A proposal from six miles away
The Painted Porch
Ryan — five things we found on your site this morning, what we would do
about them, and one thing we are asking for. It should take about four minutes to read.
First, the free part
We went through thepaintedporch.com and the Daily Stoic channel by hand this morning. No
software audit, no report generator — somebody actually looked. Here is what we found,
and you are welcome to it whether or not anything else here interests you.
1. The shop hours link to a 2020 store membership.
The hours in your top bar — Monday to Thursday and Sunday 10–7,
Friday and Saturday 10–8 — are wrapped in a link pointing to
/products/2020-store-membership. Anyone
who taps the hours on a phone, which is exactly what someone standing on Main Street does,
lands on a six-year-old product page instead of directions.
2. The front page is showing July’s reading list in mid‑August.
“Ryan’s July Reading List’” is the hero. For a shop
whose whole promise is curation, a stale month on the front page is the one kind of dust that
shows.
3. Two navigation links point at last year.
“Sam’s Reading Lists’” goes to a December list.
“Socials Lists’” goes to
books-you-should-read-right-now-jan-2026
— right now, in January. These are permanent nav items pointing at dated collections, so
they go stale on a schedule nobody set.
4. There is no “plan your visit” anywhere in the navigation.
Home, About, Browse, Ryan’s Recommendations, Sam’s Lists, Socials
Lists, Quarterly Classics. It reads as a bookstore that ships books. But people drive to
Bastrop for this shop — that is the rare and valuable thing about it — and
the site does not help them do it. No map, no parking, no what-else-is-on-Main-Street, no
“here is what is worth the drive this month.”
5. Two million subscribers, and not one of them is pointed here.
The Daily Stoic channel has 2.05 million subscribers and about 4,900 videos.
Its links go to dailystoic.com/email and store.dailystoic.com. The bookshop is not among them.
That is a defensible choice — the newsletter is the better asset and you know that better
than we do. But it does mean the most valuable audience in the world for a Stoicism bookshop is
being handed to a mailing list, and the shop six miles from us gets whatever finds it by
accident.
Who is asking
We are in Bastrop, six miles from your front door. We build and run a network of about 420
websites, 250 of them driven by a marketing engine we wrote ourselves. Seven of those sites are
about Bastrop specifically — the news, the radio, the builders, the realty, the film
office, the fiber rollout, and a civic one.
420sites
7about Bastrop
6 mifrom your porch
The engine audits a site, writes the fixes, and publishes the ones a person approves. It is
not a demo. It has been running daily, it publishes to real sites, and when it produces
something defective a quality gate refuses to ship it. We are not going to claim it is finished
— we spent this week finding and fixing our own faults in it, and we will tell you about
those before we tell you about the wins.
What we would do for the shop
Nothing here needs your time beyond a yes.
- Fix the five things above, starting with the hours link, which is a ten‑minute
job and is costing you walk-ins today.
- Build the visit page the shop deserves — hours that are actually current, a map,
parking, what is on the shelves this month, and what else to do on Main Street while you are in
town. Written so it reads like the shop, not like a listing.
- Put the shop into the Bastrop network we already run, properly and editorially: the
news site, the radio site, the civic site. Not link-stuffing. Coverage.
- Make the dated lists behave. The nav should point at “this month’s
list,” and the month should change itself.
- Measure whether any of it worked, which is the part almost nobody does. We fitted
measurement across our own network this week and found we had been flying blind for months. We
would rather show you a real zero than a flattering guess.
The honest part
You wrote a book about how easily media is manipulated, so you will have read a hundred
pitches like this and found the seam in every one. So here is ours: we have not proved this
makes anyone money yet. We have built the machine, we have published with it, and the number
of customers it has demonstrably produced so far is zero. We know that because we finally
instrumented it, not because we are guessing.
What we can prove is that we do the work, we check it, and we report what we find even when it
is unflattering. That is the whole of our claim.
What we are asking
Support for the local build — a Bastrop network that covers this town properly, with
your shop in it as the anchor rather than an advertiser.
Concretely: twenty minutes in the shop, and a straight answer
to whether this is worth backing. If it is, we will talk about what backing looks like. If it is
not, keep the five findings above and we will fix the hours link for you anyway, because it is
six miles away and it is bothering us.
Paul Terry Walhus
Bastrop, Texas
501.365.1001 · walhus@gmail.com