What's up everyone, this is Cortland from IndieHackers.com and today I'll be speaking
with John O'Nolan, the founder of Ghost, which today is an open source, non-profit
company that makes well over $60,000 a month in revenue.
But in 2012, John was a WordPress developer who had become disillusioned with how bloated
and complex WordPress had become.
So he created some mockups and put together a concept page for a new type of publishing
platform that would focus on one thing and one thing only, which is helping bloggers
and journalists get their voices heard.
Within three months, he had over 30,000 people sign up for his mailing list, so there's
a lot to learn here about what it's like to find a real traction and about the advantages
that come with having domain expertise and working on a company in an industry that you
actually understand.
Meanwhile, John is traveling the world as a digital nomad.
He's surfing all the time, building his company and in general just doing what he loves.
So there's also a lot to learn about building the kind of company that you enjoy running
that can last a lifetime.
I hope you guys enjoyed this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it.
Without further ado, I present to you John O'Nolan, the founder of Ghost.
This episode is brought to you by SparkPost, the world's fastest growing email delivery
service, trusted to send over 25% of the world's non-spam email.
Built on AWS, SparkPost's robust cloud API lets apps and websites send and receive email
and is designed for the way developers work today.
Sign up now and send 100,000 emails a month for free, forever, with all the same features
that come with paid accounts.
Go to pages.sparkpost.com slash Andy Hackers to learn more.
SparkPost.
Start fast.
Deliver more.
Guaranteed.
Hi, John.
Welcome to the Andy Hackers podcast.
How's it going?
Hello.
I'm good.
Thank you very much for having me.
Thanks for joining.
I know it's a little bit short notice, but I'm super excited to have you on the podcast.
For those who don't know, John O'Nolan is the creator of Ghost, which is a publishing
platform that he first conceived of in 2012.
You created a concept page that went on to basically just dominate the internet for a
few days.
It wrapped up like 100,000 page views, was at the top of Hacker News.
Everybody was tweeting about it and talking about it, and that project went on to become
Ghost.
That's right.
It was a pretty wild ride since then.
Yeah.
I've read a lot about the beginnings of it, and all the different numbers that you shared.
You ended up with 30,000 mailing list subscribers after the first few months.
The number of page views that you got, the number of articles written about it was just
astounding.
I'd love to start by talking about just that process.
How did you manage to launch such a popular concept page?
Gosh, I think there was a lot of good timing involved, or fortuitous timing, shall we say.
I think this is probably quite key.
It wasn't necessarily planned to be big.
I'd finally, at the end of 2012, reached this point in my life where I'd step back from
some of the ambition or pressure that I was putting on myself of needing to come up with
a big idea or a great idea to do something monumental, and had just resigned myself to
the notion that if I could just work on something I really enjoyed that would pay me a full-time
salary then that would probably bring more happiness than trying to shoot for the proverbial
moon.
So Ghost, as a simple, focused publishing platform, was an idea that had been in my
head for the better part of two years, but that I'd always rejected because it seemed
too obvious.
You know, who wants yet another blogging platform?
It just didn't seem like any kind of revolutionary idea worth pursuing.
On this particular day, when I launched that concept page, I was in fact lying on a bed
in an Airbnb in my underwear in Brazil, and I was just kind of getting this idea out of
my head that had been stuck in there for ages, and I thought, I'll just do some mock-ups
and kind of design a blog post a bit like a product page, and if nothing else, then
at least the idea will be out of my head, and I won't have to think about it anymore.
Thinking maybe a few hundred of my Twitter followers would see it, something along those
lines.
So initially it was really just an exercise in kind of getting rid of an idea, just trying
to make it go away, and I honestly didn't expect it to go quite as crazy as it did once
I hit publish.
I think it's awesome that you said that what you were really looking for was to get away
from this pool of having to come up with some gigantic world-changing idea and just focus
on something that could be a good business and support yourself financially because that's
pretty much the entire idea behind Andy Hackers, that you don't have to do this Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook raise a billion dollars and take over the world or make nothing at all.
There's a lot of space in between that, so I think that's super cool, and also what you
said about the idea being seemingly too obvious and so you didn't want to go with it or you're
hesitant is really interesting because I found talking to people that there's a lot of really
obvious, straightforward, kind of unexciting ideas that end up being really good businesses
and changing the world for the better.
Yeah, definitely, and if you're passionate about one of those ideas, then it's key.
Yeah, exactly.
If you're passionate about it, then you'll be motivated to keep working on it and actually
see it through and do a good job versus doing a crappy job and quitting halfway through.
Now, you've already done a text-based interview for Andy Hackers, which by the time this goes
out will probably be on the website, and one of the cool things that you said in that interview
was that Ghost is not a revolutionary idea, that it's in fact just a good idea, and that
it came from years of experience and a clear understanding of the product and the wider
industry.
What was your background when you were coming up with the idea for Ghost, and how did you
conceive of the initial idea?
Yeah, so I think that's always been one of our strongest advantages, or at least my personal
advantages as a founder, is Ghost was born out of just being very deeply rooted in the
entire, quote-unquote, blogging industry for many, many years before it actually launched.
So I started out as a freelance web designer developer, and over the years just kind of
found myself working more mostly in WordPress based on what my clients wanted.
It wasn't kind of initially planned, but that seemed to be the most work I was getting,
and that evolved from little local businesses and musicians all the way up, eventually,
to Fortune 500s, people like Nokia, Microsoft, Virgin Atlantic.
But the consistent part throughout the story was always, one, using WordPress, and two,
building blogs for these companies, whether it was their whole site was a blog, or they
wanted me to build their developer outreach blog, or their gaming community blog, or whatever
it might have been.
And so I just, for I think the better part of basically five or six years, been building
blogs with WordPress for companies, and over the course of that time, I decided it would
be a good idea if my entire business was based on building blogs with WordPress to get involved
with the WordPress core community, which is an open source volunteer community who will
create this software together.
And over around a two-year period became the deputy head of the user interface working
group, so the group designing and developing the UI of WordPress admin, and helping do
all that sort of thing.
And I kind of watched as WordPress grew up from these humble roots as a little blogging
platform and evolved into this great big content management system, application platform, basically
e-commerce system, added all of these things, which are very, very cool, and enabled all
kinds of new websites to be built with WordPress, but which really strayed away from that original
use case of being for publishing and blogging that I was particularly passionate about.
And so having had years of interactions with different kinds of bloggers, different kinds
of businesses, the open source community itself, the wider WordPress ecosystem, I had so many
different touch points of experience on what it takes to make a good product in this space
in terms of logistical requirements, in terms of what people want and don't want, where
the common pitfalls are, what things do and do not work.
And all of those micropoints of experience in some, all brought together, were I think
probably the most valuable to understanding what would be a good solid direction for Ghost
initially and avoiding many of the inevitable pitfalls that would come along the way.
You're in constant contact with people who were working with WordPress on all sides of
the equation, whether they're clients, or whether they're developers building WordPress sites,
or whether they're publishers or writers or journalists.
At what point did you, during your career of working with WordPress and becoming the
deputy you had at the UI department, did you start to think that, hey, WordPress isn't
what I initially loved, that it's getting away from its original roots of being focused
on publishing and journalism and getting into a territory that you didn't like?
So that was probably around the beginning of maybe mid 2011, I guess.
I want to say it was around WordPress 3.1.
And so 3.0 was a kind of a big milestone in WordPress is when it really started moving
towards this new custom space of now you had custom post types and more things you could
do in admin.
It really started opening up its amount of use cases.
And that was kind of exciting at first.
And then by around 3.1, it became clear that there was just a different focus, there was
new focus for what WordPress was about, and that just wasn't publishing anymore.
And that's I think, I guess when I first started imagining, and I even have the very first
notebook I ever wrote anything down in here, and the title that I scribbled on the page
was WP light, which has got to be the most unimaginative name in the entire world.
I wrote this list of advantages and disadvantages of WordPress in its current state and what
you might want to do if you were to reimagine it from scratch, at that point in 2012, I
think beginning of 2012, if it was built with modern technology, leave out all the kind
of historical bloat and things that have just built up over the years.
And that was the basis for it.
So did you keep these ideas to yourself?
Or did you talk to other people about your notebook and what you were thinking about
and kind of bounce it off of other people too?
I mostly kept them to myself.
I found a hilarious old DM thread with one of my other friends who was also a designer
in the WordPress UI group called Chelsea Odecan, and we kind of talked back and forth a little
bit about the idea.
And she was like, yeah, a lot of people have talked about this.
No one's actually done it though.
And I think that message was what eventually like motivated me to do that blog post.
But no, no big, no big discussions.
She told me at the time not to name it ghost because people would read it as G host, which
in hindsight I find hilarious.
Yeah, that's really interesting that the amount of domain knowledge that you had that went
into ghost as a product, because I think a lot of people underestimate how important
that is.
And I've done a lot of interviews with people who also went on to create super successful
products that skyrocketed in growth in their first year.
And it's pretty common to nominated that they worked in the industry for years before that.
And they had all sorts of knowledge that other people didn't have.
I feel like there's also this weird notion that's perpetuated far too often where the
only thing you have to do kind of in this mindset is to spot a gap in the market or
a missing product or a pain point that people have and then go and solve that.
And this is where like a million CRM tools come in because everyone looks at the business
landscape and goes, oh, people don't know their customers.
They have no good way of managing their contacts.
So what if we just built a really great CRM and it's not a pain point they have and they
don't understand the CRM industry or maybe even the local businesses they're trying
to serve.
But they're just trying to come up with an idea to fill a gap without necessarily having
any experience in that space.
And I always say it's far, far, far easier to spot a gap in a market you're not a part
of because you don't understand all the nuances of why that gap is unfilled.
And often there are many, many reasons why a gap will go unfilled that are 100% valid
and do not require fixing.
And without being ingrained in an industry, it's you can waste years just figuring out
that the gap you thought you were filling doesn't actually exist.
And I've done that in past businesses before and it's been a big lesson.
Let's say you're in a position where you didn't necessarily have a ton of domain knowledge.
Let's say you had to stop working on Ghost and start a new idea but couldn't be in blogging
or publishing.
What would you do to come up with an idea?
Would you join an industry and start working there or would you try to research things
from the outside in?
I think I would join something and try and figure out where the next idea would come
from.
I think there are lots of different types of people and where they specialize in.
I'm not a particularly great innovator, but I'm a great pull things together or I'm a
great remixer.
If you know Kirby Ferguson and his documentary, everything is a remix, which is fantastic.
I'm very, very good, and this is maybe the only strength that I kind of am confident
admitting to, is I'm very good at looking at lots of disparate ideas and taking the
best parts from multiple places and combining them to form something new.
That's what I really, really enjoy, is finding great ideas from lots of different places
and then what happens when you pull them together and put them into something new.
And obviously the obvious comparison here is like music where they're constantly sampling
and remixing different tracks and effectively every modern song is a ripoff of 20 old songs.
I feel that way about modern technology, programming, design, all those things.
I love taking existing ideas and recombining and remixing them.
But that means for me personally, first I have to go and be exposed to all of those
ideas rather than inventing a light bulb or something out of nothing.
I'm not very good at that.
That's not my strength.
I have a tremendous amount of respect for people who can, but my thing is to just find
those existing things that exist.
Existing things that exist?
Wow.
Those existing things that you can spin and change and modify and see where they go next.
That makes a lot of sense.
I think people who can just pull ideas out of thin air are extremely rare.
Usually they have some sort of inspiration or thing that they've done that other people
haven't done and they just, like you said, remixed it into something.
To that effect, I think when I look at Ghost in the early days, a lot of it seems almost
the opposite of remixing.
It's like you took this huge behemoth that was WordPress and it was all sorts of things
in one and you kind of like unwove it into one simple product.
You had a lot of discipline early on in keeping it simple.
People would ask you, why can't I have comments in Ghost?
And you said, this is not going to be a native feature of Ghost.
You can add your own comments, et cetera.
Do you think that your discipline in keeping the product super simple in the beginning
was one of the keys for it to be a success?
Definitely.
And not only from a business point of view, but also from a product point of view, and
we can talk about that.
But I think one of the great things which you just kind of highlighted there was, in
fact, the first version of Ghost was 100% a remix of existing ideas out there.
But what's great about this is you weren't exposed to all of the things that we were
pulling from as we were creating this.
So when you describe it, it sounds like an unraveled, boiled down version of WordPress.
But when I look at it, all I can see is kind of the source material of things I pull together.
But the inflection point or the difference between those two is that the things we pulled
from, the ideas we pulled from were outside of the existing kind of blogging platform
space, if you will.
So they were ideas which weren't common to publishing platforms at the time.
It was from somewhere else.
So great examples of this, the kind of the original dashboard we had in that first mockup
was almost a complete carbon copy rip of something called geckoboard.com, which is a kind of
dashboard analytics visualization tool.
The Markdown editor was almost completely taken from a Mac desktop Markdown editing suite
called Moo or MAU, M-O-U, which was great.
There were just tons.
There was like our post-edings menu was taken from Tumblr.
There was other bits of UI which were taken from like a music app.
There are tons of individual pieces that were sort of taken from all kinds of places.
And when you put them together, they're in some ways recognizable, in some ways not recognizable.
But that being able to use that as a base and then keeping it incredibly simple moving
forward to come back to your original question, I think was definitely key.
And if for no other reason than one of my strongest philosophies, and I don't have many
very strong opinions or philosophies, but this one is really, really dear to my heart,
is I very, very strongly believe that you will always get more of what you already have.
And for that reason, it's incredibly important to be very, very conscientious about how you
edit your life.
And that can just be about you personally, it can be about the team you have, it can
be about the customers you have or the product in fact.
So an example of this, if you currently have lots of users who are internet marketers and
the internet marketers are sending you, they like the product, they're sending you feature
requests like, hey, we want to be able to click through sales on blog posts to our conversion
goals.
And you go, okay, cool.
I'll do that.
I want to please my customers.
I want to please my users.
I will fulfill that feature.
They're going to be super happy.
They're going to go and recommend your products to their friends who are also internet marketers.
And then you will get more internet marketers.
So by listening and fulfilling requests of this one user group, you will get more by
definition of that exact same user group.
And if you don't consciously choose who to say yes and who to say no to, you might end
up in a place that's unplanned.
So it's very, very important to always be very conscientious of why you're saying yes
and why you're saying no.
This is the same thing when you're building a team.
If you have a team full of white male affluent people, you're probably going to attract more
of those people by its very nature.
People will be more comfortable to apply to a team where they feel like they are represented,
they can be a part of it.
So if you're not conscientious about choosing diversity very early on and creating a diverse
team early on, then it's very hard to change trajectory later on.
So being very cognizant of what we say yes to and then what the impact of that's going
to be, what will be the trickle down effect of that decision later has been really, really
key to us, which is why we've very strongly, from a product point of view, said no to lots
of features which we know would lead us down a path which we were not passionate about
to either lots of, I don't know, e-commerce people trying to hack shops on top of a blogging
platform which makes no sense and trying as much as possible to always say yes to the
types of user we want to have in future.
So in our case, that's journalists or independent publishers because if we please them, we will
get more of them.
And I try and filter this into as many of my decision making points as possible as I
go through life.
That's fascinating, it's just about being conscious about the decisions that you make
rather than allowing them to kind of unfold haphazardly.
It reminds me a lot of talking to David Hauser a few weeks ago about his company Grasshopper.
And at some point, I think five or six years into his company, the culture just wasn't
where he wanted it because they'd never thought at all about like what kind of culture do
we want to have and it just, if you don't think about it, it's not like you don't end
up with a culture, it's just one that you don't want.
There you go, so one of my favorite quotes in the whole world is by Jason Cohen, who's
the founder and CTO of WP Engine, Managed WordPress Hosting Company.
And he says, you either choose a culture or you end up with one.
And I think that's so true.
Even not choosing is a choice, it's just not a conscious one.
And you'll probably end up with something that you didn't plan for in the beginning.
But you either choose something or you end up with the results of your lack of choice.
And making the choice I think is always a far more empowering and useful thing.
One of the choices that you guys made was to keep the product super simple and super
focused, which is difficult sometimes because in a lot of ways, it opens you up to competition.
And I've seen a lot of people launch a task managing app, or maybe even a blogging platform
or any other sort of app in the beginning, they're saying, we're going to make it simple
and pare down and we're going to keep it very light.
And then over the course of time, actually features me again, and people start requesting
different things.
And people feel in a lot of ways that it's hard to stand out from the competition when
your app is simple, because it's easy for someone to clone you.
And once that happens, what you know, what real differentiating factor do you have?
So with ghost, how did you think about competition in the beginning?
And I know you mentioned that you were worried that you know, the idea was maybe too simple.
And so it took you a while to release it.
What is it that keeps competitors from basically eating your lunch?
Why do people use ghost over alternatives?
I would love to be able to say there's one silver bullet or one key thing.
But in and I think in some companies and products, there is a silver bullet or a key thing.
In our case, I think it's lots and lots of little things which add up to something bigger.
And a big part of that is the approach and the philosophy of the company, a massive amount
of the early traction we got came from this result of us saying we're doing this open
source we're doing this as a not for profit organization.
And we're doing this because we believe in creating great publishing software, not because
we're trying to get rich off it.
And similarly, choosing to make it open source so that anyone who uses it basically has full
ownership and control of their own code, having a fair business model, which is sustainable
knowing that the platform is stable going into the future, it's not going to disappear
when funding dries up, all of these little things, I think add up to something which
is stable, forward thinking, fast and reliable.
And yeah, there's no one key thing for us that at least that I can point to.
Those all sounds pretty huge to me, you know?
Well, I think it's interesting because it's, for example, you guys are number one on Hacker
News for a long time.
And the culture on Hacker News is very much in favor of open source projects and projects
that have some sort of business model or sustainability so people know that they're not just going
to be shut down in another few years.
And the fact that you guys had all of this makes it no surprise to me that Hacker News
embraced you guys, even when you only had a concept page compared to other alternatives
where I've seen people get upset and say, hey, I'm not going to use this because I'm
going to have to put all of my data into it for years and then it will even be around,
right?
And what happens if the creator gets bored?
How much are you thinking about, okay, what did it, you know, who's my target customer
and what do they need?
So from day one, the passion was always have an impact in serious publishing and journalism.
That's always been like the long term, this is where we want to go.
This is what makes us excited and proud to wake up in the morning is the notion that
a really important piece of journalism would be enabled to be published and to spread and
be read widely thanks to the technology we've created so that we could help other people's
ideas flourish and have some kind of impact on the world.
I've always said I don't have world changing ideas, but if I can help people who do, then
I feel like that in some meta way I've helped enable that and that's enough for me.
But initially, you know, you can go in with all the intentions of helping journalism,
but if you don't have the base technology there, then you're just talking, you're not
doing anything useful.
So while that was the long term goal, the first few years we're really just solve our
own basic use case, which is we need a platform, it needs to be able to publish posts, it needs
to be able to log into it.
Like there are so many nuances and basics that need to be in place first before you
can even start thinking about what kind of interesting features you could build for a
long term use case and particularly coming into a brand new technology area.
So in our case, Node.js and we were on that proverbial technology train very, very early.
I think we were the first big consumer open source Node.js projects in the world and now
I think still the largest.
There were all these things which are traditionally you would think easy to do like uploading
and resizing images in PHP, super easy that problem.
And in Ruby, that problem has been solved a million times like there are existing libraries
who pull them together and you can build out this feature set very, very quickly.
In a young Node.js industry, there was and still is so much stuff missing because it's
still a young technology, it's still catching up and there are still a lot of basic things
that are not easy to do.
Image resizing is still one of them, by the way.
So we had a lot of early hurdles just to kind of getting base parity for this platform.
So yeah, the first set of goals was just create a platform that works for our use case, simple
blogging and once we get there, then we'll talk about what's next.
And you mentioned that you had this big focus early on an open source and that you weren't
in it for the money and that you really wanted to contribute to the actual movement of improving
journalism and helping people get their word out.
How does it goes to make money because I know today you guys make $750,000 and you have
a mission like that and when you're based on open source, what kind of business model
do you have?
Yeah, we're a complete black sheep of I think any type of business where a profitable nonprofit
company which releases software for free with no copyright.
It makes no sense, paradox of everything.
So when we launched on the Kickstarter campaign, I had this notion of a sustainable business
model that I thought would work and at the time this was not real.
This was just an idea in my head, there was no reason to think this would actually work
other than as we touched on earlier, the experience of seeing other similar things in different
industries and piecing them together into an idea of what if we took this from over
here and this from over there and combined it, that would probably work.
So the idea for this kind of sustainable open source model as I call it was that we would
hire great developers who would make free open source software which would be given
away because that software or the app in this case is really good.
It would attract a whole bunch of users who would want to use it.
Now you need a server to run this software so a bunch of people would use their own server
but a bunch of people really don't want to waste their time managing servers regardless
of how technically proficient they are.
So they would probably need like some really solid managed hosting, a platform as a service
which is just a click and go situation, fully optimized, runs the software in the best possible
way it can ever be run.
So if we offered that platform as a service on a monthly subscription fee then even if
we captured a small percentage of all of the great users that would generate revenue and
we filter all of that revenue back into the parent not-for-profit organization that would
then be a source for the nonprofit org to be able to hire more great developers who
would be able to make more great software which would attract more people who would
need more hosting, who would pay more money, which would fund more of the not-for-profit
organization and so the cycle is then established and continues and it becomes virtuous rather
than detrimental.
So with each loop it gets stronger, becomes a stronger model and a stronger cycle rather
than diminishing like in a kind of venture capital style where you're just constantly
running out of money and burning through it and increasing your burn rate or your growth
rate to match your burn rate.
It's the opposite of that.
Yeah, you're really bootstrapping.
You've got kind of this self-funding process where you're reinvesting your profits back
into other parts of the business to make it even better.
Super weird, right?
For the rest of the entire world that's a very normal cycle in the technology space
that's kind of an anomaly.
So once we got the Kickstarter funding and as a nonprofit there's no other way to take
funding.
You can't take venture capital obviously, you have no shares to sell and weirdly banks
don't want to give you loans because nonprofit organizations are considered high risk for
some reason.
So we have actually had this seed funding of about $300,000 to prove this business model
and once that money was out that was the single piece of runway and that was the end.
So we knew we had a fixed timeline to either prove or disprove this idea and this business
model.
And at the 11 month mark, 11 months from the end of the Kickstarter campaign or 11 months
when we started doing business, we did.
So we had turned our first month's profit which I think was about $200 and we've been
in the green ever since then.
Awesome.
There's a lot that you talked about there.
You talked about your platform as a service solution which you guys have actually host
the ghost publishing software for people in charge of money for it and you've also talked
about and I kind of want to go back to that so don't let me forget about that but we also
talked about raising money on Kickstarter and this just goes back to like the explosive
early days of ghost because you had the idea, released a concept page, you got tons of mailing
with sign ups and then a few months later you had a demo and a Kickstarter page that
also, I think your initial goal was what $30,000 and you ended up raising $300,000, you just
blew it out of the water.
Yeah.
How did you do that?
Was it just because your product was so much more compelling than anything out there or
you guys have like a sustained marketing push?
So this is one of those things where in hindsight it's easy to look at it and go, huh, that
was a really good idea and that actually aligns with a lot of the things that people talk
about as being stuff you should do but at the time it just felt like a very natural
progression and it was really a series, I guess what marketers would call a series of
launches but in my head was just the most logical progression for how you would do this
type of thing and it was this idea of continuously building an engaged audience who wanted to
hear more about the product so like we talked about there was that initial blog post on
this page which hit Hacker News and just on the off chance, in fact now I think I didn't
even add an opt-in form to that post initially but when it started going crazy on Hacker
News, I quickly added one and so I started collecting email addresses straight away.
If you want to hear more about this in future, if I ever do anything with it enter your email
address and so from the Hacker News initial posts, traffic that generated I think around
30,000 subscriptions right off the bat a few months later when we decided to launch on
Kickstarter and we had this prototype built, okay well who are the first people who are
going to be most interested in hearing about this like clearly those people they've already
opted in and said tell us more like if you end up building this thing so then we emailed
that list of 30,000 people like okay this exists now and if you want it to really be
released as a stable piece of software back this Kickstarter campaign which was a huge
huge boost to those early hours of the Kickstarter funding campaign and was a big part of what
got us to being fully funded in 11 hours but of course all of that exposure of the Kickstarter
campaign which generated more press and more interest also generated more traffic and when
that traffic came and discovered the Kickstarter campaign they either contributed or we had
an opt-in form sign up if you want to find out when this thing launches and so the exact
same cycle repeated and after the Kickstarter campaign again we did this kind of soft launch
which was to Kickstarter backers only but if you came to the site you couldn't get
the software yet but there was this opt-in form that said leave your email address and
we'll let you know when it's ready so to cut a long story short over this kind of year-long
period and incremental launches or announcements we amassed something like 80,000 email addresses
of people who had opted in to find out when this thing was live not we're trying to spam
them and tell them about something that they don't care about they had told us they want
to hear about it so on launch day we had 80,000 people to email and the net result of that
was a hundred thousand signups on day one completely organic without any what I would
call marketing push of kind of advertising or really trying to force the word out there
it was all inbound effectively and this just felt logical to me like it felt like the clear
thing to do but apparently this is a real strategy that people use what's striking to
me about it is how effective it was because there are also people who will use that strategy
and they'll gauge interest with the blog post or you know a concept page and then they'll
collect email addresses and then send emails to those people let them know about the next
thing but just the massive numbers that you had I mean it was like something else is going
on behind the scenes where it was maybe the right time for you launching to launch the
idea or maybe on the right forum it was just people really I mean 30,000 email subscribers
is humongous I always say real traction is like true love it's very hard to describe
but you'll know it when you see it and I'd worked on a whole bunch of companies and products
before ghost where I thought I had traction I thought I did like there was some I found
old press kits where we bragged about like 10,000 page views in the first month and then
when you compare that to ghost which was like 10 million in the first week or something
it completely eclipsed it was just a different plane of reality and I think once you hit
an idea that resonates with a wider group of people it's immediately obvious you immediately
feel that you're onto something when I felt that for the first time I knew like okay this
is the time to put all of my client work to the side live off my savings and now work
on this idea because I've never in my life had a response that strong and I think if
anyone is wondering like okay do I have that traction yet no you probably don't because
if you did honestly you would you'd know it like it would be like nothing you've seen
before felt before your inbox would be full and it's always again easier in hindsight
to be able to figure out and identify but it was such a dramatic difference to anything
that I touch before yeah I've been in a similar situation before it's extremely impossible
to ignore it or to wonder if it's happening because it's just orders of magnitude is bigger
and I think that that principle can be kind of distilled down to like a smaller level
to like if you're doing let's say you have five different marketing strategies and one
of them is getting you ten times the number of hits is all the others should probably
double down on that rather than spreading yourself then over all these other things
that aren't working you know and if you have an idea that's amazing and you're getting
all sorts of your inbox is full like you said you're getting millions of page views you
should probably quit your consulting job and work on that because you've actually hit on
something that's really real and true I think this also comes back to what we were talking
about earlier in terms of having that deep experience of a particular industry I think
that the natural evolution of that or the natural result of that is that when you have
all of that context built up what you build and the way you communicate it inherently
touches on all these points so it will touch on the key pain points and it will avoid the
things which are unimportant so that when people do arrive and read about the idea or
see it for the first time or whatever it has a very very high chance of resonating because
it's it's clear that you've kind of been able to think through a bigger picture and I almost
don't think that's something you can plan it either just kind of happens or what doesn't
happen depending on on how deep you really are into this problem how long would you say
that did your industry domain expertise in the area remain super useful to you because
I know it was like extremely helpful and deciding the initial product but was there a point
during running ghost where it was you were no longer kind of coasting off of this old
knowledge and you're having to learn a whole bunch of new things in order to make ghosts
itself a successful business yes definitely and that's such a great question I would even
go further than that and say there's a point at which that old knowledge becomes detrimental
because you there's a possibility that you hold on to old ideas and old truths without
questioning them enough so good examples of that initially when we just very very very
simple level initially we structured the ghost kind of application directory structure in
a similar way to WordPress because we knew people be familiar with it same with our theme
API we we picked structures similar to WordPress because we knew people would be familiar with
it it would be easy to learn and it was a quick decision that was simple to make like
how should we do it okay let's look at how popular platform does it already that's probably
a good benchmark to start with but then a certain point you realize structuring an OJS
project like a PHP projects inherently creates some limitations and confusion further down
the line and similarly holding on to ways in which older platforms do things inherently
holds you back from discovering new ways of doing those same things so there's there's
definitely a point and I don't necessarily think it's a single point you reach but it's
definitely important to recognize as you go when ideas are holding you back and need to
be changed and adapted for the new thing in terms of how long I think I don't know I think
we coasted on good solid old experience for a year and a half or so before we started
needing to really relearn and rediscover some of those parts and build them our own way
and when did you guys end up launching your platform as a service offering and actually
start charging people money for that right so from initial blog post that hit Hacker
News it was six months to Kickstarter campaign from Kickstarter campaign to launching the
first version of the product was probably four months yeah four months and then we had
another two months until the platform as a service launched so the whole timeline of
kind of initial idea to everything running as a business was about a year what was it
like launching the platform as a service part of it because I know it was kind of a turn
it had to be kind of a turning point in the business because it was the first time you
actually started charging people money for an actual product for us it was planned from
day once even in the Kickstarter campaign we talked about how this is going to be the
business model and then when we launched the product the platform service was already firmly
in development I think it was actually already in beta we're already testing it so it didn't
feel very monumental at the time just felt like a very natural progression this is the
plan we had we're going to fulfill it but certainly seeing those those first few customers
come in and starting to have a number of MRR as being representative and growth trajectory
which would give us an indication of whether we were going to hit break even or not was
exciting very very difficult to appreciate that excitement at the time you're so deep
in in the trenches of just trying not to die early on in a startup's life you're just going
from one thing to the next thing and trying to survive trying to stay alive what I was
curious about it was if there been any particular strategies you guys have had to use to grow
your revenue or has it been kind of like a constant percentage of people have always
just filtered off into the you know the platform as a service offering rather than doing the
self-hosting thing our growth has always been very stable and very organic it's certainly
not exponential it's not even high by kind of Silicon Valley SAS startup standards but
it's been very very very consistent and we've essentially never done any real what I recall
real marketing experimented with like a couple of ads a few times never really paid off we
haven't done a great deal of content marketing or anything like that just because we haven't
figured out a way that kind of feels good for us so it's it's always been incredibly
organic and the things we've tried haven't moved the needle that much so we've really
been kind of realizing that just try to focus on the products the users the community and
where we're going and figure that if people are consistently using us and finding us and
recommending us because of how good the product is then maybe that's the area where we should
focus on the most not saying that's a good thing I think we could probably do more and
better in the marketing department it just hasn't been a focus so far yeah I mean I found
similar things to be true with ND hackers nothing really moves the needle in terms of
growth like just posting a really great interview and having people talk about it and share
it organically I can spend weeks posting bad interviews on reddit and hacker news and spamming
every other forum and I won't move the needle nearly as much as just having good content
so one of the really cool things about ghosts that I think a lot of people don't know is
that you built the company remotely when you first built it you were basically traveling
the world as a contract developer right yeah and you continue to build a remote team and
hire people working remotely and travel yourself right exactly right yeah I'm in Thailand in
fact right now as we're talking what's your philosophy behind that is it just that you
enjoy traveling or is it that you think it's the future not quite I'm not I'm not the Peter
levels of the blogging world I don't think no for me it's actually in fact lots of these
early decisions of ghost were less consciously chosen and more kind of it just felt like
the obvious things to do this is clearly the way we were going to go and from this point
of view there are a couple of factors so I grew up all over the world I'm technically
English Irish but I was born in Scotland my first language is Dutch I lived in the Philippines
for seven years Austria for two years Egypt for three years when people ask me where I'm
from I honestly have no idea so I've always traveled I've never really lived anywhere
for any particular length of time I'm not really sure what the word home means but I
understand it means something to some people so I've always done I always did back in the
day all my all my freelance work remotely and even when I was in the UK for an extended
period of time and I had British clients I still wouldn't go to their offices I'd still
be working remotely just from a distance of you know 10 or 20 kilometers rather than 3000
to my clients in the States so it was it was and then contributing to WordPress was the
same thing everyone's all over the world to contributing code open source that's just
how it works so it was it was like clearly this is the obvious ways to do things I've
always traveled I've always worked online why would you ever what would be the point
of having an office what advantage would that have so yeah it was just like clearly this
is this is what we're gonna do and it feels good I feel good about it I think remote work
is 99% awesome and 1% really hard and that 1% is the contextual water cooler just getting
to know people by based on their body language and their facial expressions and the random
conversation that you have while making a piece of toast that leads to a great idea
like that's the only thing that I really miss from in person meetups which we try and counteract
by every six months we get the whole team together and do a trip somewhere in the world
the last one was here in Thailand the one for that was in Austria and try and spend
ten days together just kind of binging on that time together of contextual awareness
and knowing each other that then always helps in the subsequent six months of working together
yeah I love remote work I've done a lot of contract work as a developer and I always
put in my thing like my contract like I'm allowed to work remotely whenever I want even
when I'm contracting for a company that's in the same city that I live in and it's funny
that you said that you've kind of always been remote your entire life because I wanted to
ask you you know what things make remote work harder and more difficult than the alternative
but it sounds like you haven't really had the alternative that much but the right so
what is your on a more personal level what kind of philosophies guide you and running
your business and being a founder because I know there's so many challenges psychological
challenges with being a business owner and being a founder and trying to manage a bunch
of people and run a product that's used by tens of thousands of people so what gets you
out of bed in the morning do you meditate do you like to read books I love I love learning
things constantly but I think if there's one key philosophy that drives everything and
that really filters into everything we do it's it's kind of embodied in the question
and it's one that I get a lot of wise ghosts a nonprofit organization it's in fact it's
whenever people learn about the company for the first time in person I say it's a not
for profit organizations to say what why why would you why would you do that to which my
recent answer has been well why would you run a for-profit corporation and there's there's
kind of no good answer to either I think but I spent the majority of my early life being
very ambitious and wanting to become a millionaire and I'd set age 26 is kind of my I don't know
why it's just my arbitrary goal of that's what I wanted to hit it by so I was always
trying to come up with big ideas but I always played this game in the back of my head and
I think we've all played this game and it's the what if you won the lottery game what
if you came into a massive amount of money how would that impact your life what would
you then do with it and the beginning that game is super fun and super easy because you're
giving your boss the finger you're buying a Ferrari and then a Lamborghini and then
three houses and it's you know this utopian kind of I have no problems model and then
the game gets a little bit harder but still fine like okay so what would you do next okay
maybe travel a lot learn a bunch of stuff give money to charities and then it gets a
lot harder like how would you fulfill your time and then you know maybe try and build
a family but that's not really dependent on money anymore maybe start a company but then
that's only slightly dependent on money and then at a certain point it gets very very
hard because at a certain point you realize you could burn through all of that lottery
money quote unquote lottery money in the space of I don't know for me three or four years
I could buy all the things do all the things but then what next what next you wake up on
a Saturday morning it's sunny outside you have nothing to do but you still have 50 60
70 years to live your biggest concern is no longer money it's not a question of how do
you want to spend your money is a question of how do you want to spend your time and
no matter how much money you have that question remains true and at a certain point of playing
this game over and over and over again I eventually realized sitting on the small beach in the
Philippines with a couple of new friends kite surfing that I would be doing exactly this
if I got to that point how I would spend my time is like this I would have the freedom
to travel the freedom to hang out with really nice cool people who I enjoy spending time
with and the freedom to work on cool open source software that I felt was meaningful
to me and that I enjoyed working on and in that exact moment I realized I do not need
to be a millionaire to achieve that goal I was already living that lifestyle I was already
living my end goal of what would you do if you became a millionaire on a very very average
in fact below average by kind of San Francisco standards freelance web developer salary and
when I finally hit that realization point it really freed me up and took all this pressure
off my shoulders in terms of criticizing my own ideas and this is what led to ghost even
being conceived as a possibility was okay so all I need now is an idea that can pay
me a very fair full-time salary I mean even if you want to be generous and say I want
150 K a year okay well that's not a lot of money and in SAS terms you can build a business
that likes 150 K a year pretty easily and achieve all the things you want to achieve
so what is it is there stuff in life that you really need that is more than a decent
salary and then why and if you look at the big data on this you know the the happiness
curve of how income affects your actual happiness it absolutely flat lines above about a hundred
thousand dollars a year so do you really want to be a millionaire is that really what you
want and if not then what how does that impact your ideas what different ideas would you
have if you changed your life goals from being financial to being time-based from being how
much wealth do I have to how much time and freedom do I have and then my subsequent kind
of step from there was okay what if you tried to build a business of a group of people on
the exact same philosophy so what if you tried to build a company that set out at its core
to not make a whole bunch of money for its shareholders what if you did the exact opposite
you tried to make a company that did not make as much money as possible how would that affect
the decisions of the product of the team of the perspective of the outlook and then suddenly
that problem seems super interesting like okay wow would be all about the customers
and the users and there will be no external pressure from shareholders or investors there
will be no pressure to sell or achieve a valuation or a certain revenue multiple it would simply
be something that exists in a pure independent form by itself and is able to keep itself
going as long as it's doing a good job for its stated mission to serve its users and
customers and each step that we've made over the last four years has been an evolution
of this philosophy of I don't need to be very wealthy and I know it won't make me happy
and Ghost doesn't need to be an extremely large corporation I know that won't make me
happy either so if we just take away those things as goals what is the end result and
what I optimize for constantly is more time more freedom and more happiness and those
things in aggregate feel really really good to me and I if I have one wish for the world
is that we can see a bit more of that yeah I'm huge on spending my time the right way
and and having freedom and I think it's really inspiring to hear hear someone in your position
have the same the same goals and the same ideals I think in Silicon Valley especially
there are very few people that I've met including my own younger self whose goal is not to be
a millionaire by age 25 26 and the narratives that you hear in like you know that you see
on TechCrunch that you see in any tech magazine or movies like the social network totally
reinforces that it's that you have to do this to to be a success or this is what success
means and it's either zero or a billion dollars and so I think it's awesome to be able to
talk to people like you on indie hackers who have a business that's doing really well and
who are living awesome lives and don't need to have some sort of world-changing billion
dollar idea and I hope that more people come to that realization because the number of
businesses that you can build when you don't lock yourself into you know this crazy unrealistic
goal is huge and then the ways that you can live your life are obviously a lot better
and I think the products that you build are higher quality products too because you don't
end up having like you like you hinted at this perverse financial incentives to build
something that extracts every last dime of money from your customers rather than building
something that they actually like and a lot of ways that's a competitive advantage if
all of your competitors have to make some sort of crazy multiple in revenue in order
to be viable where you can put customer satisfaction as your number one priority then you're probably
going to have a better product agreed and what I find crazy slash hilarious about all this is when
you talk to the the silicon valley based founders who have had a big exit who have had that unicorn
growth and big chunk of change come their way are they happier I've yet to meet one who's insanely
happy and has had a successful exit the more the more common story I've heard is being sad about
how the product turned out due to the the market they ended up in and now wanting to approach what
would previously have been called more of a lifestyle business but something where they
have ultimate control over the whole thing and more freedom of their time so you can follow this
trajectory in other people's lives and see even the ones who who hit this big success this sort
of ultimate unicorn end goal that doesn't sound that great and it seems like they still come back
and try and do the thing which was simpler and easier and smaller from the beginning and to me
that's a very clear indicator that that's the right way to go it's kind of like this weird catch 22
where if you work on something that you really like working on and then just sell it to another
company then you'll probably be upset because then you gave up your baby that actually made
you happy and if you work on something that you don't like working on then it's not going to be a
success anyway so you need to actually just keep the thing that you're passionate about and do it
for its own sake so i want to ask you a couple more questions before we end one of them is about
mistakes and challenges so if you could go back in time to 2012 knowing everything that you know now
is there anything differently you would do with ghosts in order to make it you know maybe grow
faster or avoid some mistakes that you make there's a couple a couple of really big things
the ones that always come to mind most quickly we launched right around the time that the cloud
quote unquote cloud was becoming ubiquitous but wasn't quite there yet so our first version of
our hosted platform we had hardware servers and invested i think i don't know forty thousand
dollars or something in hardware servers and thought that was the way to go and it was
basically right just at the end of that era where that would have been a good decision i don't know
three years beforehand but was a terrible decision now we ended up having to sell them a year later
at a loss and my gross digital ocean it just wasn't a fun experience and that was just generally poor
the the big one though was using so we after the kickstarter launched my co-founder hannah and i
spent all our time building the products uh the publishing platform and we subcontracted out our
business website with the billing system and the user platform and the hosting system uh to an
agency because we simply did not have enough time to do everything in the space of four months after
the kickstarter and they built everything in ruby on rails which is fine a particular issue with ruby
on rails just that neither hannah nor i know ruby on rails which turns out to be a key problem
so we had ended up with a team of javascript developers where our entire business infrastructure
was running on a ruby based platform and we were unable to maintain it so every time something
went wrong which of course it always does we would either have to subcontract in more help
for a lot of money or be kind of screwed and it and then the problem of having all this traction
right at launch day is you immediately are locked into whatever decision you made because suddenly
now uh you can't just swap out this thing or kill it or do something new because you have 300 000
of revenue and 3000 customers who are all sitting on this thing you can't just pull it out and put
in something new there's all kinds of crazy migration and uptime and all the stuff that
has to be considered so it really backed us into this very difficult corner that eventually took
us about three years to get out of um just because of one poor early decision uh so that's probably
the one thing i would change on a brighter note what kind of advice would you give to
to an indie hacker an entrepreneur who maybe you know has an idea or has a product and is hoping
to grow into something bigger sounds so cliched but just go and do it uh i think it's a slight
detriment of the state we've ended up in of the how cool startups are now that there is
an absolute saturated market of advice and tips and books and strategies and things to go out
there and find and i've seen a lot of early founders or people who would like to be founders
just get completely stuck in feeling like they don't know enough and they need to read all the
things they read the lean startup then they read the the startup owner's handbook and then they
read everything by paul graham ever and then they um read every blog post by sam altman and then
just end up in this loop of reading and reading and reading reading and learning and researching
but not building and then it's very hard to get out of that cycle because it reinforces this idea
that you don't know enough therefore you need to learn more before you start building and so i
think my my single strongest message would maybe be that none of us have any idea what we're doing
um people at small levels of success such as us people at big levels of success such as i don't
know slack or microsoft no one has any idea what they're doing and if you look behind the curtain
of any of these companies you will see dog-patched bits of code which will fall apart at the slightest
poke and push and things which haven't been fully thought through in any capacity and just are that
way because they are that way and what you have to internalize is that the difference between the
people who make it and the people who never start is at some point making a leap of faith
into the unknown and being completely terrified whilst making that leap but making it nevertheless
and having that initial drive to jump is probably the most important thing you can do and you know
what if you fall flat on your face uh and you probably will you're gonna learn from it get up
do it again but you will learn nothing from just reading constantly and not actually experimenting
and trying new ideas so you probably know enough already and even if you don't that might even turn
out to be an advantage naivety sometimes uh is a huge advantage if you could see how high the
mountain was before climbing it you might not begin on the journey at all so get out there and
just start walking yeah as someone who's fallen flat on his face plenty of times i totally agree
just do it it's not as painful as it might seem and you definitely learn a lot from it agreed
cool john so can you can you tell everybody where we can learn more about ghost and more
about you in particular definitely so ghost you can find on ghost.org uh all spelled the regular
way it's great pains to get that domain um you can find more about me and all the links to all
of my things uh on john.onolan.org which is my personal site and blog and i've just started a
youtube channel i'm making videos now which is terrifying but all the links to all that kind of
stuff is there so yeah if you want to hear more things like this or see me talking about more
things like this that's probably where it's all going to be and it would be great to hang out or
send me a message on twitter and we can talk awesome thanks so much for joining me on the
and actors podcast it's been a pleasure thanks for having me if you enjoyed listening to this
conversation you should join me and a whole bunch of other nd hackers and entrepreneurs on the nd
hackers.com forum where we talk about things like how to come up with a good idea and how to find
your first paying customers also if you're working on a business or a product of your own it's a great
place to come and get feedback from the community on what you're working on again that's www.ndhackers.com
slash forum thanks and i'll see you guys next time