Hourstriker Looking Back at 2023 and Forward to 2024

2023 was an interesting year for us here at Hourstriker, by us I mean my wife and myself. We launched the site in April 2023 as more a shell of a site than anything else. Since it can take years for a site to gain traction, my wife just said “get something up!” and I did.

My background is in software architecture and to me it’s just as important to build a site that looks good as it is to make sure the site is built as well as possible. So there really isn’t such a thing as just throwing something up. I’ve made enough sites to know if you rush the initial development that you will constantly be making little patches for the entirety of the site’s life. Once we had a general idea of what we wanted to do with Hourstriker, I set out to create the database and then get the general layout of the site done.

Initially when we launched Hourstriker the site was 100% focused on articles such as news, reviews and educational pieces. After a few weeks of putting up articles I decided that there really needed to be a better organized way to get through these articles, epically the articles about watch education.



At this time we were starting to put up a lot of articles about watch brands and also various complications found in watches. While building the database we identified hundreds of watch brands that we wanted to feature on the site. Initially we only wrote about a few of our favorite brands, leaving hundreds of other brands with no content. We decided over the next few months to make a huge push and get every brand that we entered into the database a full brand history article.

Past having just an in depth article on each brand’s history, we thought it would make more sense to have a central hub for each brand. This would feature a short brand write up and have the main article about the brand’s history pinned first, making it easy to really delve into the brand. Then every time we’d tag a brand in an article it would show up at the top of that brand’s landing page. This just made it much more efficient to see every time we mentioned a brand.

Here is an example of a brand’s landing page:

https://www.hourstriker.com/brands/audemars-piguet



Next we decided it was time to put all of the articles we were putting up about watch components and complications in one place. For this we decided to create the most complete and in-depth watch glossary that we know of. For each component / complication the glossary landing page has a short two paragraph write up about the component with an image illustrating the component as well.

Just having that as a glossary would have been a very strong watch glossary, but we also went one step further. For each component there is a link to a detailed article about the component. In these articles we not only talk about what the component / complication is, but also talk about its history and also highlight a few watches that best represent that component.

Here is the link to our watch glossary:

https://www.hourstriker.com/glossary



At this point we felt that Hourstriker had watch information covered rather well with reviews, articles, news and a pretty solid knowledge base. The next natural extension of Hourstriker would be to selling watches. We created the one of the largest online watch sales sites nearly 20 years ago and felt it was time to add a store to Hourstriker.

For our store, we felt it was important to try and sell watches that we were actually interested in. We’re huge fans of brands like IWC, Panerai, Hublot and Sinn, so these were some of the first watches we started listing for sale. Past that we also tried to focus on watches from those brands that we would actually have in our collection. The biggest issue we’ve had so far is how to source watches in this mostly less than $10,000 price range. Through all of the years of being in the industry we really didn’t make many connections for these types of watches. For the most part we dealt with extremely rare and more expensive pieces. This really isn’t where we want to be for Hourstriker. Hopefully for 2024 we can find a more reliable source for the type of watches we have been adding to our store.

Here is the landing page for our store:

https://www.hourstriker.com/shop



We also felt it was important to feature more in-depth watch reviews and articles moving forward. When a new watch comes out and a brand releases a press release there is only so much you can say about them. For the most part articles like these will be put up daily since it really doesn’t take much time to put them together. Everyone does that, so we thought it would be interesting if a few times a week we put out articles (like this one) and reviews that are much longer and more detailed. We have a ton of experience in the industry and feel we have an interesting viewpoint contrasting the current trends of people that have been around watches for just a few years. We enjoy putting these articles together, but with our rather small team of two, it is very hard to get more than a few up a week. Also with most of 2023 being dedicated to adding features to the site and filling them out with content, we had been very short on time for these types of articles. In 2024 you can expect a lot more of these in-depth articles and reviews.

The last section we want to talk about for 2023 is the watch database section of the site. In this section of the site we are trying to add every current (and then future) reference for every brand featured on our site. The goal for this section is to build this into an easy to use, yet extremely powerful tool for you to easily browse and compare watches from hundreds of brands all in one place. Needless to say this is a chore to put up, but we’re getting a little bit faster at this taxing data entry every day. So far we’ve completed a few brands and should have many more completed shortly.

Here is a link to our watch database page:

https://www.hourstriker.com/database



Now that we’ve covered the highlights of what we’ve been up to since launching the site up until the start of 2024, now it’s time to look at what we would like to achieve in 2024.

For the most part I put most of the initial work into Hourstriker. This included everything from coding the site to entering in watches and writing articles. I knew there was zero chance of this model continuing without help. Since day one of being in the watch industry, my wife has always helped with the businesses. For the first watch site we helped create, she actually ran the jewelry side of the business which was extremely successful in just two years. When 2008 hit, that kind of killed the jewelry side of the business, so she stopped helping with the watch business after that. In the years since, she has been a big part of all the other businesses we have started or been a part of though.

She didn’t help much with Hourstriker because in November of 2022 we had twin daughters, needless the say the last year plus she has been taking care of them during the day, allowing me to get the site off the ground. Now that the babies have a better schedule and don’t require constant attention, she will start helping more with the day to day work at Hourstriker in 2024. This should allow us to get a lot more content up on the site.

There is a ton to a website that you can’t actually see. For the most part Hourstriker highly excels at things that are more technical like page speed and server resources. When it comes to design, I’m the first to admit that I am not the best graphics designer or UI expert in the world. I believe this first version of Hourstriker is way more than serviceable design wise, but could definitely be improved. Even though mobile layout is very simple, it’s an art to get it just right and be both functional and visually appealing. I feel the current site has a nice balance between desktop and mobile rendering of the responsive code, but I’m going to continue to tweak and adjust the site as the years progress. Hopefully in the coming year I can get the site to the point where I feel the design is as strong as the tech behind it.



We do have a decent sized collection of personal watches and do get in a few watches to sell each month, so there are enough watches to do a review or two a week until we run out of watches. In 2024 we would really like to start partnering up with watch brands to get new watches in to review. Even to this point, I don’t feel that Hourstriker is really there yet. I would like to be able to show brands more consistent postings and have a much larger Instagram following before reaching out. I’m sure some brands would probably already agree to send us watches to review, but I’d really just like to have stronger feet to stand on before reaching out.

I mentioned earlier that I would like to find more consistent sources for the watches we would like to sell in our store, but we would very much like to be authorized retailers for some brands as well. Hopefully having the added benefit of us here at Hourstriker providing support along with the brands themselves, people would possibly want to purchase an official watch through Hourstriker instead of just off of a brand’s site. Just like getting brands to send us watches to review, I wouldn’t want to even bring this up to brands until our site is much larger.

We’ve had a lot of experience in the jewelry world as well over the years. We have discussed adding jewelry to Hourstriker at length last year, having even gone so far as to create some prototypes that my wife wears every day. We need to spend more time researching jewelry manufactures before we move ahead with our own designs though. Having got this far into the article, we can imagine you are a watch fan, so our designs will probably appeal to you is all I can say about our own jewelry at this time. Besides our own jewelry, we would also like to add some branded and non-branded jewelry to the site. This will probably happen when we feel it makes sense to add jewelry to the site and can also maintain the supply reliably.



One of the last things we’d like to work on for the site is the search functionality. Right now it does some simple keyword matching for articles and items in the store. Now with adding the watch database section a few weeks ago, there is a lot more information that needs to be searchable. The trick is how to create an easy to use search function that spans articles, store item and reference watches. I still haven’t really had the time to think about how this should work, but it’s definitely on my mind frequently. When the right idea comes along, this section will be improved upon. I feel this will probably happen around the time we add the advanced watch search functions to the database section.

As it comes to content, we really need to nail down where and how we take our pictures. We used to use digital SLRs and lightboxes to take pictures, but I don’t want to use those kind of clinical pictures for Hourstriker. We have a nice mirrorless camera, but feel that with good lighting our Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultras take close enough quality pictures without the fuss of using a dedicated camera and swapping lenses. As we work less on the technical side of Hourstriker and start focusing on content, we can now nail down our photo taking processes and locations. Not only would better pictures help our articles and store items, but should also have a positive influence on our Instagram account.



One final thing we would like to look into for 2024 is actually doing something with YouTube. I spend way too much time each day watching watch YouTube channels and even though I enjoy the content, it’s nothing we want to do. We have a few ideas for simple videos that are on the short side while still being informative and entertaining. My wife and I aren’t the type of people that want to be the center of attention, but we feel we could do something worthwhile on YouTube… we’ll see…

Well I think that is a nice wrap-up to 2023 and a decent look at what we are planning for 2024. Like with everything in life our plans for 2024 could drastically change and Hourstriker could go in an entirely difference direction when it comes to new features. We do have full control of the site though, so I think this is a pretty good roadmap of how the site will improve in 2024.