What's up everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com and you're
listening to the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool
stuff online and making a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit
down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the
strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same. I'm
talking to John O'Nolan, that's whose silky smooth voice you're listening to.
John is the founder of Ghost and the last time we spoke, I don't know where
you were living. I think you might have still been in South Africa. It was like
2019 and now you're in Granada, if I'm saying correctly. Yes, Granada,
the suddenmost island in the Caribbean chain. Yeah, you're like the OG digital
nomad. You've been living this way your entire life. Everybody else is like
trendy, it's like a fad, and you're like, no, no, no, this is just how I live. I
don't have a fixed home address and never will. What was it you were telling
me about earlier this year? You told me, because I was actually gonna come
visit you in Granada and then now it's all locked down and my travel plans
are borked. But you were sailing across the Atlantic, so you weren't even
necessarily in Granada, you're just like in the ocean. Home address like middle of
the Atlantic ocean. So I spent the last 10 years or so traveling by plane and
then living out of Airbnbs and kind of looking around to hopefully find a
country slash area where I might eventually want to buy a house, have a
bit more of a base and like various countries in mind for a while, but none
of them quite felt right. It was either complicated immigration, complicated tax
systems, complicated citizenship or like how you could and could not stay there
or very, very expensive. And so eventually I kind of changed tack and thought, well,
what if I buy a house that is not fixed to any one country but rather can go with
me. So I bought a sailboat instead of a house and now I live on a boat. I'm
talking to you right now from a boat floating in a place called Prickly Bay
on the southern coast of Granada. And yeah, this is next version of
nomading for me is floating around the world rather than flying around the
world. How does it feel to like sort of I guess take all of your possessions with
you when you travel because that's like what living on a boat or living out of a
car enables, right? Like wherever you go, that's where you live. You're not ever
really in between living places. One thing I really like about travel is it
confronts you with a lot of challenging questions about yourself and for better
or for worse people find out I think in lots of interesting ways who they really
are through the act of travel and some people like what they find out about
themselves. Some people don't like what they find out about themselves but
almost everyone grows from it and whether you choose to continue doing it
or stop doing it is almost not the point. The point is finding out how it makes
you feel and what you learn about yourself in the first place. So I think
it's a totally unique experience to everyone and I'd certainly recommend it
but I wouldn't expect anyone to have an identical experience to anyone else if
that makes sense. Yeah, the identity thing is such a mind trip because like at
least like in some regard like my identity is probably American, probably
like very techie, you know, I spent 10 years living in SF and it's not until you
get out of that and swim in different waters that you really can see where you
really were. Like you can't really learn about who you are until you've
experienced being a different person, being a different place, I think. And with
you, it's like you've been doing that your entire life. It's like what is your
bedrock? Like what's the core identity of John, right? When you go to a new place,
does every place seem weird? Is there any place on earth that seems like normal?
It's almost exactly the other way around. I think everywhere kind of seems normal.
It gets harder and harder to find things that surprise you and find things that
are, you know, a culture shock. The first time you go somewhere completely
different to a culture that's the opposite of one you've ever been to
before. It's that the world is this weird crazy place with people and food and
stuff in it that I didn't know about, didn't know existed. The more you travel,
the more that reduces because there's just less and less novel new things.
Equally, the internet kind of reduces a lot of that via, you know, the last however
many years of BuzzFeed top five everything in the world lists. So it's
getting harder and harder to be amazed by things. And part of the attraction to
me of, you know, being weird and living on a sailboat was being able to sort of
re-challenge myself and go to places that are not easy to get to by plane, that do
not have well trodden tourist paths with Instagram highlights along the way. But
to kind of try and find wild weird places that less people go to again.
That's a big part of the appeal. Obviously it's a little more challenging
in the last 18 months than it might have been otherwise. But yeah, that's that's
part of the ambition. I was on Twitter earlier this year and I think it was Paul
Graham who occasionally tweets about advice that he gives to his kids. And he
gave his kids some advice that I took to heart. I was like, that's pretty good
advice. And he said that if you're going to be competitive, pick one or two things
in life to be really competitive about and chill out and everything else. And I
read that and I realized like, oh shit, like I need this advice because I feel
like I'm constantly competing and comparing in like every part of my life.
Like I'm always seeking this novelty. I need to do things I need to do things
that others haven't done. And so like at the time, like even when it like it came
to travel, I would think about where do I want to go? And instead of just picking
a place to go that like I thought I would have a genuinely good time, I would
like try to pick a place that like no one else had been to just so I could be
like unique and say like I'm the only one of my friends who's been there. Which is
not a not a smart reason. Like who cares? Like travel is not supposed to be this
competitive thing. But for some reason, like because of Instagram, because of
Twitter, because of Facebook, because of like all my friends and you know people
online going all these places, like somehow they like robbed them of their
luster to me and made them seem less interesting if there'd already been a
ton of people who'd snap photos there and they've already been there.
Yeah, I agree with that. All the most meaningful moments in my life now are
the ones that I don't put on the internet. So whether that's friends or
family or or travel, if it's something I really care about, I'll now go out of my
way to keep it offline. Because that's the different differentiator now, right?
It's not everything's offline and we put a few things online and those the the
interesting ones. It's it's exactly the other way around. Everything's online by
default, every part of my my life in terms of work and a lot of friendships
and communication is online. And the things you keep offline are now the the
weird special moments that are separate from everything else. And that, I think,
has been healthy for me to interact with or just appreciate those moments
differently. When you know you're not thinking about who's gonna look at it,
who's gonna like it, who's gonna make fun of it, you're just having it for the
sake of it, whatever it is. I think that's the perfect way to go about it.
Because that forces you to evaluate whether or not you're doing this thing
because you want to do it or whether or not you're doing it because you're
playing some sort of status game or you're worried about what other people
think. You know, like if not posting something on the internet suddenly makes
it lose all of its luster, then that's probably not something you should be
doing. It's clearly not something that you really enjoy doing. The flip side of
this is, I think I'm a paying subscriber to your blog, Rediverge. What was the
last time you posted? I'm like, I'm paying a monthly subscription for this. Where's
where's my updates on John's life? Yeah, I'm doing a really bad job of
organizing that. So I have, I write on it really regularly but I don't send emails
really regularly because the way in which I write on my personal site is
it's all over the place. Some areas are about business and I have like a whole
like section which each post is kind of a chapter that's semi kind of vaguely
like a book. And then there's a few random updates which are like travel
things, then there's some gear guides of just stuff I like. But I've done such a
poor job of organizing a cohesive narrative where I can say to people
month to month like here's what I'm doing. There's something I'm working on so
please don't cancel yet. I'm trying to figure it out. I keep paying you my $8 a
month or whatever it is. Yeah, if you dig hard enough, yeah I've been adding like
three four thousand words a month but and I keep saying to myself and others
I'm gonna do an email update soon where I summarize to everyone all the new stuff
that's on the site. But yeah the idea of the site was to create basically a
paywalled personal blog where I could write freely and kind of go back to the
golden age of blogging where people just used to write about what was going on in
their life, stuff they're interested in. Without this the kind of performative
side of every blog post needs to get as much traffic as possible therefore it
needs to be very friendly and like can't offend anyone and can't say anything
that some people might not like which kind of just dulled and made everything
really boring and flat. So putting a little paywall in front of it was my
idea to kind of reclaim a little creative space on the internet and I
would say the verdict so far is mixed because shortly after launching it quite
a few people who I admire and respect who are far more successful than me
subscribed and became paying customers and that immediately brought back my
fears of like well I don't want to you know I don't want a silly joke now
because whoever is subscribed and is reading and they're gonna think I'm a
fool but maybe I should I should probably just lean into that and embrace
that's the I think the thing that the sort of old blogosphere had that you
don't have now is like this anonymity right when everybody's subscribed to
things through RSS you have absolutely no idea you subscribe to your RSS feed
it could be anybody it could be nobody I mean I guess you can get like a number
but that's basically it whereas now it's like okay you see exactly which email
addresses are part of your list you know who that person is and if like you
really care about your reputation in that person's eyes and you're suddenly
gonna have this anxiety or this fear or this minimum quality bar about it becomes
essentially performative and the other the reverse is true as well right like
you your identity nowadays one's identity on the internet is so much more
there's so much more attention on whoever is creating whoever is writing
about ideas I wasn't too sure about the whole pseudonymous I'm still not sure
if that's how you say it but the idea of having online pseudonyms I wasn't sure
if that was a trend I really understood or thought was going to take off from
about a year ago now it's seeming more and more attractive to me to have
different identities for different compartments of life and not
necessarily have all of them be tied together and linked because I think that
again that opens up the freedom of what you might explore what you might do I
can tell you right now if I do another business or another startup at some
point it will not be under my name I'm gonna do it under I don't know if I'm
gonna be a poor day for something but I'm definitely going to try and do it
with a completely separate I asked you a completely separate set of concerns
both because it's interesting to try something new in a different format but
also because I think the more customers more users more revenue have the more
you're deeply aware or I found I'm deeply aware of how much is to lose
everything just feels more and more risky and that really hampers creativity
particularly in the context of coming up with new ideas and ideas that push any
sort of boundary that might might not I was talking to a friend about this in
the context of finances because I think this applies to lots of different areas
in life where like when you don't have very much the world is your oyster it's
all about gaining and exploring and trying new things you know like when
you're you know young broke college kid you could do whatever you want and then
like as you make more money or as you gain more reputation or whatever more
responsibility it becomes more of a game of like how do you not fuck it up how
do you not lose what you've already got yeah and that's kind of boring you know
it's kind of tragic like if you look out in the world for example and like you
look at all these like billionaires for example how many are you really doing
cool interesting things like give the occasional Elon Musk is like I'm gonna
put a hundred million dollars into this unproven rocket company and hopefully
don't lose my entire fortune embarrassingly but everybody else is
like no I need to pass down my wealth for generation to generation and
preserve what I've gotten because it was so hard to get here and I don't want to
lose it and like that's a it's its own sort of prison in a way and I think this
idea of pseudonymous accounts like I've like probably five or six pseudonymous
accounts that I've created over the years and then I've like literally never
sent I've never sent a single tweet or done anything in any of their names I
just get this like little well of inspiration like I want to be anonymous
and then I make it and I come up with a cool avatar and like a persona and then I
just like no I never touch it again so they're ready for the day where I'm
ready for like to do it but like I haven't actually used it but that's
super freeing to have that and to be able to like create something new and
take a big risk and not have people compare what you've done to the
reputation that you've already established for yourself I was talking to
you know body Elon Musk I was talking to him on Twitter a couple of weeks ago I
was like how do you you know if you do this thing how do you how do you keep it
private because you know if I work at Twitter or anyone works at Twitter can
just go and look at what the email address on the account is and then right
IP is and deduce a location like they can even analyze your like basically
you're writing style nowadays like there's like AI algorithms that connect
people and be like oh this is actually tweeting exactly similar to this other
personal account over here is probably the same person exactly so he sent me
this very very long post I don't know it was practically Edward Snowden level
kind of privacy advice very interesting but very very very in-depth it advocated
for spending like multiple thousands of dollars coming up with kind of decoy
identities and all kinds of stuff I don't know if I'm that invested but it
was yeah it's interesting I mean he invests in all kinds of businesses now
it's funny he's gone from like a parody account to a real investor I imagine
very tempting once you've built up that kind of persona to actually take
advantage of it and leverage it and try to turn into something we have a mutual
friend who does this I mean AJ from card he's been basically anonymous this
entire career and like I know he lives in Tennessee like they've talked to him
I've heard his voice but like I don't know who he is as far as I'm aware no
one else knows who he is but he's like raising money and running a real
internet business that people depend on like I don't think he's ever been like
publicly unmasked and maybe to some degree that means that people just don't
care that much like they kind of like the mystery and like you know maybe one
out of like a hundred thousand people is really gonna do the work to try to dig
up the information and try to find out who this person is yeah I think it
depends if there's some reason or motivation for why it would be worth
finding out who a person is right like Satoshi Nakamoto there's a lot of
reasons for why unmasking that identity would be particularly fascinating to a
large group of people I'm asking AJ I love AJ not that interesting so the
last time we spoke I think you would just released like ghost 3.0 this is like
late 2019 people who don't know ghost is one of the most popular and definitely
the most high quality ways to build your own online publication whether it's a
blog or a newsletter or things like that maybe the place to start here is I'm
curious as ghost has grown because ghost used to be super easy to describe right
it was like a WordPress alternative it's like a better WordPress you know it's
for blogging now ghost is like doing all these cool things how do you manage to
describe your company what you're doing when it grows to have like five or ten
things that it's great at instead of just one you definitely have to find new
stories to tell that's for sure how I describe it now as I say ghost is the
best way to turn your audience into a business and I think many many great
businesses start from an audience even ones that are not predominantly content
based but that's our kind of core now that we think about as you said it evolved
from publishing but we got to a place where we asked what problem does every
publisher have and unanimously the answer was how do I make a living from
this and so it was a natural evolution from from one to the other but very much
now the the business aspects the commerce aspects of allowing creators to
have subscriptions and earn recurring revenue in the same way SaaS businesses
have done for a couple of decades now has become the the heart and soul of
ghost of the reason the thing people are excited about and why they are signing
up to to try it out like on one hand okay you've got like this publishing
software and like part of ghosts growth is just continuing to build up the
number of people who are using ghosts to publish stuff online and on the other
hand you have like this sort of new trend this new problem of like okay well
people now are convinced accurately that they can actually make a living online
from the stuff that they publish from their audiences and that probably was
less true you know ten years ago when you were first you know like getting
started with ghosts so it's difficult to decide what direction do we go in do we
go with like this shiny new thing that's definitely the future or do you know do
we keep going with our bread and butter it's like I have this the same problem
with any hackers where it's like okay and the hackers is a lot of things to a
lot of people it started off being primarily focused on software engineers
you want to build SaaS companies nowadays there's a lot more ways to make
money online like do I stick stay true to my core mission and keep it simple do
I pivot and sort of be like a leaf blowing in the wind and if I do that you
know how do I stop myself from pivoting you know every year or two or maybe
that's the right answer and you're one of the few people I think you as an
equally sort of expansive project or a product yeah the evolution of indie
hackers equally has been awesome to watch from the outside as well as every
so often when you've been gracious enough to ask me to come and hang out on
the inside I've seen the audience firsthand change and shift from as you
identified that early kind of hacker SaaS group into now a much more diverse
and wide-ranging group but I think you still have a common core of I mean our
common core was people creating content on the internet who are passionate about
that and want to be able to do that and have a business that allows them to
continue to do that you have a similar core of creative people who are looking
to start a business on the internet and find new and creative ways to do that
using technology and I think whether that's SaaS or something else the the
core of doing something with technology on the internet to have an independent
business rather than following the startup roller coaster model is still a
really really strong core even if the the versions of that and the expressions
of that evolve I think we running these companies have to make a lot of
decisions about what we believe the future is gonna be like to some degree
like you can survey your users and say okay what what are your biggest problems
and they can tell you I can tell you know Andy hackers their biggest problems
are like not having the confidence to get started not having the time or the
money to get started not knowing what idea to work on not knowing how to grow
their businesses these are sort of the perennial problems but then we have to
like make bets like for example personally like I'm not that really into
NFTs a lot of people are super into NFTs and it's like they think it's the
future I'm just like I just don't I don't see it you know and so it's like
I don't spend a lot of time anything people about it and talking about it and
adding sections to any hackers about it and maybe ten years from now it's like
I'm an idiot and we miss the boat and there's some new you know hub on the
internet for startup founders and creatives trying to make money and it's
like it's not me you know because essentially NFTs are it but it goes it's
kind of I mean it's kind of the same thing with you I like who knows if like
the creator wave is like a blip on the radar you know five years to know
everybody's gonna be a no-code creator no one's gonna be writing or all the
publications are gonna be bundled up into these big publications that we don't
don't even exist today like anything could happen it feels like things are
moving so fast it's it's risky to make these bets it is and I think it's part
and parcel it's the heart and soul of what it means to be an indie hacker to
some extent is being forced into making these bets because whereas funded
startups move very quickly using capital we can't do that and every bet ghost has
taken whether it was on rethinking our editor and moving something that was
much more powerful and dynamic or introducing memberships and
subscriptions as a different business model we've had to place that bet so
far ahead of the curve even nodejs choosing that as a tech tech stack right
at the very beginning we've had to place that bet so far ahead of everyone else
that there was absolutely no certainty that those bets were gonna pan out or be
correct and so we started with node in 2013 we started with a kind of brand new
dynamic semi block based editor in 2014-15 we started it on memberships and
subscriptions in 2016 each one of those things took maybe four or five years to
play out and by the time we had kind of just built each iteration of what that
thing was and launched it was just when it was catching on and becoming
mainstream so we launched our editor around the same time as WordPress
shifted its editor and medium became wildly popular we launched memberships
and subscriptions I think a month before or after sub stack suddenly started
taking off so placing those bets really early and not being able to see the
future but kind of guessing what where you think it's gonna go is how you
compete with funded startups as a needy hack and I believe that really really
strongly is you you don't have the advantage of being able to move fast so
you have to have the advantage of looking further ahead and trying to get
there because you're gonna move slower it's gonna take more time but if you
place good bets you'll get there at the same time as the funded competitor who
realizes the opportunity much later but can move much more quickly and how do
you beat the funded competitors at that placing because I mean theoretically
they have the exact same resources I mean they could also be prescient you
know they could also look ahead and make the right bets in addition to just
moving quickly so what's your framework for thinking about these big decisions
that you want to make a ghost so what I think is important is that to pursue a
bet as an indie hacker versus to raise money against a bet as a startup very
different prospects in terms of potential upside and potential downside
so whereas you might say I think memberships and subscriptions are going
to be the future in five years time and I'm gonna start working on it today so
that in three or four years time I'll have something ready to launch there's
not very much downsides it doesn't really you don't need permission from
anyone to place that bet other than yourself and the amount of time you're
willing to spend on it funded competitors or funded startups
typically they have strings attached to the funding right they need to show
their investors and their board that they are placing a reasonable bet based
on a market which is probably going to provide a return on investment so they
by nature can't look as far ahead in terms of where they're going to use that
capital where they're going to spend it so it's it's just a different set of
parameters to operate within and I I've thought about this a lot I really don't
think one has had a distinct advantage I think you you kind of coalesce on the
same point whether you start early or you start later with lots of lots of
money to get there faster but if you're starting from a place of not having
funding you you have to be thinking further ahead that's what I think and
then how do you win against that that's a harder problem but it's it's it's a lot
of positioning I think I mean every single one of our competitors that we've
had over the years and we've been compared at various points more or less
to WordPress then more medium nowadays more sub stack sometimes patreon every
single one of them has had between 130 million and what is WordPress raised
now I think WordPress is raised 1.1 billion and we we started with the
$300,000 Kickstarter campaign you know and been bootstrapped from from there
ever since as a nonprofit and just growing off our own revenue so we've
been wildly outgunned a hundred percent of the time but we've positioned ourselves
differently to others by being open-source by being decentralized by
being independent by having a rock solid story to tell people which is we're
gonna be around in 10 years we're gonna be around in 20 years because the
company can't be sold they can't go anywhere this technology can't be shut
down and if you can position yourself with a compelling story in a way that
is meaningful and competing in an area where your funded counterparts can't
then I think you you have a fighting chance no matter the amount of funding
that you're up against and what's the story of ghost if I'm sitting down and
I'm like I could choose between all of these funded competitors you know I
could be on WordPress or patreon or medium or sub stack what is it that
differentiates ghost from from being part of that and the reason I ask is I
think there are a lot of people listening who have companies that are
going up against these big competitors and they have absolutely no idea what
makes them special or makes them different the few different sides to
this that the fundamental one that we organized the whole company around in
the culture around is that we just try to be good not in the way not in Google
sense don't be evil good but actually good so we make technology choices for
the long term for the benefit of everyone not to make money we release
all of our code is open source we structure the company away it can't be
bought or sold and then that becomes the story that is an interesting one because
it typically doesn't resonate with people initially when you say we're
decentralized open-source nonprofit they're like okay I don't understand
why that would matter and what tends to happen is over a longer time span say
three to five years people will maybe try ghost maybe doesn't quite work for
them and they'll go and use some other competitors products let's say medium
and then after you know around about the eighth or ninth pivot of medium where
they pull the rug out from absolutely everyone right shut down various sites
kicked people off changed the design thrown in revenue taken out revenue done
a whole load of horrendous things people then start to remember the story that
they heard a long time ago of ghost which was always independent always
open-source always decentralized and the meaning then has value to them and that
is a really significant and compelling thing that is about being around for
the long run and being trustworthy and reliable for the long run and in the
short run nobody values it but in the long run almost everyone does so if you
can be around for long enough then that kind of fulfills itself I think one of
our most ardent competitive advantages is just being around while lots of other
people start up and then subsequently shut down again and the more direct how
do we compete against everyone else at the moment is we have 0% payment fees
so another interesting benefit of choosing different structures and
different things to optimize for is we already have a business model it's
monthly monthly fees for hosting we don't need to take a percentage of
anyone's payments we are already profitable before that so it's very very
easy for us to say yeah we can have 0% payment fees it doesn't matter like where
we already have this model and so in short-term sense that's quite attractive
to people because most other creator platforms especially the ones that are
starting to get popular now have what what's often referred to as a
graduation problem which is it's very easy to get started you can gain some
success and then as you start to grow and really rake in lots of money and
just as the platform starting to make money off for you because your payment
fees that you're paying to them are meaningful you look around you go hey
I've got leverage I've got revenue and now I want a serious technology
platform so I'm gonna leave and I'm gonna set up my own website it's gonna
be something which has 0% payment fees and I've graduated from the starter
service to the main service or to the service that I now own and run so a lot
of the time that happens with platforms that have fees baked in and where do
people end up very often on an open-source decentralized self-hosted
system much like ghost so how that applies to others is going to be very
different depending on the market depending on the other competitors in
that market and the structure of the technology but if you can find different
ways to position yourself that is not the same as every other startup out
there then you put yourself in a place where you can compete on a different set
of grounds I think one of the biggest mistakes I see indie hackers make
sometimes and I include myself in this because we've made this mistake a lot
is to try and compete with funded competitors on their terms so for
example if if we wanted to compete with sub stack and we started saying subs
act really good at PR we're gonna do PR we're gonna try and get news we're gonna
try and get headlines we'd lose every single time subs act has a whole load of
money raised they have very high-powered investment investors who have PR people
that help them get all those ad placements I swear subs act could like
introduce a new button in their footer and they would be on the front page of
of TechCrunch that's the level of how good they are at PR if we started trying
to compete with them on PR we'd lose every single time it would be very very
very foolish but where we can win is on technology and on engineering because
they just don't have a patch on us on in that side of things so the more we
focus on our tech is better our engineering is better our product is
better our business model is better then the more people listen to us talking
about those things and focus on those things instead and those areas are much
much harder for subs act to compete on in no small part because of how quickly
they've grown it's much easier to change a technology product when you have a
hundred customers versus a thousand customers versus I'm sure they must have
over a million users at this point suddenly technical debt becomes very
very challenging to solve so trying to think of ways in which you can do
something different to your competition where your competition will have a more
difficult time matching you I think is a really useful mental model yeah it's
super interesting too because when you talk about medium for example it's
almost like their funding is like a thorn in their foot like the amount of
times a medium has been able to pivot and kind of screw over everybody else
he was like dependent on their previous business model is staggering and they
wouldn't be able to do that if they didn't have a ton of money but they
would have had to basically figure out how to get you know one of their first
you know one or two models working they would have had to have committed to that
and in a way like I think the combination of all of these other funded
competitors like needing to grow super quickly and needing to do these crazy
pivots in order to like maintain their growth
juxtaposed against ghosts which has just been like slow steady patient
reliable like ghost has always been here it's always going to be here and you're
not gonna have to guess what ghost is about because you guys have been so
consistent just like that in and of itself is like a huge differentiator
between you and the sort of incumbents you know I just got a message today in
my Twitter inbox or someone said hey I know you're busy but like I've got this
idea I want to run by you and I I'm afraid to post it on Indie hackers
because like somebody else could build it and steal it from me and then I look
at like some of the people I've talked to on the podcast etc who like have some
of the most successful indie companies and you're all going up against these
these huge incumbents I mean you've got like you said WordPress sub stack medium
patreon these are all hugely funded competitors I talked to Andre Asimov on
the podcast earlier this year he has a website to help you make websites like
he's going up against like weebly and Wix and Squarespace and Webflow and all
these other things that have been here forever and yet he's still able to make
you know ten twenty thousand dollars a month and there's all these other big
arenas form builder software website builder software blogging software
helping people with hiring etc where I think there is room still and probably
always will be room to solve the problem in a different way than the incumbents
are solving it and to like do it you're saying have a different story and stand
down and differentiate yourself that can be a frustrating message to hear because
until you have some tangible experience that you can match that advice to it can
be so frustrating to hear cuz like how you know how do I apply that to what I'm
doing is always when I heard these types of stories in years gone by I couldn't
figure out how to how to make it apply so it's right it can be a challenge to
translate it into something direct but I think to your point of someone you know
being fearful of that idea being stolen and I think about this a lot this you
know there's the old saying the ideas are worth nothing execution is worth
everything I actually don't think that's right I think about this all the time
because on the one hand it's absolutely right like if you you can post any idea
on indie hackers it doesn't matter if it's the greatest idea that has ever
happened no one's gonna steal it it's just not gonna happen because an idea
without any execution is worth nothing but equally and the thing that gets
talked about far less is the best execution ever is completely
meaningless when it's on the wrong idea the best execution perfect engineering
the best design products will flounder will stagnate will not become a success
if it is in in aid of a goal which does not inspire people or in aid of a story
which people do not find resonates with them the the magic is when you you hit
the combination of both and there's like a handful of really great examples if
you haven't read the book called hatching Twitter I'd strongly recommend
that to everyone and there's a great quote in there by Mark Zuckerberg who
describes the Twitter founding team as a bunch of a bunch of guys in a clown car
who crashed into a gold mine because for want of a better description they fucked
up everything that is possible to fuck up along the way in products in design
in marketing and business in fundraising in in everything they screwed
up non-stop and the idea of Twitter was a force that could not be held back
because the execution was just enough to carry critical mass of people wanted and
enjoyed using it so much that it just kept going I think a lot of the time in
my past ideas where I've worked really really hard on something I've thought to
myself the thing I've made is so good it's so much better than everything else
like why is this not succeeding why is it not working and each time in hindsight
the idea wasn't strong enough no matter how good my execution was the story
behind the idea was not resonating with people enough for it to catch on and
ghost was the first big change in that trajectory for me so I wrote a blog post
about a half baked idea and suddenly it was on the front page of Hacker News
there were 30,000 email addresses in my sign-up form and the story had caught on
and that combined with execution is magic if you can find that it's magic
but one or the other without the the counterpart it doesn't work but you can
lose you can lose years of your time trying to force right and I think the
common wisdom that you know ideas are worthless comes about because probably
the common failure mode is people thinking that their ideas worth so much
and people who haven't like they haven't written that manifesto and seen it rise
at the top of Hacker News they have no real proof that their idea is a good one
and yet they still think it is and then they started investing all this time and
money and resources in the building the perfect product and you know a year
later they released something that's a total dud because the idea actually
wasn't validated like nobody actually cared and I think with you what's what's
cool is you have like this perfect combination of like having hit on the
right idea before you wrote a single line of code like you knew that there is a
lot of demand for what you're up to I think with any hackers I had a kind of a
similar situation where I didn't have any sort of manifesto but like I could
see people engaging in the idea behind any hackers on other websites and being
super passionate about it so I didn't even have to validate the idea on my own
like people were already doing it and I think that if you take that and combine
that with this long-term outlook like ghost is a not-for-profit company there
is no exit plan for you like you have to start a company that you actually want
to run for the long term and I think that when you have that pressure like it
probably convinces you to make better long-term decisions which then make it
easier to run your company for the long term and that gives you this advantage
that we were talking about earlier where like people can rely on ghosts they can
count on you being there and you can sort of learn these lessons over the
years you can catch these trends you know you didn't have to start ghosts at
the exact perfect right moment in time to capture the creator economy trend or
whatever in the newsletter trend right you've just been here forever and
whatever trend comes about like you're gonna be there for it that's the really
funny thing is if I had gone with what I thought was a good business idea I
probably wouldn't be sitting here talking to you today because I thought
this was a bad idea I you know we would joke I used to be a contributor to
WordPress and we would joke among the other people on the core team you know
who wants yet another plugin platform like everyone of us at some point came
up with the idea of like oh well let's you know start over and really do it
right this time and it was a running joke like who could possibly want another
blogging platform there are already so many so I thought it was it was a bad
idea but it was an idea I couldn't get out of my head and so I wrote I wrote
that blog post about it and the the market for want of a better term the
audience educated me that this is actually an idea that resonated with a
lot of people way more than I had expected or anticipated so it was a
lesson in humility as much as anything that's my read of what was a good or a
bad idea perhaps wasn't as good as I thought it was but you're right the
the framework based on the structure in terms of decisions that get made it's
very different being a nonprofit and never being able to sell a company I
like to say every decision is about creating a company that you're happy to
be stuck with because if you can't sell it there's no kind of ends that justify
the means there's no kind of why I'm gonna do this and I hate it but you know
maybe one day I'll get acquired and then it'll all be worth it this you guarantee
that outcomes not possible so then like I get three sales emails a week from or
sales request emails a week from from companies saying you know we want to
start an enterprise blog and can we have a call and you can give us a demo and
walk our what is it called stupid enterprise companies our requisition
team provisioning team one of those words you can walk everyone through it
and then send us a PDF procurement that's the department then you can spend
about six months haggling over price and then maybe we'll sign up I get those all
the time and it's very very simple I'd say sorry we don't have a sales team and
then I close the ticket because long term that's not a company I want to be
stuck with I do not want to be doing that and there's no ends that justify
the means if I spend my time signing up enterprise companies I'm not gonna be
happier my salary is not going to change the valuation of the company doesn't
matter because it's never gonna sell doesn't make sense so those decisions
that can be very difficult when you're getting started and suddenly it's a big
company they want to give you lots of money become very easy and I've been
very grateful to have that framework as Ghost has gone on over the years
because it's allowed us to create the type of company that I'm just really
really happy to be stuck with I've got a team I'm happy to be stuck with I've got
a product I'm happy to be stuck with it's kind of created a perfect thing in
in terms of what you would want to work on for a long period of time if I ever
start a new company I'm gonna have a list of these sort of constraints like
there's almost arbitrary decisions I can make upfront that will force me to make
better decisions down the road you know one of them will probably be exactly
what you have like what if I can never sell this company you know what am I
gonna do if I have to do this for the rest of my life I'm with hiring you know
like what if I have to actually be friends with the people that I hire and
they can't just be the sort of work acquaintance but they have to be people
I actually enjoy being around like that would change my hiring decisions what if
I can't ever raise money and I can't live on a sort of borrowed time like I
have to fund this business myself like how will that change what I'm building
and who I'm selling it to you I think there's a lot of these questions you can
ask that force you to probably make much healthier decisions compared to if the
world is your oyster in any decisions possible you can go in any direction
then it's easier to just make a bunch of bad decisions people massively
underestimate the creative potential of arbitrary constraints I would encourage
everyone to try out arbitrary constraints whether it's in your daily
schedule or in the way in which you're gonna go about an idea like I don't know
I can only use one JavaScript file or one PHP file it does it almost does not
matter what it is impose upon yourself an arbitrary constraint and watch how
creativity suddenly flows from you in ways that you didn't know were possible
before because the human brain as it turns out likes to get out of annoying
arbitrary constraints and find ways around find loopholes in things and it's
been a remarkable source of creativity for me to just try out constraints make
things hard for yourself I mean a massive amount of ghost was born out of
me saying I am no longer going to try and make a million dollar company I'm
going to try and make a company that goes out of its way to make as little
money as possible but to make a great products so our nonprofit structure like
it's never gonna sell open source would give away all of our intellectual
property distributed we won't have an office we'll just have all the team do
whatever they want and if anywhere that's very unremarkable now it was a
little more remarkable in 2012 but those constraints are where so much of the
creativity came from for building the products in the business later and the
good thing about constraints is you can choose constraints that are like fun and
positive for you if you're just using arbitrary constraints like why not choose
constraints that you're gonna like like I have constraint that I kind of started
implementing earlier this year with indie hackers where I said I'm not
allowed to start anything on any hackers it's not going to be super fun for me to
work on it has to be fun and that's just an arbitrary constraint there's like
there's no law in the universe that the most fun stuff is going to be the most
you know effective or successful for any hackers but it's an arbitrary constraint
that I added and like a lot of decisions that flowed from that like for this
podcast like my the entirety of the work I do for this podcast is a couple hours
of preparation with my podcast boss Ari and then hopping on the call of like
people like you and it's great and like I don't do anything else with the
podcast I don't title things I don't edit things I don't publish things I do
zero of the stuff that I don't consider fun because of that constraint and like
it turns out that that has side effects are actually beneficial which is that I
put more focus into my prep sessions and they're more efficient and I get to spend
way more time doing other things that are important and fun to me as well and
so I mean if you're a founder you can say okay I have to do a company where I
charge a lot per you know a lot of revenue per user because that's what I
want to do or I have to talk to people because I'm social I like talking to
people or it has to be fun or it has to be outdoors or it has to be something
that allows me to work with my hands and like you can have these constraints and
still build a successful company no matter what set of constraints you have
like there are examples of people who've done it and I think with you we were
just talking about this I think a few months ago you have this other
arbitrary constraint I'm not sure why you have it it might be like a side
effect of the fact that you're a nonprofit but you can't hire more than
50 people was it at which point you were you're constrained and you have to figure
out how you're gonna grow and become bigger and better without hiring a single
more person than 50 so where is that constraint come from yeah I love that
you put this up because it's it's something I think more and more about
nowadays so we're coming up on I think 27 people so more than halfway there and
that the rate at which we're hiring is increasing so the kind of 50 60 number
is very much on the horizon it's within sight and the constraint comes from I
have never worked at a company bigger than that which didn't have office
politics or disconnection from the mission or where things kind of stopped
being fun and from all the people we've hired over the years there's a remarkable
amount of refugees who were at startups they passed the kind of 60 70 person
mark things stopped being fun middle management came in the founders sort of
left the early team behind and started pursuing growth goals at the cost of
people and everything just sort of like lost what made the journey special around
about that point and there just so many people who have the exact same story at
a certain point we said okay well what if we just don't grow bigger than that
we'll just stick like not bigger than 50 ish 50 60 somewhere around then I'm not
gonna like say be really belligerent about a fixed number but around that
point what if we just put a line say okay no more and what will that do so
first of all the same as what I was talking about earlier it keeps coast as
a company I'm happy to be stuck with I want to have a group of 50 or 60 people
where I know every single person well not a large group of strangers who are
all just working to a common economic incentive but a team of people who really
know each other deeply and meaningfully which I think you can still achieve
around that size but then what the logical question that follows is okay
well what are the goals of the company once you have 50 or 60 people and you
still have ambition what do you want how do you fulfill whatever goals you have
that that kind of don't fit into the model of that size of company and the
answer is you have to change your ambition or you have to change the model
with which you approach your goals and so a lot of how I think about ghosts now
is less about growing one company and more about growing one centralized
company more about growing a large decentralized ecosystem so whereas many
most companies will try to grow bigger and absorb smaller companies and kind of
be this big blob consuming more and more of the market to become the holy
grail of what everyone wants to become which is a monopoly that dominates a
market kind of think about the opposite how can we make ghosts the products a
really strong and stable core and then spin off all the other things for which
there is demand from the market but that we don't have a big enough team to build
so maybe that's community features or maybe it's video and media that
integrates with ghosts really well or maybe there's an enterprise hosting
option of people who do love to get those emails from large companies with a
big procurement process and close those deals if we can have our smaller team
make a tight core that enables lots of businesses to exist around ghost and
around that open source core then an ecosystem will evolve around it of
multiple economic dependence and it will probably function similarly to a large
company except that I won't control all of it and that's actually very appealing
to me I don't want to control all of it I don't want to have the final say in
how everything should evolve so as we kind of get closer and closer to that
size I start thinking more and more about how can we decentralize features
how can we decentralize the architecture of products and how can we
decentralize the market to be able to create opportunities for other
businesses to exist within ghost and that's one of the things I'm most
excited about at the moment is we have this two-sided ecosystem evolving where
we have on the one hand creators that are starting to use ghost now to build
subscription businesses and are already today making more money per year from
ghost than ghost makes itself which is wild and exciting but on the flip side
we're starting to see that market fuel the opposite end of developers and
experts which in the early stages is kind of coming in the form of theme
developers and integration developers but you're already starting to see people
create companies like a comment platform for ghost is doing pretty well called
Cove comments by Dan Roudon and there's a handful of other small hosting
companies they're popping up for ghost and the more of these that pop up and
become successful the more excited I am about what could be possible for the
future of ghost I think about this a lot with indie hackers too because any
hackers is really just like we're three full-time people now it's me and my
brother and we have an engineered stripe and then beyond that we have a budget to
hire some contractors and stuff to help out but like we're a very small core
team and so it's a very similar constraint of like well how do we build
this thing and get like you were saying like some of the benefits that big
companies have without like the downsides having to manage a ton of
people and jump through a bunch of hoops have a bunch of paperwork and like all
the things that just make it not that fun anymore to run a really big company
and I think that that like forces some creativity on your part and it's for
the best because at the end I think you it's a totally achievable goal like with
any hackers what that means it's basically empowering community members
and volunteers like we can have hundreds of meetups around the world every month
and I don't have to lift a finger even know what's happening at the meetups
because other people want to do this for their own sake sort of their incentives
are aligned to do it and I imagine it goes it's kind of exactly and that's
it's much more exciting prospects me to enable hundreds if not thousands of
independent businesses that are a thriving ecosystem versus create one
enormous megalomaniacal company that controls everything that they're just
not even comparable goals to me that one is fundamentally not interesting and the
other one is incredibly exciting and I think it's less brittle to like I was
just reading a post by Casey new and Newton who's like a famed journalist who
went Andy on substat this year and he was talking about how much less brittle
it feels where you know a bigger publication just one month of you know
one quarter of like you know bad ad revenue could cost reporters their jobs
whereas with him he has so many subscribers that it's so unrealistic for
his business to tank like so many tens of thousands of people would have to
like simultaneously decide that they don't like him anymore for that to
happen and like that's just a place of relative comfort and I think that's also
true when you don't have everything under this monolithic entity and said
you have an ecosystem absolutely what's your advice I always in the podcast with
the same question what's your advice for fludging any hackers now or in the
middle of 2021 the creator economy is in full swing it's no longer just a buzz
term a buzzword but like people are actually making living in publications
on the internet and yet all the old stuff still works people are still
starting new SaaS businesses people are still making a killing in crypto people
are still you know making new podcasts are successful and popular despite the
fact that these right we're in this new world I think we're just there's more
ways to make money on the internet and make living on the internet than ever
what's your advice or somebody who's listening to this and they have no idea
what they want to do and they're just getting started I'll give you two
answers to this a biased one and an unbiased one and I believe both of them
holds equal amount of merit the the biased answer is I think the creator
economy and the subscription business model outside of software holds an
unbelievable amount of potential for the next decade that's coming up and it's
opening up the doors to people to be able to benefit from the subscription
business model for occurring revenue who don't need to learn how to or ever have
the ability to code because it can turn content as a service into a business in
the same way that we had software as a service and I'm all in on that concept
so I'm heavily invested in it myself in in right seeing that future become a
reality and I wouldn't be unless I thought there was there's some real
merit to it you're not seeing the explosion of things like ghosts and
sub stack and patreon all at the same time because there's nothing happening
there and unlike crypto the value is extraordinarily tangible it's creating
businesses around audiences in a symbiotic relationship with publishers
that I hope will also eventually put that the trust back in journalism when
journalists eventually circle around to figuring out that publishing content to
serve audiences rather than get them to click on ads is a much better model for
journalists and people as a whole so I think there's tons and tons of
opportunities there and it's such a low risk low-cost business to try out if
you're just getting started you're not sure where to go the other fringe
benefit of it is establishing an audience and growing an audience is the
single highest leverage thing you can do for starting any other type of business
down the down the line there's a great quote in the stripe book called that the
high-growth handbook which has stories of how lots of big companies grew very
very quickly and I can't remember the exact quote but the sentiment of it is
about how most companies think that their advantage is in building products
and they are product visionaries and they could create any products they
wanted and sell it into any market and be very very good at it because product
is their strength but fundamentally what most companies get wrong is that
products isn't their strength at all their strength is having an existing
market that they have carved out a foothold within and can sell products too
and stripe is a great example of this they have a captive audience of
entrepreneurs on the internet and so they sold payments and then later they
added stripe Atlas because entrepreneurs typically want to incorporate companies
and then recurring billing and then capital and you see stripes strength
that they are executing on is not coming up with lots of different products that
are very good for lots of different market sectors but rather selling
different things to the same audience over and over again so if you can
establish and grow an audience of people who are interested in what you do and
respect what you say that pays off over the long run again and again and again
because every single time you do something new and you need to launch if
you have a captive audience you have a massive advantage over anyone with a
great idea just shouting into the ether that's what Peter is great at I mean he's
very huge audience with nomad list digital nomads look to him for like the
future and the technology around that and then he's just built product after
product after product to the same audience yeah and like I mean what
remote okay I think makes millions of dollars a year and that's just a job
board that he launched the audience he already has single PHP file or creative
constraint so I would say there's there's tons of opportunity for paid
newsletters websites courses all that kind of stuff if you want to have a good
start with it check out ghost but yes this is a very biased answer my unbiased
answer I think as always to everyone would be one just start stop fucking
reading articles about inspiration and how to succeed and the lean startup
handbook just start making stuff you'll learn faster you will go further even if
everything you do flops and fails you will progress much more quickly by doing
that and I'll add a little flavor to that of the best ideas don't need the
best execution to succeed they just need the minimum amount of execution to
succeed and there's a handful of products they're around right now I
sub stacks a great example and I actually respect them a lot for this if
you try and use sub stacks a day the experience is dreadful it is fucking
awful my god that product is bad if you sign up for it there's buttons all over
the place half of the check boxes don't make sense and there's like a thousand
of them but people are going nuts for sub stacks that has the minimum amount
of execution for a very good idea presented very simply so I would say try
and build more stuff more quickly at a lower quality than you think you need to
succeed and if you have the right idea and you're able to create something that
people buy into the story of that is the best possible starting point you can
have love it John O'Nolan thanks for coming on the show can you let listeners
know where they can go to learn more about what you're up to with ghost and
what you're up to in your personal life as well with the rediverge definitely
you can find all my links personal newsletter and things that I'm doing
personally on Twitter at John O'Nolan and for ghost check out ghost.org that
will tell you everything the product does and how you can create a wonderful
thriving content business within the greater economy yourself which you can
and should do not a sales pitch. Alright, later John. Cheers.