November 4th: Feel Good Friday #3!

Happy Friday, fam!

We're so grateful that you're here with us. Here's all the fun that's happened at Kahana over the last week:

Our new website is almost ready to go live! ??

Last week, we shared some of the progress we have been making on updating our website. But this week, we'll give you a closer look at what's going on under the hood:

For starters, "update" might not even be the right word, because we're actually building a brand new website from scratch! Here are a couple of screenshots and behind-the-scenes photos of our journey.

Message from the developer: We just finished our new version of the Kahana Landing page!! This new website has an embedded signup/sign-in form, better UI/UX based on the industry best practices, pricing, a newly designed explore hub section, and more.

We are using NextJS and every page has its own SEO meta description. So this website is super optimized for SEO, and it’s fast.

We have used the utility-first CSS framework TailwindCSS (latest version). Tailwind is a little advanced to use, and it doesn’t have built-in components right out of the box like Bootstrap, so have taken inspiration from the web, and we have created some great React components with detailed comments, good variable names, and ES6 to minimize the code and everything. So anyone who knows how to read should be able to update this new website.

It would be so easy to maintain and update in the future. I am personally very happy. We are using Vercel for deploying our new public homepage with separate staging and production versions. You just push the code to GitHub from your laptop, and then it will automatically deploy the website within minutes!

From top to bottom, it's beautiful ??

And you should see it go live in the next several days!

Thank you, thank you, thank you @One Chowdhury (Shawon) ??

Kahana Co-Founders Speak on the Radio! ???

Another carry over update from last week, our guest appearance on Carl Nordgren 's show to discuss the creator economy and the origins of Kahana is officially out! You can listen to it with the link below straight from your device (no download required):

Thank you so much for having us, Carl!

YouTube Growth ??

This week, Adam emerged from a rabbit hole and released an ambitious YouTube video about how to sell on Gumroad. Check it out!

Here's a quick snapshot of our YouTube channel subscriber growth over the past year:

We are super excited for what's to come and have tons of great, educational, and (hopefully you think so) fun videos in-store :)

With that being said, if you haven't done so, we would sincerely appreciate if you'd consider subscribing to the Kahana YouTube channel! Currently, only 5.7% of our watchers are actually subscribed, and our goal is to reach 1000 subscribers in the next 2 weeks ??

Many thanks in advance for subscribing and supporting the channel ??

Why we're migrating our BLAG (blog) to Ghost (not the scary type) ????

For blogging, we could build our own custom blogging platform. However, on top of the basic blogging platform, we'd also need to take care of the writing experiences, save drafts properly, set up newsletters, send new emails, make it SEO optimized, set up global CDN,? try to make the website fast, etc. If that sounds like a lot of work to you, then you'd be right!

It's almost like building another startup, and we've got plenty on our plates with the one we are already building - so no thank you ??

Everyone knows a good developer costs a lot. So using a pre-built blogging engine is a no-brainer from the point of cost and saving the most crucial resource: time ??

We've tried WordPress in the past, and while it worked for a period of time, we didn't love it - it just gets to be clunky. We would need to add plugin after plugin to get the most out of it (leading to bloated code). For example, just for setting meta SEO on WordPress, we would need the Yoast plugin, and for global CDN? Another plugin ??

Optimizing WordPress would cost us a lot and WordPress is not fast ??

And setting up an email newsletter would also cost us. While WordPress is a popular tool (it is used by many people to achieve a vast number of things), it's not ideal for us right now.

Note: another option is Medium, but it would be Medium branded and we don’t control the rules there.

So we quickly made the decision to go with the open-source platform Ghost. With built-in SEO, email newsletters are ready out of the box, analytics, optimized with global CDN, speed, customization option for developers, and rich writing experiences, Ghost is one of the best options available to us. And getting all these features including the server that is specifically optimized for Ghost will only cost us $25/per month.

Companies like Apple, OpenAI, and creators like Ali Abdaal all use Ghost.

Within just a few hours after releasing this newsletter, the new blog should go live!

Twitter ShenaniGANS ??

Jonathan posts fun questions on Twitter like these every day:

If you want to get in on the action, feel free to engage! We'd love to see you there :)

Duke Consulting Club ????

Last week, we mentioend that we kicked off a partnership with the Duke Consulting Club, so just wanted to give a warm welcome to Krish Bambawale , Ganeesh Varadarajan , Shayan Kothari , and Davis Featherstone to the Kahana Team ??

We are looking forward to accomplishing amazing things together!

In Da News ??

Over the past few weeks, we've been fortunate to have opportunties to be featured in some great publications. Here are some articles where we've made an appearance!

Fantasy update ??

Before we let you get on with the rest of your Friday, I'm sure you are all DYING to know what happened in the epic showdown between Goose's Gang (Jonathan) and Sunday Express (Adam) this past weekend ??

In an anti-climactic ending to this newsletter, we are sad to report that our prediction did not come to pass. Instead of the high-scoring, back and forth clash we were hoping for, it ended up being more like the majority of the games in this series: another lopsided, boring affair

But hey, don't blame us - it's the Raiders fault for their meltdown.

In any case, Goose's Gang comes out on top of this one.

Have a wonderful weekend everybody - see you next week!