. In that time we’ve built four websites, created 3 iOS apps, and learned a handful of useful things. I’m thrilled with what we’ve accomplished so far, where we are right now, and really excited about where we are heading.

In a previous post we mentioned that when we started this journey, we didn’t have a spelled out plan for reaching our target market. One of the main reasons for this is that we wanted to stay flexible so we could learn and adjust as we grow. Also by nature we are “generalists”, we like to do a little bit of everything and not just specialize in one small specific area. Although we do have some specific strengths, we didn’t only want to focus on or offer just those services alone because we wanted to be able to learn exactly what other small businesses in the area need and then do what it takes to provide that to them.

Oh my have we learned a lot in the last couple months. I think our biggest gains are in the area of SEO where we have quickly gone from the idea that “good content will be found” to “we need to make sure that good content will be found” to my current position of “improving SEO means improving the user experience.” I’ve realized that learning how Google taught bots to glean information from webpages can give incredible insights into how humans do it. Here are a few key insights and examples of how we got it wrong while trying to be right:

We’re excited to be starting this new adventure with Shepherd Dog, so naturally we’ve been sharing our excitement with family, old friends, new friends… basically anyone that’s interested. And in doing so we’ve found that frequently the first question we get from people is, “How do you market something like that?”

In these first few months as we make decisions about Shepherd Dog we are also figuring out what our values are. Part of our thought process for each decision involves analyzing why we made that decision and what it says about who we are. In the near future we will put our values into writing and make them a core part of our site.

Today we are thrilled to talk about the first client website that we have built. This project has an interesting story and we hope to turn parts of it into a template for how we find future clients. You can take a look at the new site at https://www.imperialtx.com.

One month ago, we filed our paperwork with the tax assessor and Shepherd Dog officially came to life. Since then we have been working with clients and building our own website which we are thrilled to share today.