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What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

blog.ghost.org

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Re: What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

#111

Post by vanilla-almond »

johnonolan wrote: post #24

Good morning HN! John from Ghost here - Thanks for all your support over the last 5 years. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that very first blog post hitting the #1 spot of HN and getting so much attention back in 2012. That was the very first time anyone ever heard about Ghost, and everything we've built since then has been thanks to that.

Congratulations on the 5th anniversary!

A question: Do you think your choice of technology stack (JavaScript, node.js) played a part in your success?

I've read many times from product creators that developers wildly overestimate the importance of choosing a language or technology stack when in fact it has little bearing on whether a product will succeed.

Do you have any thoughts on this topic?

Re: What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

#112

Post by [deleted] »

johnonolan wrote: post #107
vladdanilov wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you're in the spotlight now, I want to bring back the discussion on image optimization [1]. Looking at your Features page [2], there are 953KB of images that can be compressed down to 453KB (-47.3%). I genuinely wonder what you can save with better image optimization. [1] https://twitter.com/JohnONolan/status/941572225890533376 [2] https://ghost.org/features/ [3] https://i.imgur.com/b5OO3Q6.png

So, on a post which discusses problematic behaviour on Github where entitled people try to bully us into working on what they want without writing any code themselves -- you (someone who has tried to bully us before on Github) -- decide that being in the spotlight is a perfect time for you to draw everyone's attention to your feature request once more. Because you think bullying us with HN social pressure will help y…

[deleted]

Re: What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

#113

Post by chipotle_coyote »

holychiz wrote: post #104
justinclift wrote: post #11

> Our biggest marketing failure has been our documentation and resources. ... We're actually hiring right now for someone to help us fix this and make using Ghost a really fantastic developer experience. Putting user docs as part of a marketing role is not lining things up for a good result. :( How about putting it under engineering instead?

User docs are customer-facing, and therefore entirely fitting to be under marketing. Of course building the documents requires engineering contribution for technical details.

Yes, user docs are customer-facing, but the problem is that if they're under the control of marketing, then documentation priorities will be set as if they are marketing materials. And, possibly worse, a writer who works in marketing will by and large be treated by engineers like, well, somebody who works in marketing. (Without getting into sordid details, I'm speaking from personal experience of having been a tech writer under engineering at one company and under marketing at another.)

Re: What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

#114

Post by chipotle_coyote »

prophesi wrote: post #13
debacle wrote: post #6

I didn't realize Ghost was a non-profit. Very noble. The feedback in Github is interesting. Ghost is probably more likely to have issues with demanding users than, say, mongodb. Very cool and inspiring post. That said: - Ghost's marketing materials tend to outright lie to users when making comparisons to WordPress or other platforms. - I dislike OSS projects that hide their OSS nature. Why does a user need to pay $29…

Homepage says it's FOSS, features page says it's FOSS, the developer page links to a giant Download button. And how is it lying about their comparisons? It is indeed simpler to set up a Ghost site than a Wordpress site, and has more features out-of-the-box that you'd otherwise have to download sketchy plugins for with Wordpress/etc.

> It is indeed simpler to set up a Ghost site than a Wordpress site...

I...am not sure about that. WordPress, for all its warts, is exceedingly easy for even non-technical users to get up and running; that was a huge contributing factor to its rise. And a large part of that ease of use came from its choice of PHP and MySQL.

I know that in 2018 it's a lot easier to get non-PHP web apps up and running than it was in, say, 2008, but with the exception of hosting providers that have gone out of their way to set up "one-click installs" for Ghost like Digital Ocean, Node, Python, et. al, are still harder. This is something that John Nolan's post pretty explicitly acknowledged:

"We spent several years trying to engineer our way out of this in increasingly complex ways, so that people could set up a publication on Ghost with the same level of ease as they do on Medium. We never even got close. It's just not how modern web technology works."

(And, no, "just use a Docker container" is not a viable answer to give to anyone who doesn't already know what container technology is. Sorry.)

Re: What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

#115

Post by torstenvl »

johnonolan wrote: post #107
vladdanilov wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you're in the spotlight now, I want to bring back the discussion on image optimization [1]. Looking at your Features page [2], there are 953KB of images that can be compressed down to 453KB (-47.3%). I genuinely wonder what you can save with better image optimization. [1] https://twitter.com/JohnONolan/status/941572225890533376 [2] https://ghost.org/features/ [3] https://i.imgur.com/b5OO3Q6.png

So, on a post which discusses problematic behaviour on Github where entitled people try to bully us into working on what they want without writing any code themselves -- you (someone who has tried to bully us before on Github) -- decide that being in the spotlight is a perfect time for you to draw everyone's attention to your feature request once more. Because you think bullying us with HN social pressure will help y…

I don't think calling people bullies or accusing them of being shills is very professional or conducive to civil discourse. This is not the first time you've displayed that kind of behavior, either.

The HN Guidelines, which specifically prohibit this kind of content, can be found at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

#117

Post by hnzix »

johnonolan wrote: post #62
snowwolf wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re setup as a non-profit and you reinvest all profit, what do you do if you get to the point that you are making more profit than you can reasonably reinvest? Build up a large cash reserve?

Fantastic question. So the obvious answer is grow the company, right? That's pretty much what Amazon did for 20 years. Eschew profit in favour of reinvesting in building the company as big as possible. Not really our style, we'd rather keep the company small, but there's definitely still room to grow quite a lot from where we are now. Beyond that point, we can spend money on anything which reasonably furthers the mis…

> Buy some land and build a collaborative space

So, a ghost town?

Re: What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

#118

Post by pault »

alex_anglin wrote: post #22
ljoshua wrote: post #8

> The best marketing we've done has been to launch, over and over again. That's my favorite takeaway from the article. Seems like a difficult thing to do in practice, but also something I've been considering lately. Anyone else have experience with doing repeated launches that they'd be willing to share?

http://www.piedpiper.com/#company ;-)

Am I the only one that's disappointed that I can't actually buy pied piper coin?

Re: What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

#120

Post by justinclift »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #113
holychiz wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User docs are customer-facing, and therefore entirely fitting to be under marketing. Of course building the documents requires engineering contribution for technical details.

Yes, user docs are customer-facing, but the problem is that if they're under the control of marketing, then documentation priorities will be set as if they are marketing materials. And, possibly worse, a writer who works in marketing will by and large be treated by engineers like, well, somebody who works in marketing. (Without getting into sordid details, I'm speaking from personal experience of having been a tech w…

> ... then documentation priorities will be set as if they are marketing materials.

Thank you. This is exactly my point.

The only way making them a function of "marketing" makes sense, is if the leadership of Ghost view user docs as something primarily to bring in (new) sales.

As a person who has often done implementation roles in their career, having to rely on docs written by "marketing" people rather than engineers is generally a lousy experience. :(

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