An AI-powered startup pitch platform where founders pitch ideas, get instant AI feedback, and connect with investors
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VentureDen is an AI-powered startup pitch platform where early-stage founders submit pitches, receive instant AI analysis powered by Google Gemini, and connect with a community of investors and builders. Browse and search startup ideas, upvote the best ones, leave feedback in the comments, and build a public founder profile — all on a blazing-fast Next.js 16 + Sanity CMS stack.

Every pitch is scored by AI across clarity, market positioning, and uniqueness, with actionable suggestions to sharpen the idea before it reaches investors. A fully editable, content-managed homepage and blog round out the experience, making VentureDen both a product and a complete, real-world reference for building a modern full-stack monorepo.

VentureDen is a pnpm + Turborepo monorepo with two apps and shared packages:

apps/
  web/      — Next.js 16 frontend (App Router, React 19, Tailwind v4, Turbopack)
  studio/   — Sanity Studio v5 (Vite, styled-components)
packages/
  env/                — Zod-validated environment variables (client + server)
  sanity/             — Sanity client, GROQ queries, live preview, generated types
  ui/                 — Shared Radix + CVA + Tailwind components (shadcn-style)
  logger/             — Structured logger
  typescript-config/  — Shared tsconfigs

1. Make sure Git, Node.js 22+ and pnpm 10+ (via corepack enable) are installed.

2. Fork this repository and clone your fork:

   git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/VentureDen.git
   cd VentureDen

3. Install dependencies:

   pnpm install

4. Add environment variables — create apps/web/.env.local and apps/studio/.env.local (see Environment Variables).

5. Start both apps:

   pnpm dev

6. Open the frontend at http://localhost:3000 and the Sanity Studio at http://localhost:3333.

apps/web/.env.local

NEXT_PUBLIC_SANITY_PROJECT_ID=
NEXT_PUBLIC_SANITY_DATASET=
NEXT_PUBLIC_SANITY_API_VERSION=
NEXT_PUBLIC_SANITY_STUDIO_URL=
SANITY_API_READ_TOKEN=
SANITY_API_WRITE_TOKEN=
AUTH_SECRET=
AUTH_GITHUB_ID=
AUTH_GITHUB_SECRET=
GEMINI_API_KEY=

apps/studio/.env.local

SANITY_STUDIO_PROJECT_ID=
SANITY_STUDIO_DATASET=
SANITY_STUDIO_TITLE=
SANITY_STUDIO_PRESENTATION_URL=
SANITY_STUDIO_API_VERSION=

All variables are validated at startup with Zod via @workspace/env. Any new variable must also be added to turbo.json globalEnv so Vercel cache invalidation works.

Run from the repo root (Turborepo fans out to both apps):

After editing any Sanity schema, regenerate types from apps/studio:

cd apps/studio
pnpm extract   # write schema.json
pnpm type      # regenerate packages/sanity/src/sanity.types.ts

• Content flow — Schemas live in apps/studio/schemaTypes/; GROQ queries in packages/sanity are fetched server-side via a defineLive wrapper for automatic revalidation. All frontend types are derived from generated Sanity types.
• Page builder — An array of typed blocks rendered by apps/web/src/components/pagebuilder.tsx, mapping each _type to a React component with click-to-edit visual editing.
• AI analysis — apps/web/src/lib/gemini.ts calls Google Gemini; the response is validated with Zod (clarity / market positioning / uniqueness scores + suggestions) and rendered in the pitch detail view.
• Auth — NextAuth v5 with GitHub; on first sign-in the GitHub avatar is uploaded to Sanity and an author document is created, with the Sanity author _id carried through the session.

Contributions are what make the open source community such an amazing place to learn, inspire, and create. Any contributions you make are greatly appreciated.

1. Fork the repo
2. Create a new branch (git checkout -b improve-feature)
3. Make your changes
4. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Improve feature')
5. Push to the branch (git push origin improve-feature)
6. Open a Pull Request

Please read CONTRIBUTING.md and SECURITY.md before submitting.

Method	Description	Action
🔧 Manual Build	Create an optimized production build.	pnpm build
▲ Vercel (Recommended)	Deploy instantly on the Vercel platform.

For more details, check the Next.js deployment docs.

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