"I find myself in a world of impossible architecture and inexplicable machines. I cannot fathom how it works, and I am terrified to put one foot in front of the other lest I fall through the floor." – 1w/Faith v10.1.0000 (Talos Principle)
The idea of Gehenna (the site) is a place for founders and startups to share their journeys and experiences (edit as of September 2023, Gehenna is now my personal blog for my own thoughts), helping out people who are hesitant to get into building their own startup/company, already in the ecosphere or are looking to mentor others. Since being a founder is lonely and hard, it's nice to have a place dedicated for founders / entrepreneurs. I'm a big fan of autodidacticism (the process of self-learning), so why not create a very meta community for shared learning?
Community For Growth
Hopefully I can build a place for people to post interesting things, like how Medium.com has a fantastic community for sharing tutorials and guides on different things, but specifically for startups and founders. Indiehackers.com seemed like a perfect solution to this, but it feels just like Reddit but with more self-promotion than anything. I'm thinking the combination of TechCrunch.com and Indiehackers.com, with the learning element of Medium.com sprinkled in. A place to share guides/stories/ideas on different segments of business or product, marketing or sales, development or research.
The topics that I want to build around is:
Finding an idea or startup
Validating your idea and whether your customers will actually pay for you want
Blogs throughout development and testing
Discussions of areas of improvement, hurdles to jump over, lessons learnt etc.
Celebrations of major milestones, such as customers, funding, objectives (even acquisition?)
Finding good co-founders, networking or growing as a person/team
I will be sharing the aforementioned for my given ventures, so if anything you can see what I'm doing (for better or worse), at least the site looks great...
Developers & Empowering Your Website
Another reason I started Gehenna was to create a place where you can write content for your site, whether that's blogs, release updates or any form of written medium that needs to be on your site to be hosted here. The reason being is that you can write your content on Gehenna and then deploy it straight to your app, with your domain, branding and aesthetic, so that it is extremely easy for you to build your site's network and content.
This should hopefully allow you as a founder or developer to integrate SEO-optimised content for your site, without having to write any code or build out any routes (this includes paying for bullshit hosting fees or any other CMS trap that a site like Webflow or Wordpress can lock you into).
Even if you don't want to use pages setup for your startup, you can use the API to fetch the content, if you want to tailor your site even further! With respect to this, I'll be posting articles with code snippets on how you can do this properly, including guides on setting up your tailored article pages so that it's easy for you to get up and running.
There'll also be some metrics and tracking things that I will plan out, so you can track engagement and analytics with your customers / readers.
Long Term Planning
Obviously there will come a point where my free tier for file storage will hit its upper limit (which I can then upgrade to the $25 USD / month plan (because supabase.com is awesome), so I'm not sure what to do. Right now I am focusing on creating a cool place for me and others to share their learning and growth, just as I had originally planned back in 2020 when I first wanted to make Gehenna.
Conclusion
Anyway this is just a formal introductory post, it might be updated to reflect new thoughts or things I forgot to add, but welcome to Gehenna!