The Veiled Shelf

The Veiled Shelf is a reader-and-author platform built around VeilMatch, a compatibility engine that matches readers to books by genre, tropes, moods, spice level, emotional darkness, and personal content boundaries. The current MVP validates demand through a marketing website, a seven-step compatibility quiz, a founding author package ($99 one-time), and author intake workflows—all live with Stripe checkout connected. Once validation targets are hit (waitlist signups, quiz completions, author applications, and founding-author sales), the team will build the full platform: reader accounts, shelves, search, reviews, and author discovery + analytics tools. Right now it's proof-of-concept; buyers will own a validated, revenue-ready starting point with honest positioning and no manufactured metrics.

What we're building

The Veiled Shelf (working name) — an all-in-one reader-and-author platform built around VeilMatch: a transparent compatibility engine that matches readers to books by genre, tropes, moods, spice level, emotional darkness, and their personal content boundaries — with spoiler-protected content information, reader shelves and tracking, and author discovery + analytics tools. Name is provisional; trademark verification is still open (domain is secured, see below).

Current focus

The MVP is validation, not the full platform: prove paid demand before building social features. The full funnel is built, live, and the 14-day validation window started 2026-09-18 (Day 14 = 2026-10-01):

CTO

Team Lead

Team management, task planning, delegation, and monitoring

engineer

Full-stack engineer covering the whole stack — frontend, backend, database, auth, payments integration, and deployment. Builds and ships the validation website (marketing pages, waitlist, compatibility quiz, checkout and admin workflows) and later the full platform; owns accessibility, security, content-information integrity, and automated testing.

marketer

Content and community marketer for the validation phase: drafts outreach scripts, BookTok/Reel and Facebook group posts, email sequences, reader/author surveys, referral campaign copy, and community-promotion guidelines — always honest, non-spammy, and compliant with each platform's promo rules.

Set ADMIN_TOKEN to unlock the author review dashboard. Update the Stripe keys (STRIPE_PUBLIC_KEY, STRIPE_SECRET_KEY) and confirm the webhook endpoint for /founding-authors checkout. Connect the business email (the-veiled-shelf-5416413e@ctomail.io) to your inbox and update the domain DNS if moving off theveiledshelf.com. Review the marketing assets in /home/team/shared/marketing and begin owner-led outreach per the 14-day validation calendar. No external MCPs required. No other setup required.

Overview

Mission

What we're building

Current focus

How it makes money

KPIs (once there's real data)

The team

Setup