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Shep 4 Newsletter — September 2026

Welcome to the third Shep 4 Newsletter!

Last month, my wife gave birth to our daughter, Emmy! She is a happy, healthy, and beautiful baby girl. I took some time away to focus on my family and adjust to life with two kids, but now I’m ready to get back to building things and sharing the process!

Review of Last Month

For the last two months, I worked on Project Zero Inventory. The goal was to experiment with producing and selling products without keeping an inventory by leaning into third-party, on-demand manufacturing. Overall, the project was a partial success: I published three kids’ books using Amazon’s print-on-demand service, giving me three new products without having to keep or ship any inventory.

Check them out:

The Wheels On The Bus book is my favorite of the three. I basically rewrote the classic song in a way that teaches all the components of a bus engine and how they work together.

While the kids books are great, the 3D-printed kitchen gadgets are still unfinished. I’m still working on them in the background, but I won’t post another update until I have something meaningful to share. The main lesson I learned is that, moving forward, I need to choose Projects of the Month that are more within my control and don’t depend as heavily on outside people or resources.

Moving Forward

This month’s Project of the Month is Project One Video, a self-explanatory project where the goal is to make and publish one video.

For context, my long-term plan is to use social media to bring more attention to the projects I’m building. I’m finding that LinkedIn is not the best platform for building in public, so I ultimately want to expand to Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms. Before I do that, however, I want to make sure I’m not biting off more than I can chew.

One thing I’m learning from the books I’ve been reading about social media is that the easiest way to create content consistently is to reuse it. Evidently, there is a strict order of operations: start with long-form content and break it into smaller pieces, not the other way around. With this in mind, YouTube is the next logical step because I can create one long-form video and cut it into shorter clips later.

My goal for the month is simple: film, edit, and publish one video on YouTube. I’ll start with a straightforward tutorial about an AI agent I’ve been working on. But the real goal isn’t so much the video itself as it is developing a workflow that I can repeat for future videos.

Articles

Final Thoughts

Thanks for reading! I appreciate your support and hope you’ll follow along as I attempt to produce my first video.

I’m going to leave you with an interesting fact I learned recently: a single day on Venus lasts longer than an entire year on Venus. It takes the planet about 243 Earth days to rotate once, but only about 225 Earth days to orbit the Sun (SOURCE).