What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com and you're listening to the
IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses
and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How do they get to where they
are today? How do they make decisions both to their companies and in their personal lives?
And what exactly makes their businesses stick? And the goal here, as always,
is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own
profitable internet businesses. Today, I'm talking to John O'Nolan, the founder of Ghost. John,
welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me. It's nice to be here and to see you in person.
Yeah, you're a real person. I know, incredible. We're recording this in person at my apartment
in San Francisco. What brings you to us, John? Why are you here? Well, I was here to have a
meeting at Stripe. And when I said that at immigration yesterday, the officer who was there,
usually they questioned me about like, why have you been to Egypt? Why have you traveled so much?
And this time I got a 10 minute grilling on when Stripe's IPO, because I've heard it's going to be
by the end of the year. So my immigration officer was convinced that I knew something he didn't,
I think he wanted inside of trading or something. Wow. Pretty wild. This is like something straight
out of HBO. You know, like when he goes to the doctor and the doctor's pitching him a startup
on Silicon Valley felt exactly like that. I was like, this can't be real. Only in the Bay Area will
the immigration officers grill you about tech, IPOs. Yeah, almost too good to be true. But yeah,
no, I had a couple of meetings at Stripe and that was fun. And so yeah, good, nice,
get a chance to meet you in person. Yeah. So you are, as I mentioned, the founder of Ghost.
You've been on the podcast before, but that was two years ago. A lot has happened since then.
You recently released Ghost 3.0. Why don't you walk us through your sort of a whirlwind
tour of the early days of Ghost just so people can catch up if they haven't heard the story before.
Yeah. So the lightning recap, I used to be one of the second heads of design at WordPress on the
open source product. And after WordPress started moving to be more of a generic website builder,
I set up Ghost as a nonprofit open source publishing platform built with modern technology,
so Node.js, and focused solely on publishing, not on any other use cases. And it started out
as a blog post, turned into a Kickstarter campaign, and then launched in 2013 with a
sustainable business model. So it's an open source product, but you can buy managed hosting
directly from us. And that's how we fund the nonprofit organization that has done very well
since then. So our revenue today available on Indie Hackers is 1.83 million a year,
I think. And you're recurring revenue. I think last time I was on the show was 700,000. Yeah.
So you more than doubled your revenue in the last two years, which I imagine that's been a whirlwind
journey. Or has it been slow and steady and uneventful? More slow and steady, I would say.
The trajectory of revenue growth since the last time we talked has only changed once and not in
a really big way. But it's been very predictable throughout. There's been no major kind of crazy
inflections or business points, just being slow and steady, healthy growth, and trying to make
good decisions. What about your life personally? Because I think when someone's earlier on,
on their company, they have all sorts of visions and predictions about how much their life's going
to change once they hit 10k or 50k or 200k a month in revenue. How much is the reality
different from what you thought it would be like? That's a good question. I think it's both
different and the same in equal and opposite ways. So you always have this delusion no matter what
stage of a company you're at, that things are going to get easier right around the corner.
Like, I just need to hire two more people for these positions. Or I just need to get to this
revenue milestone and then things are going to get easier versus now. And the reality is that
those things you thought would get easier do, and you didn't account for the 10 other new things,
which are not easy, that have now arrived. So things never get easier. They just change and evolve.
And you have different problems at different stages of your personal career and your company's
size. So it's an ever shifting journey. And it's always interesting, but I don't think it ever
gets any easier. And even now I have the delusion that after a few more hires and key positions,
things will be easier for me and I'll have more time. But I'm increasingly willing to think that's
not the case. Yeah, I have the same thing. Right now I'm thinking about the IndieHackers podcast
backlog. And now in another few weeks, it'll be much bigger than it ever has been. And in my
life it's going to be so, yeah, it's going to be great. It's going to be relaxing every day.
Yeah, it's never happened before. You'll take on three more projects,
probably, because of all your extra time. Yeah.
So it's kind of like we do it to ourselves in a way. We just always push ourselves to a...
A lot of it self-inflicted for sure.
So I think we should start here by talking a little bit about Ghost's business model. You
mentioned that it's non-profit. And I'm really curious about basically what that says about you
as a person. Because I've only had one other founder on the podcast who runs a non-profit.
The vast majority of founders run for-profit businesses. But I think to even dive into that,
we just need to talk a little bit about what it means to be non-profit in general.
So what does it mean to be a non-profit? What can you do that other companies can't?
And what can't you do that other companies can't?
That's a good one. Yeah, it's definitely the biggest point of confusion. Usually when I tell
people Ghost's a non-profit, first question is, what's that? And the second question is,
why on earth would you do that?
Was it exactly my questions?
Yeah. So a non-profit is essentially the same as any kind of for-profit normal company with one
major difference, which is there's no share capital. And no share capital means that nobody
owns the company. The company is an independent entity, which is stewarded by trustees and can
sell the board of directors. But no one owns any part of the business. So no part of the business
can be bought or sold. Because none of it is owned or by any particular shareholder,
none of the profits can be distributed to those people. So company exists by itself,
no one owns it, no one can buy it, no one can sell it. And any money that the company makes
stays inside the company and must be distributed through whatever the goals of the company are.
In our case, that's fostering journalism, open source and education around all of those subjects.
So we can only spend money on those things. And if I get tired of this whole thing at some point,
I can retire, but I have nothing to sell. So someone else can take over,
but there's no big payday for me.
So I think that's probably the number one reason why a lot of founders
don't sell a non-profit because they want a big payday.
Definitely. Yeah, that's all of the things I just said are non-attractive to a lot of people.
But it gives you a different platform from which to make decisions.
And that's the reason why we do it is if you're building a company,
eliminating the idea that you could one day sell it to Microsoft or Google for a billion dollars,
how does that affect the decision making of how you structure a company, how you structure a team,
what type of product do you build, who it's for, whether or not it's sustainable or not.
If you're building something that you're going to be stuck with and that will never have any kind of
payoff at the end of the line, what do you build? And that's kind of the grand experiment of what
I wanted to find out. I kind of decided that being a multi-billionaire was not for me,
and it didn't excite me very much. So if you built a company exclusively trying not to achieve
that end goal, and you completely built something you're going to be stuck with forever,
what do you build? And so the answer is you build the best thing possible for users and
customers and the team and something that you're happy to work on every day because it feels good
and it feels like it's beneficial for you, for the people you're around and for the world that
you live in. And it checks all of those boxes rather than, well, maybe it's going to pay off
one day. So it's a lot less of a lottery ticket. I talked to a lot of founders who have a company
that has some sort of mission. And I find there's pretty much three different types of founders who
have a mission. There's the founder who has a mission and it's total bullshit. You can tell
they don't believe in it. It doesn't matter. They're just paying lip service to having a mission
and anything they care about. There's people who are kind of in the middle, which I think is the
most common, where they might have a mission or a goal for their company and how it affects the
world. And they really do believe in it and care about it, but it's still mostly a means to an end.
They recognize the prudence of having a mission and how that keeps them aligned, but they're not
necessarily all in. It's not their life journey. They wouldn't give up the chance at a big payday
to have this sort of mission. And then there's founders like you who actually deeply care about
the thing that you're working on, which in this case is, I think, independent journalism. Is that
fair to say? Yeah. Where does that passion come from? How do you care so much about something
like that? There's so many different angles to it. I think journalism as a concept is one of the
most important ideas that we have at its most basic level. Journalism is the idea of informing
people to better make decisions about their own lives or community specifically of people,
whether that's what to buy, who to vote for. It's giving people information needed to make decisions
better. And the purpose of it is for society to be able to evolve more efficiently and to be a
better informed society than it started out as. And I think that's an important idea. I mean,
in 2019, more than at any other time, arguably. And in 2019, more than at any other time,
journalism has no money behind it, has no business model, has no method of surviving.
The notion of what we think journalism is, has never been in a worse state as a result of that
money drying up. Because a lot of it now is just clickbait to get the last drabs of advertising
that barely exist anymore. And so trying to address that or fix that in some way feels
like a meaningful problem to solve. And there's people who need that problem to be solved.
And from a product point of view, it's just an interesting problem to solve. It's an interesting
challenge to work on to build publishing software. It's certainly not one of the easiest things you
can do, but it's got a lot of interesting nuance. And then my experience in working on WordPress,
was a comparable product. These are comparable products in some ways.
There's obviously a natural advantage in starting something like this.
It's funny because if you think about when you started Goats, which was what, 2013?
This was back in those days, I think journalism was already sort of under siege in a weird state.
But it's only gotten worse. The 2016 election sort of blew things up. The continued rise of
social media has really impacted things in a weird way. And I think your mission has only become
more relevant over time. But this is a business show. We're talking about how to start a company.
And I think for most people, it's difficult just to get a profitable company off the ground,
let alone start a company where they're having an impact on some mission that they care about.
Yes.
How do you achieve both of those things simultaneously?
Really good question. I mean, so there's probably a lot of different ways.
I'm sure there's a lot of different ways you can achieve it. And I can give an answer from my own
kind of survivorship bias point of view, but just keep in mind that what worked for me won't
necessarily work for you. But what worked for me was to go after the idea that seems
not interesting, but the one that I knew a lot about. So in 2013, the idea of starting yet
another blogging platform was not a good one. There was not one where I thought like, this is
the next Airbnb, this is going to be a huge thing. It was like, oh, who wants another blogging
platform? That's not a good idea. But it was a problem that I deeply understood because of
having worked on WordPress. So it was the obvious thing to work on, not the interesting thing to
work on. And in spite of not finding it a sexy idea initially, I still kept coming back to it
because I could see the problems with WordPress and I could understand what the market of people
using WordPress, at least a subset of them really wanted. And I felt like I could do something
better, but I was not convinced that it was interesting enough to be a viable product or
a viable company. So for me, the answer was the obvious idea, which had an established market,
had established demand, in which I understood the nuances of what could be built and what should
be built in that space. So that's one answer. It's fascinating. It's funny because it's almost
the opposite of what I would expect. I would expect you to say, I started with my passion,
even though it was not a viable market and I didn't know very much about it. But you took a very
practical approach to getting here and now you're doing something that's supremely meaningful. Do
you feel like you've had to change your vision and change your views a lot since Ghost first
started to get here or has it just been smooth sailing? I don't know about smooth sailing,
but we've been pretty dogged about maintaining the same vision. A lot of that was locked in.
A thing about choosing nonprofit upfront is you can't change. I locked myself into owning no part
of the business. And this came to fruition. So I said when Ghost launched, if someone came along
and offered me $10 million for the company, I couldn't take it because I don't own the company.
And that is a safeguard that makes the business relevant because it's going to stick around.
It's not going to... I can't just change my mind at some point down the road and say,
actually, I'm going to sell out on all the stuff that I promised our users and our customers.
My word is legally behind what I'm saying, which is not something people do usually.
And that actually did come to fruition. In 2015, I was in San Francisco and we had some investors
trying to convince us to do a Series A and we're like, we're a nonprofit, we can't. They're like,
we've got $10 million and we really think that you could go far. And we're like, we're a
nonprofit, we can't. And that for all my own moral integrity and the strength of my beliefs,
when you're sat opposite someone at a table saying, we think this business could be big,
we want to give you $10 million to support it. And they're not just saying that, but they're
also saying, this is your one opportunity. This is your one window to succeed. You do not want to
squander this. And this is not a random stranger. This is someone who's invested in GitHub and
Airbnb. And you are in an environment where you feel helpless to the powers and that everyone
else around you know so much more than you do. Your resolve waivers, no matter how much you
believe something and having the safeguard of I've already made this decision and I've legally locked
myself into this decision. I've never been more grateful for. And in hindsight, the power dynamics
of that conversation that I was having were terrible, were awful. Like it was out and out
manipulation of the kinds that you, there are movies and books about of investors manipulating
startup founders to get ahead. But still it played out. That was exactly the purpose of having that
structure. So it's a kind of circle back to your question. We've stuck completely to the mission
that we had in part because of the structure we put in place and in part because we've been able
to thanks to the business working and being profitable from year one. So we've always been
sustainable. And yeah, we're still on that path. So when we first spoke, Ghost was pretty far from
being a super early stage company and you're making a high six figures in revenue every year,
but now you're much bigger than that. And I'm interested to talk about some of the differences,
some of the things that an early stage founder might look forward to or might have to expect
as their business grows. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting subject for me, because there's
so there's a lot of information out there about starting something previously more around kind of
traditional startups increasingly, thanks to sites like indie hackers, there's more information out
there about how to bootstrap stuff and, and get started. And then there's, there's kind of a
massive amount of information at the other end of the spectrum of, you know, running large companies
and management theories and corporate structures and fucking holacracy and shit like that.
But there's this, there's this middle that's, that's kind of not really talks about this,
the sort of gap between, oh, you've passed initial traction, you've got like, let's say
a hundred, $200,000 a year in revenue, like that's real business for, for, I don't know,
a few people, that's a real business that's meaningful. It's, that's succeeding, but
it's not big enough to have all of those problems be naturally solved, just hire a bunch of people
and throw them at the problem. Like, no, there's a, there's a big gap between the first couple of
hundred K a year of revenue, and then feeling moderately comfortable and like you can do stuff,
which is kind of where we just, I feel like that point happened for us around like 1.5 million a
year. It's a really big gap. And there's not a lot of people talking about like, oh, well, how do you
get from one to the other and what changes between one and the other? And I don't, I don't have all
the answers to that either, but I think it's a, an interesting thing to talk about. I think the
biggest thing that changes both in revenue growth from, from point A to point B, as well as in
company age, I guess is I guess the last time we spoke, we must've been four or five people. I'm
not completely sure. And I was hands on everywhere in every single decision, every single thing
happening at the company I'll be involved in versus today. We're just starting. So we're 15
people now, and we're just starting to be at the point, which is still tiny in everyone's eyes, by
the way. But we're just starting to be the point where we have more than one team, like there's an
infrastructure team, and then there's a product team, and there's a business team now. And each
one of those has its own goals and its own meetings and is starting to have its own roadmap.
And I'm not necessarily involved in every single decision about every single thing that ships.
And that's a completely different, different frame of mind to be in as a founder, and to
transition from one to the other is a journey in and of itself.
How do you hire people and find the right people that you can give the level of autonomy to, where
you're transitioning from a founder who controls everything, and you can feel pretty confident
that things are done well because your hand is in every pop, and now you have to sort of give up that
psychological control, which I know can be hard to do. How do you hire people who you can trust
and not feel bad about it?
There's a great quote about this I saw the other day. I'm going to butcher it, but I'll try, which is
in the early days of being a startup, you have to be involved in every single detail
and care about every single micro decision that gets made.
And if and when a startup succeeds, you have to stop doing that.
So the very thing that is a strength from the beginning is an immediate
liability if and when you achieve any sort of success. So it's this
complete dichotomy of you need a skill set in the beginning, which will
kill your business if you don't change it later on. So finding
people at the right stage with the right set of skills and the right set
of values is always difficult, particularly when you're not fully one
or the other. We're still not fully, like I'm still involved in a lot, maybe not
everything anymore, but still a lot.
I'm not sure if there's a succinct answer to this other than
finding people who believe what you believe and working
closely enough with them so that they understand how you think
and how you make decisions and frame their own work against
the same trajectory as what you're hoping to achieve.
And beyond that is just a lot of trial and error of figuring things
out together. One of the things that struck me about Ghost in the early
days is that it was a very well thought out product. It was exceptionally
well designed. Even just the landing pages, you could tell a lot of care went into those
and as you grow and you're sort of delegating these tasks to other people who
don't have your same personality necessarily, your same set of skills, you have to give that up.
I think it's easy for the quality of your product to slip.
And the number of things you have to focus on increases. You can't give things as much attention as you did earlier on.
And yet you just released Ghost 3.0 and it seems like it's even better
than the original Ghost. It's getting better as you get bigger.
What contributes to that? How do you make that happen as your company gets bigger?
And is being a nonprofit and having sort of a long-term view, does that contribute at all?
In many regards. I'm not sure if nonprofit helps or hinders or
has much of an impact in this area, but
it's one of the most difficult things to maintain, I will say that. It's something I think
a lot about. And I think one of the reasons why
it becomes so difficult to delegate is if you have a quality bar
which you consider to be your reputation, which we very much do,
then maintaining that bar, not even aspirational. It's not even like
oh, we aspire to maintain the level of quality we have now. It's not even
a goal. It's like we can't fall below this line because
then we'll lose what we've already got. Which is just an interesting
framing because it doesn't feel like it's something worth shooting for, but it does feel like it's something that you
can't let go. And it's not an easy thing to maintain, particularly in
design. I think design is one of the hardest just because a brand's voice,
whether visual or the words used or the tone of the company,
are crucial, particularly when you're connecting with an
early audience who that resonates with. And maintaining that, it's
not easy. So I almost have no useful answer at all to this other
than yes, it's incredibly difficult and yes, you have to continue to focus
on it. And yes, the more people you add to the team, the harder it becomes for that
not to get diluted. What kind of trade-offs do you have? Because I think
very often if you want to have some sort of stringent standard like our design quality cannot
fall below this bar. You can do that, but you have to make a sacrifice in some
other area of your business. What kind of trade-offs have you made for a ghost as it's grown?
I was working per day. This is the obvious one, right?
Implementation time, I guess. So it would be almost all things.
You can ship a shitty MVP version pretty quick. And in a lot of cases that's
the thing you should do, and that's the correct decision. In other cases
it's worth taking the extra week. It's worth taking the extra
bit of time or number of iterations to get
something right so that it resonates more strongly with an audience. Because
you get one chance to make a first impression, right? Whether it's with a new product or a new feature or a new
thing. And often there's a bias towards shipping quickly,
but sometimes it comes at the expense of making a good enough impression
to even get an early user base. And that's
a balance that you constantly have to weigh in terms of falling between
the right lines, not shipping too fast and not waiting too long. But we've built
a reputation on being a well-designed platform.
For us to maintain that is important. So yeah, that's something we think about a lot.
One of the things that I struggle with as indie hackers gets bigger and I think a lot of
founders struggle with is that your to-do list basically continually grows. The number of things
that you discover you should be doing or want to be doing never gets smaller. It just gets bigger and bigger
even as you're crossing things off that list and you have to somehow prioritize
what you're going to build. And I think in the early days as a founder,
you're just trying to make your first dollar in revenue. You can really just
determine a lot of what you need to build because it's the bare minimum that your customers need.
When you're a little bit more mature, it turns out you've sort of got that covered. You've built
Ghost as a platform. People like using it and now you've kind of got a wide array of options
that you can choose to pursue. You just released Ghost 3.0.
How do you as a little bit later stage founder determine
what kind of features are worth focusing on, what's going to help you grow and accomplish your mission?
There's a great book. The title escapes me, but I'll
ask Cortland to put a link in the show notes after this, which is written by the guy
who I think he invented WebKit and he invented
the original iOS keyboard. It's about how things
were designed at Apple during like kind of peak Apple.
I don't know, six to eight, nine, whatever you want to consider that period
as. It's a really interesting book. I highly recommend it, but
the big takeaway from the book is that best products at Apple came out
of a small group of people building prototypes and iterating on them
and having a very deep connection to the problem that they were trying to solve
quickly. We kind of have a similar philosophy in terms
of how we think about products. It's driven
a lot internally by the things that we believe to be true about the market
we're in, about the use case we're trying to solve, and about our own experience
solving those use cases. I think in product development
there's almost an overemphasis on listening
to the customer and lean customer development or lean product development by talking to customers
and customer interviews. While all of those things are valuable, they should be
one tool in your toolset, not the sole tool. You can get a lot of false
information from customers by asking the wrong questions or by asking
the right questions to the wrong people. These things can often lead
you down a huge distracting path versus your own
direct experience of solving a problem and understanding
deeply the problem that you're solving from your own experience of being the user.
We try and balance listening to what people are saying and what people
are asking for, and that's almost just the really, really short term roadmap.
Then there's the stuff we want to do that we care about, and that's kind of the medium
term roadmap. The long term roadmap is really fueled by what we
believe to be true about the world and where we think the entire market and industry
is going and what our competitors are doing around us and what's happening
in the state of humanity that is changing, which is the more relevant
long term goal. I would give you three more tangible, quick examples
of that. People were asking last year a lot about responsive
images and how to do translated content in Ghost. That was something you'd been asked about
so often that it was hard to ignore, so we added those features in Ghost 2.0
and a lot of those requests went away. It wasn't like a thing that we were super
passionate about solving and there were already workarounds that could solve all of those things,
but we made it a bit easier and that was cool. Memberships and
subscriptions is something we've been thinking about for years or so
that we just launched in Ghost 3.0 that enables a whole new business model for news
and that feels all for publishers in general and that feels important and we care about it a lot
of the time to get there. Then the trajectory of Ghost is over
10-20 years is on being around as a starting point
so that means the business has to be sustainable. It can't just be burning through
invested dollars until they run out and then disappear. In many ways our strategy
is to outlast the competition and in a lot of ways the world is
moving to be more decentralized, more privacy focused.
We've always had that angle, but that's only started to become, I don't know, trendy
in the last 12-18 months and so making sure
that we are going to be compatible with whatever that future world is going to look like.
So are you simultaneously doing these quick user requested features
and combination with your medium term outlook and combination with your long term outlook?
Are you oscillating between all three of these every couple of weeks? What does it look like
to try to balance all this stuff? Yeah, you're right because a lot of people say stuff like this and then
it's like, okay, but how do I apply this in reality? Often when I listen to podcasts that's a frustration
I'm like, that sounds great, but how the fuck do you do all that stuff? So more practically
we work in cycles like Basecamp do. So we have
six week product cycles where we have a set of work that we think can be done in six
weeks and that's what we're going to do. And then there's a two week gap of kind of
bug fixing and planning for the next cycle. And so you end up with
six cycles per year. That's right. And everything that we plan
to do, whether it's a user requested feature, a medium term
plan or a long term plan is going to fit into one of these cycles in some way.
So practically six times per year we do planning and in those six times per
year we decide how many small things, how many big things and how many things in between
are we going to take on? And it varies. So some, usually the beginning
of like a calendar year is like, okay, here's some big things we're going to take on for the whole
year. It's just a natural kind of point to do that type of planning. And then usually
there'll be one cycle in the middle of the year where we go, okay, we're just going to do these user requested features
because people have been making so much noise about this for so long. So it changes.
It oscillates at the points of these cycles and the cycles are quite helpful
for one being able to say no the rest of the time when
people are coming in with requests like, cool, that's, we've made a note, but we're not going to think about now.
We're going to think about it in six weeks time or whenever the gap in the next six week cycle is.
And also for them, when you get to that gap, kind of taking stock and going, are
we still doing the right things or should we change the plan of what we're doing so far this year?
So it both allows you to go faster
and not go too fast, which is really helpful.
I think you've made any easily identifiable mistakes
and what you've planned on working on in the last couple of years since we've spoken.
And if so, what are your thoughts on why that happened and how do you correct?
We've definitely made mistakes. We've been quite fortunate not to make very many
big mistakes. General judgment has been on our side.
I think the most significant ones have been in
overly ambitious engineering projects, which we underestimated
up front. So really a really kind of practical example of this is
there's a two login problem with managed service which is called Ghost Pro.
And so Ghost the product is an open source piece of software and you
have a user account with an email and a password, but it's
decentralized, right? So every instance is separate. So we have a hosting service
and you also have a username and a password or an email address and a password.
And so people sign up and they create these two different accounts because that's the only way you can do it.
It's the same if you were to set up like a WordPress site or something that was self-hosted.
But they forget that there's two accounts. And so there's a massive amount of confusion about,
oh, how come I've got a login for ghost.org? But then that's not the same as a login for my site.
I don't understand. And that came up enough times that we were like, okay, we're going to solve this
and we're going to solve it with OAuth. So we're going to have a login with ghost button.
So that necessitates that you build this sort of centralized service, which can
serve requests via this login with ghost button. And then
you'd have this magical ubiquitous flow of just one login to
rule them all. You could login to all your ghost sites with one login and that would also be your billing account.
Sounds great. In practice, OAuth is terrible as a
spec to work with. And two, it didn't solve anything. It just introduced
new problems because now we could have this one login and we spent
like six months building this, by the way, at least with like
five people on and off, at least two full time. So now you could log
in with one thing, one login. And then what happens if you log out? Or there's a problem
we didn't think about. So what happens? Do you get logged out of one site? Do you get
logged out of your site and your billing account? Do you get logged out of your site and your billing account
and all the other sites you have set up? What if I'm like a guest author
on your site, but I also own my own site and I have one login for both, but you kick me
out of yours. Do I get logged out of your site and my
site or just one? There's just a whole host of new problems
of decentralized architecture. And in hindsight,
building this big login with ghosts centralized
thing was just not a problem we ever should have taken on. Not a lot of
people have login with X buttons. Why is that? Because it's a really difficult thing to
solve. That's why Twitter do it and Google do it, but Basecamp don't.
It's just not an easy thing to solve. And so there's been a few projects
like that that have probably represented our biggest mistakes where we've taken on something that big
companies do because we felt big startups, big tech startups do because we felt like
they do it. That's the thing people want and that's the thing we need to do.
And we have to do the same to compete or to at least be held in the same regard.
And it doesn't make sense because they have a hundred engineers
for that one login button. And we had two engineers for a whole company.
So eventually we threw that whole system out, we rolled it back, we got
rid of the whole thing. And we've tried to be better about identifying these things in advance.
But now I think we're more, as a result,
more careful about the engineering challenges we take on when we compare
ourselves to other products out there and other features we go, how big is the team working on that?
Because if we're realistically going to do something similar, we shouldn't be
taking on a challenge where we're competing against a team of 300 people working on this one feature.
Or that is only possible because 300 people works
on this one feature. So biggest problems over
ambitious engineering in favor rather than what we should have done
and what we're increasingly doing now is authentication-less
no-factor authentication. So magic email links. That's a really easy thing to do and
it solves the same problem. So you put in your email address, you get a link, it logs you in.
That's it. That's it. No one has to remember anything. It's like every link is a password reset link.
So it immediately solves having two logins. It solves anyone having to remember any details.
It solves centralized versus decentralized. And it's a trivial thing to implement.
It's not hard at all. And that was the decision we should have made that we
have arrived at now.
It's funny because you mentioned Google and these bigger companies doing this and they don't even have it figured out.
If you share a Google Doc to my personal account and I click it,
I'm logged into three different accounts. Google's like, which account do you want to open it with?
It belongs to one of my accounts, Google. And no matter which one you click on, it's like a redirect loop.
Exactly. It's super hard. It's a tough problem. It's really difficult.
And I think this is a problem that, you know, we've been talking a lot about how things have changed.
This ghost has gotten bigger, but this is a problem that exists at pretty much every phase
of a company. I talked to a ton of early stage founders who their number one problem is they
are just, their eyes are bigger than their stomach. They keep trying to code these things
and do things that huge companies do. And it's like, you are an Andy Hacker. Just do the super
version of it and that'll be much better. And the problem with any degree of success at any
stage of any business is that your ambitions grow with
your success level. So like anything in life, right?
The thing that was your dream or your goal was a name for this.
It's the other one, right? Your ambitions will always grow.
Whatever your goal is today, once you achieve it, that will become your new normal and you'll come up
with new goals. And the same is true for product development and your ideas
of what you could do. And you have to balance it.
Jeff Bezos has a good quote about having sort of a long term vision
for the future where he talks about kind of the default thing to do is look at what's changing in the world.
What are the trends? What's new and what's upcoming? But his personal vision is to do the exact opposite
and ask what doesn't change? What's still going to be the same 10, 15
years from now? And we're going to focus on that as a company and that's Amazon obviously.
With Ghost, I don't know how true or how useful that model
will be because you're dealing with the publishing industry, with writing, which is changing pretty rapidly.
Amazon is selling products, which I'm not going to say is not changing, but people are just going to buy
mops 10 years from now, I'm pretty sure. And your estimation, what are some things that haven't
changed and won't change in the future with publishing?
I think Jeff Bezos' example in that one is shipping times, right?
People always want to have fast shipping, no matter what.
10 years from now, people are not going to want to get something they order on the internet any slower.
They're going to invest heavily in infrastructure and delivery. It makes a lot of sense, fulfillment.
It makes perfect sense. From a ghost point of view, there's a few things which
definitely won't change. I think the world needs
journalism and that's not going to change. And there'll be a desire
to do some form of journalism, storytelling, content creation, sharing,
no matter which way you want to frame it. I would argue that a lot of these new YouTubers
are a new form of journalism and the very least a new form of publishing.
I think that's going to go away, although the formats in which that kind of takes shape probably
will. And then I would offer the hypothesis that someone
will always want the written word. I think a lot of formats do come and go,
but that the written word is the cheapest to distribute,
the most broadly understood, the most easily translatable, the most
data-friendly in terms of bandwidth. And there will always be some form of published written
word that is unlikely to ever become completely irrelevant.
And those are probably the only two big constants that I think about.
Like you say, I think everything else is evolving pretty quickly. I think for the next 10 years,
definitely something that we're going to see more of is publishers that are trying to earn a
living. And that overlaps with the Indie Hacker Maker creator audience as well in terms
of people trying to make an independent living, start a small business
and sustain themselves. And generational studies, if you look at
like we're now kind of Gen Z, whatever's coming next after
millennials, is just starting to enter the job market for the first time.
And a lot of the early signs show that they are equally entrepreneurial
if not more than the generation before them. So I think
that's not going to change. I think we're going to see a lot of people trying to start their own thing,
work independently, and have some form of independence, financial independence
in one way or another.
It's a fascinating topic. It's one I think about a lot too, obviously running Indie Hackers is
arguably like a golden era of the individual maker making a living
online by themselves. And Ghost, especially now Ghost 3.0,
helps facilitate that. You're allowing people to basically set up their own publication,
write for their own audiences, and charge money for their content
directly without really having to set up a bunch of different individual pieces of that
in a complex way. What are you seeing in that space?
Do you think it's a growing area? Do you think Indie Hackers can succeed there?
If so, what are their best options?
This whole space I'm massively excited about. I mean, no surprise, right?
But we're just at such an interesting point in so many different regards in terms of
what's possible for independent business owners.
Regardless of what you publish, you might publish code, you might publish words,
you might publish videos. If you're putting something out into the world, I would argue you're publishing it.
And if you have an audience for it, then you're a publisher.
In the more traditional kind of journalism space is for a while you had
advertising and that worked great. Then Google and Facebook came along and they
ate all of the advertising dollars. They just disappeared completely.
So traditional media has no money anymore. It has no money whatsoever
and it's all drying up, but we're starting to see new media
business models succeed. Like Ben Thompson Stratecri, like smaller publications
here in San Francisco, like The Information. People in Europe,
like The Correspondent, who've also just opened in the US,
where aligning the incentives of
an audience who get value from content that's being produced
and being willing to pay for it directly are able to do so
thanks to technology like Stripe with recurring subscription payments and that's getting
easier and easier. And there's people starting to have more and more success with it and then you've got
the whole new creator movement with Patreon and even
Open Collective to a lesser extent on the open source side. There's this new
wave of indie businesses which realizing the internet
is now big enough to support niche businesses. Niche businesses are no longer
tiny. Niche business can be a big business because having a very specialized
thing now has a large enough audience to be able to actually make
money from it. And so software is kind of the first example that got
there, right? So we had on-premise software and now we have software as a service and whereas
20 years ago no one would pay for something in the cloud, now it's like
I can't imagine having a piece of software that it comes on a CD or that
doesn't live in the cloud. Like why would it not be in the cloud? And paying
subscriptions for stuff is completely normal. But there's all these other business sectors which could have
subscription payments but it's not easy. Right now you still
need a competent developer to understand the Stripe API and be good enough to work
with it and build the same bit of subscription billing over
and over again. So we tried with Ghost 3.0 to solve this
problem for publishers and we built memberships and
subscription billing directly with Stripe into Ghost so that within
under kind of 10 minutes if you have an existing Stripe account you can
set up a website, you can connect to subscription payments and you can start
getting customers immediately. And I think that's the first move
towards a new type of business model that I think is going to become
more ubiquitous just as we've seen e-commerce explode and e-commerce platforms
enable a lot of that. I think subscription commerce has a very healthy future
and platforms I hope including Ghost and Light Ghost
will make that easier and easier over time. So I think for indie hackers
and indie makers what we've built now is almost like a good prototype. If you
want to start like you need a site, you need user sign-ups
and you want to be able to build these people monthly, you can set up a Ghost instance
which does all of those things and then you can focus on building your products. And the only thing you
have to do is then connect the user systems at some point so that your
members have access to whatever it is you've built, written, created, whatever it is.
So it's almost like a good step in the door. Even
potentially for kind of no-code movement startup founders, people who are interested in
just getting an MVP out as quick as possible. And I think in practice
that whole space is going to grow tremendously as we have more and more people
building stuff. I think if you're a writer, you look at the ecosystem
and there's just so many options for where you should be publishing content.
Should it be on social media, on Facebook and Twitter where you can build a following?
Should you be starting a newsletter where you can sort of collect email addresses and then keep those
sort of to yourself? Should you be on a platform like Medium or should you start your own
blog that you host or should you install Ghost? How do you think people
should think about this array of options? And I realize you're biased here as a person
who runs Ghost. So maybe a better question is why choose Ghost or some of these other platforms
if you're trying to make a living for yourself.
Very biased, but I'll try and give an honest answer. I think
previously the answer for why not to use Ghost, maybe that's a good place to start,
is the distribution mechanism. So the biggest advantage
Twitter had and Medium definitely had past tense
was that you could go and write there and the network effects
you would get would mean you could grow an audience from nothing. So you could just write something,
hit publish and it would find an audience and that audience could grow much more effectively
than on the open web where you can publish just into the ether
and never know if anyone's read it. I think what we're starting to see now is
social media feels like it's a little bit on its last legs or at the very least
kind of on the way down. Medium is just pop up hell now
and unless you agree to put your content behind their paywall they don't distribute it
via their network at all anymore. That just doesn't
happen. So the network effect is gone. So for
the reason why Ghost is important or why
we think it's important is because no matter what happens
with network effects or anything else you still own the platform.
So if any of these other companies get sold or shut down or
change, your writing disappears with them.
Open source movements always sort of hypothesize that that would happen
but there weren't very many examples of it actually happening enough to scare people
into really believing it. Whereas I think in the last few years we've really seen the
dark sides of what can happen with companies being bought and sold, with data being leaked,
with centralized players with massive amounts of data
not necessarily being the best stewards for it. Increasingly people are starting
to care about this and I think increasingly we're starting to see better decentralized
options which still solve the network effect. So we've got activity pub spec which powers things like
Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter and we're starting to
see better options that are not just in the centralized space.
So if you're going to choose a platform my advice is choose something that you
own not just the copyright to your content but choose something where you
control how your content lives. Like can someone else shut you
down? If they can I would argue you don't own anything or control it.
And then figure out your marketing from there. Publish on something you own
and then figure out your distribution however you want. Distribution
always changes but ownership of content is consistent.
You're not taking a cut of the revenue that people make. No, we take zero percent. That's the best bit.
So if you want to use Ghost memberships and subscriptions to your business off the ground
we're not a middleman so no level of revenue can you scale to where Ghost
is making more. Yeah, I think it's interesting because a lot of companies have
what essentially looks like bait and switch over kind of a long
time horizon where everyone's like my Facebook page is growing so well this is like the new
medium and then like Facebook clamps down. Starts limiting who you can access.
Starts charging you money and people move off of Facebook. And a lot of people build
publications on Medium and now the most common story here is people
moving off of Medium because it's almost predatory.
I think there's a lot of merit to building on kind of a free and open source platform
where essentially you guys have no incentive to screw anyone over or take
their subscribers or do anything like that for the indefinite future.
That'd probably be impossible for you to even do that.
And so maybe this is a good point to pull on for your audience in terms of
when you're at the early stages of building any sort of
indie hacker business or indie business I think one of the best
consistent thought exercises you can have is how do you align your
incentives with the incentives of your audience or your customers for the long term.
Because if you do that there's few ways in which you can lose.
If the decisions you're making and the things you're building
will over time be better and better for your users and your customers
it's very difficult for that to get
turned on its head or turn around. Whereas if you're doing something which over time
will get worse and worse for your customers say taking a 10% payment transaction fee
if I take 10% of your $1,000 a month hypothetical revenue now
probably fine. But over 10 years if you scale your revenue to
a few million or a few hundred million well suddenly you're paying
a completely outsized amount for me providing the exact same
service at a slightly higher level. So the economics are getting worse for you
and better for me and if that's the case you're probably going to want to move off go to a different competitor
or do something completely different. Versus if you are getting
the same amount or you're paying the same amount but getting more value from
using Ghost over time then that's going to be better for you. This is a very
trivial example but if you can align your incentives with that of your audience
then they will continue to be happy with you as you continue to be happy with
the market that you're in. And these things kind of solve themselves. It's where the incentives
don't align and advertising is a perfect example of this. Where over time things
tend to go to shit as people figure out you've got their private data and you're selling it
and they don't like that and you've just leaked all of it and some guy
calls Alex, I can't remember what his name is from Cambridge Analytica, now has
the keys to your whole personal life. So I don't know, that's a good
thread to come back to I think in terms of aligning incentives as much as possible
solves a lot of difficult questions.
I think one of the biggest worries that an early stage indie hacker has is just growth.
A lot of the times they're just worried like is anyone going to read what I'm writing?
What I'm selling? And I think that creates some of the allure for these platforms that promise
to help with distribution where they have a built in distribution at work.
Running goes and seeing so many different people making money from their blogs and their websites.
What's your advice for someone who's trying to figure out how to grow when they're in the very early stages?
Yeah, I think in a lot of ways finding
the audience is almost the more difficult initial
problem and the more important initial problem than what the
idea that you have is because it's just such an instant mechanism for feedback and validation.
When Go started I already had
15,000 followers on Twitter or something and I've been writing a blog for a few years.
I already had an audience to validate product ideas against and I think something
gets skipped a lot is in conversations like this is someone says,
oh validate your idea, ask people what they think. But if you've got nobody to ask or you've only got
a very, very small statistically not significant group of people to ask,
then your data is not going to be very good. So building an audience is an unbelievably
valuable thing to do, whether that's by blogging, podcasting,
starting a YouTube channel, whatever it is you want to do,
building any kind of audience, ideally within
the market that you want to sell to or create something for,
is one of the best things you can do full stop because it'll just give you
the ability to get feedback on whether or not an idea is even good. And if it is a good idea,
people get natural traction. If something is a good idea, people will bite your head off to
take it. I had written, I had all sorts of business ideas before Ghost, which I wrote blog posts
about and that got no traction or that I launched and got no traction or that got
just vanishingly frustratingly small amounts of traction that felt
like there might be something there, but there wasn't. And when I
first wrote the blog post about Ghost, it was 300,000
views in a week or something, quarter of a million and 30,000
email addresses in my opt-in form. That was like instant,
okay, this is what I have to focus on. So I think finding any
mechanism for getting that feedback and being able to have any kind of audience
is so valuable and it requires nothing other than
creating something, putting something out into the world and talking to your peers,
having conversations. Any form of
creating something and interacting and talking will start
to build that audience. But just building products in a box without talking to anyone
rarely leads to success.
One of the things you mentioned is that the internet, sort of hitting full speed nowadays, is
enabling all sorts of people to create different businesses they've never been able to create just because
of the niches that you can target. You can be so specific and so
idiosyncratic with what you're working on and there's still
hundreds of thousands of people on the internet who want that. So my favorite kind of visual example is
imagine you live in a town like 100,000 people and you start a business that
10 people care about. It's probably not sustainable, it's not enough, but if
10 out of 100,000 people on the internet care about that, that's like millions of people and
suddenly you can create a business the likes of which could never have even existed.
And so we live in a world where now there's just millions of unexplored ideas and things people
haven't created that they could eventually create and almost no matter how specific
and weird your interests are, you can create a YouTube channel for that. You can write a blog about that.
You can have a newsletter about that and people will probably take an interest if you can find out where they are.
What are some of the more interesting niches and
weird things you've seen on Ghost if any come to mind?
There's so many including some very bizarre and creative
forms of pornography which defy belief in terms of just how specific
they are and how big the apparent audience is for them. But I think this is such an important
point for indie hackers in particular because if you're early on
and you haven't got that first idea yet or you haven't necessarily found any success with an idea
yet, it's very easy to look around and see success in
startups and in big ideas and big audiences and read books where they
say everything has to be a billion dollar idea and think
no idea is good unless it's the next Google or the next Airbnb or the next
whatever. And it's such an anti-pattern for what can be
a really successful independent business.
Weirdly, there's a weird parallel here because a lot of local newspapers
and news organizations, particularly in the US, went out of
business as a result of getting this wrong. And what happened with
the internet kind of evening the playing field of distribution
was that local news orgs all over the world, especially in the US, started
covering more and more global news, news outside of their immediate
communities. So whereas maybe whatever the
leading newspaper in Kansas would previously cover local issues, now they also
cover not just national elections but also what's happening in China and what's
going on on the internet and around the world. And
initially publishers found out that the more and more they published, the more clicks they'd get, the more clicks
they get, the more ad dollars they get. So publishing more
and more things which were useful to as many people as possible.
Getting the largest, shallowest audience as possible was the thing that paid off.
And eventually that put them out of business because the Kansas Tribune
or whatever small town newspaper you want to pick
can't compete with the New York Times. It can't compete with the national
the global publishers. But where the global publishers
can't compete, where the Kansas Tribune absolutely could,
is in what's happening in Kansas. Like what are the issues of
one particular community that are absolutely irrelevant
and not interesting to the rest of the world. And the same is true for so many
business ideas. There's so many communities which are missing key products which
they would pay for, key communities or newspapers that they would pay for,
but that no one is serving because it's not a big enough or not a sexy enough idea.
So I think a lot of times thinking smaller can lead to much bigger
success than trying to be the next VC-backed enormous thing.
And increasingly there's great examples of this. I mean
in the publishing space you've got lots of new people on sub-stack and
there's people making tens of thousands of dollars off newsletters about
specific economic issues in China. One of my favorite newsletters, Stratecory
by Ben Thompson is just really deep tech, really deep
economic analysis of the tech industry. And Ben's doing great. He's doing
incredibly well. And he-
And he writes one blog post today for a very specific group of people.
People who work in tech, who have very specific demands.
They want to know economic details of what's happening in tech
and who are willing to pay for it and economically able to. There's a lot more
ideas like that that I think are ignored. If you look at smaller communities
who really do want something and who really are willing to pay for it,
there just may be only one million of them, one million people rather than
a billion.
One of the challenges here is that people have this sort of conception that people don't pay
for content. You can log onto Twitter whenever you want, follow people, it's free.
You can read a bunch of different blogs and subscriptions
online and they're free. Do you think that's changing? Do you think people are becoming more willing
to pay for content? And if so, how do you as an indie hacker
find out what kind of content people find valuable enough to actually pay for?
Yeah, I think the second part of that question is the most relevant part because I don't think it's changed
that much. I think consumers are becoming more used to
the idea of paying for things online and particularly subscriptions.
We've got Spotify now, we've got Netflix, we've got Apple TV, we've got
Apple Arcade, we've got any number of other services you care to mention,
Dropbox. Things that people are familiar with paying a few dollars a month for
to the point where that's no longer a weird niche thing.
That doesn't necessarily mean they want to pay for them. And I think the
thing people get wrong when they think about whether or not people are willing to pay for news
in particular is if the Kansas Tribune covers
the national election and wants me to pay for a story about it, I'm probably not going to pay
that because they probably don't have better coverage of that than anyone else.
But if they cover something that is completely local to their
own community that I can't get anywhere else, I'm absolutely going to
pay for it. So the question is of uniqueness and of value.
Is the thing that's being produced, is it genuinely valuable to
someone? So it's not just a vapid set of cat gifs.
And is it available elsewhere? Is it easily available elsewhere? Is it a commodity
that's available elsewhere either for free or for very low cost? And if you
can pass both of those tests, so you're creating something of value that is reasonably unique,
then I think it becomes very easy to get people to pay for something.
So a great example of this, TechCrunch have a paid section
now called the ExtraCrunch. And within the ExtraCrunch, they have a
I think it's 21 page PDF deep dive analysis of
Patreon, the business. They call it an EC1 and their idea of it is it's like an
S1, which the documents people file before they go public,
but it's just the kind of independent version. So they've done this massive analysis
of Patreon, really in depth. It's very fascinating to read.
And it's not available anywhere else. It's not an easy thing to produce.
There's no one else who's made something like it. Would you like to pay TechCrunch
$10 a month and get access to this type of content? Well, I'm very interested in
Patreon as a business. There's a lot of overlap between what we're building
and what Patreon builds. So yes, I would absolutely like access to this.
And that's the only place I can get it. So TechCrunch have produced something
which is of significant value that's very unique. And that makes the
selling process to me very, very easy. And
if you can touch on things like that, which are very valuable to
a specific community, the notion of paying for it becomes almost trivial. It's like
how quickly can I pay for it? Just give me the checkout form already. I can't believe this exists.
This is awesome. And I think with the smallest amount of
creativity of thinking about what do people really want, there are a lot more
ideas out there, which are simply not the big clickbait things. They are not
like what could be the most popular. It's what could be the most valuable to a small
group of people who really, really find it valuable.
The intersection of being valuable and being unique. What you certainly can't do if you're trying to compete
in an area where there's tons of other people writing the exact same thing.
And it's almost antithetical to being big. Don't try and think about what would be the most big or the most popular.
Because that will take you down the exact opposite direction.
That's what I like about Ben Thompson from Shitekari. He has no sort of
theatrics about being some big company. He's just one person.
He's one of my views and I put a lot of heart and soul into them and research them.
But I'm just Ben Thompson. It's not some huge industry and I think people
sometimes try to be way too big and too lofty and they don't realize just how much value there is
and what you're saying. And there's other examples too. I talked to Sam Parr who runs
The Hustle a few months back and he's got a new thing called Trends but they're also doing this
in-depth research and he's charging subscription fees and people are, I think,
paying and signing up for it. So it's pretty cool to see that you're able to generate revenue from content.
I never did it with indie hackers. I was doing interviews with people like you.
Maybe it wasn't that unique. Maybe there weren't that. There were a lot of other places you could go
to get that kind of content. I sort of monetized through advertising.
I wonder what your thoughts are on that business model nowadays. If you're trying to
write content and monetize, how much sense does it make to do what I was
doing and call up advertisers and sell slots? Increasingly difficult. I think
for podcasts and videos, it's still a pretty big market.
Getting more difficult. For written word, I think it's pointless.
Honestly, I just don't think there's any sustainable living that can be made from
display ads against the written word no matter what you do.
And it's getting worse. Ad blockers are getting better
so it's getting worse and worse for publishers. I still think there's
quite a lot that can be done in the sort of space of brand deals
which you see YouTubers making millions from if you get to a certain
size. But the incentives to kind of pull back to an earlier thread, the incentives
are very misaligned. They are. Because you are not doing what's
great for your audience. So you're making money by what's good for the company
that's advertising, right? You're not necessarily aligning the way in which you make money
with value being provided to your audience. And over the long run, that
sort of pans out and solves itself, which is that your audience are not
going to get the best deal. What I like so much about
subscription-based publishing of any description is that the incentives are heavily
aligned. The only way Ben Thompson can keep making money from Stratecory
is if he continues to provide direct, unique value to his audience. And the moment
he stops doing that, the moment he stops serving them directly as customers
is when his revenue dries up. So the interests are completely aligned.
The only way you can continue to succeed is to continue to serve
an audience really well. I think for Indie Hackers, I mean, I know you're
with Stripe now, but it could have worked. I think a niche community
with tangible advice for people looking to do something
similar to the types of people who you interview is something I certainly would have paid for
when I was starting out, particularly if there's
really substantive advice of the kind that is readily
available for funded startup founders. There's so much great advice if you want
to go and raise funding or run a venture-backed business. There's an incredible
amount of advice and YC is almost like that type of community.
And I think Indie Hackers maybe still could
be something like that. I think a really good point you mentioned about
the incentives. I was only selling ads for Indie Hackers for maybe
two or three months before we got acquired by Stripe, so I didn't get to go down this rabbit hole
too deeply, but a month and a half into it I was already at the point where certain advertisers were
requesting certain changes to Indie Hackers content. Can you do this? Can you change your website
like this? And it's like you say, well, suddenly people are paying
your paycheck. That's how you're making money and it's very easy to listen to them and that's not what
your users want. And so you're pulled in these two different directions and I can't even imagine
what's going on in some of the bigger media companies that are primarily ad-funded.
What are they writing about that they wouldn't be writing about if they weren't dependent on
advertiser dollars? Or what are they afraid to write about because advertisers will pull their funding?
That's a slippery slope that you can follow as far as you want down.
It just starts out being nefarious, right? It starts out as
oh hey, could you not mention this here? And then at a certain point you've got a massive
contract where you would not be able to pay your rent if you lost this
advertising contract and now the advertiser wants the top story of the day to
lease it because it doesn't quite suit their interests. What do you do?
And it would be nice to say I would not pay my rent and
whatever, but when you're faced with that scenario
the reality might be very different. And so the simplicity of
aligned incentives has a lot to answer for.
A while back was reading some blog post or other that talked about being a founder
and dealing with competition. And I think they had some practice questions on there.
What would you do if this was your type of competitor? What would you do if Google decided to open up
its coffers and start funding or building a competitor product?
I think someone responded and they're like well you know what's even scarier than that.
What would you do if a competent free and open source product
appeared on the scene and they started competing with you like what are you going to do then?
And it's funny talking to you because I've always thought about this from the point of view of the founder
so deal with that, but you are that scary. You're the one who's entering the scene that others
have to worry about. Do you feel like Ghost is disrupting the industry?
We're in a unique position, two points there, because on the one hand
yes we're the open source thing, but also our biggest competitor or the most
established alternative platform is also an open source thing, which is
WordPress of course. So it's kind of a double edged sword from that point of view.
It's almost like a baseline requirement
to compete in this particular space is to already be open source because you've already had
that one major platform be open source.
Yeah, competition is an interesting one. I think in some cases
yes, so there's a couple of closed source competitors who
I think are struggling to find business models and increasingly
the prevalence of really competent open source platforms is becoming
harder and harder to compete with for them. In other cases no, because
there's some enterprise-ish solutions which
require more so a big sales
and account management team than they do a competent piece of technology.
And it's bizarre how much that's true once you get to
the upper end of the market. Big companies don't buy the best piece of software.
They buy the piece of software with the best sales and account management team
which is a really weird thing once you learn it. It's like the quality of the product has nothing to do with it.
It's how well do you manage their RFP process and contracts
and all the bullshit that they throw at you of can you do
LDAP and all these other weird types of authentication.
And if you can do that then you get the contract for a very large amount and if you can't
then you don't. At no point does someone say is the product any good.
So in that end of the space no makes no difference at all.
It's a little bit of a spectrum I guess.
Well listen John we could probably talk for like six more hours. A ton of questions I would love to ask about just being a profitable
open source business but maybe for a third episode at some point in the future.
Thanks so much for doing this and taking the time. Congratulations on launching Ghost 3.0.
Can you tell listeners where they can go to learn more about what you're up to at Ghost
and what you're up to personally if you still share that kind of stuff online if you're still doing your vlogs.
For sure. So you can find me on Twitter at John and Erlen and I've actually just
launched fittingly enough at my very own paid publication
much like Stratecri publication and newsletter which is members only so eating
my own dog food very much. Oh so we can subscribe to it. Yeah so that's on
rediverge.com. Right now it's early access beta
pricing which is I think it's I have to double check now.
I think it's five dollars a month or if you're like hmm this seems
good twenty dollars for a whole year but that pricing is going to go up as soon as
the early slots kind of sell out so I'm establishing an early audience and then
I'll put the prices up after that but I'm using it as a way kind of to do all
the things we've been talking about for the last hour so be able to publish more openly more freely
share more about the kind of behind the scenes of Ghost behind the scenes of running a remote
independent business and publish for a smaller audience where you can
kind of you can talk more freely and talk about the realities without
the kind of fear of public judgement of all of Twitter.
So it's a really cathartic exercise for me and being able to write more openly again
and for a really specific audience of people who are interested in this type of stuff so if you're interested
that's the best place to find what I'm up to right now. Alright thanks so much
John. Pleasure. Listeners if you enjoyed this episode I would love it if you took the
time to reach out to John and let him know. You can find him at rediverge.com
or on Twitter at John O'Nolan. Also if you're interested
in my thoughts and takeaways from this episode you should subscribe to the Indie Hackers
podcast newsletter. That's over at IndieHackers.com slash podcast.
Thanks so much for listening and I will see you next time.