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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

#21

Post by chatmasta »

a_imho wrote: post #12
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…

Very noble. I was under the impression being setup as a non profit grants various tax optimization strategies / returns. Which can be probably redistributed as salary.

There is a place for this sort of cynicism, for example when looking at Zuckerberg’s structure of his “family trust.”

But in this case it’s really an absurd implication. There is literally no personal benefit to founders making their company a non-profit. Yes they can pull salary from it, but they could do that in a for-profit company too. Not only that, but it’s impossible to sell a 501c3 non-profit because there are no shares. It can only dissolve, in which case the board must distribute any remaining assets to another non-profit.

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

#22

Post by alex_anglin »

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

;-)

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

#23

Post by r3bl »

debacle wrote: post #14
michaeltbuss wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their home page at ghost.org literally says "Ghost is a fully open source, adaptable platform for building and running a modern online publication" at the top.

And where is the github link on the home page, or the pricing page?

In the footer, in both of the cases.

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

#24

Post by johnonolan »

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.

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

#25

Post by johnonolan »

debacle wrote: post #15
prophesi wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Two quick examples: A baseline WP host is not $50 a month. Ghost is not 20 times faster than WP.

We do managed hosting, so the comparison is to "Managed WP Hosting" - which is exactly what the page says. Here's an example of a managed WP host: https://wpengine.com/plans/

Here is an independent speed test which finds Ghost (more specifically: Node) to be up to 1900% faster than WP - https://blog.appdynamics.com/engineering/example-node-js-fas...

We don't make baseless claims and we're not in the business of lying to anyone.

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

#26

Post by extra88 »

prophesi wrote: post #19
debacle wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two quick examples: A baseline WP host is not $50 a month. Ghost is not 20 times faster than WP.

That's for a managed WP host. I agree that the $50/mo price comes out of nowhere, but you're still not going to find one for $20/mo as you would with Ghost. Ghost is 20 times faster. And once you add a single WP plugin, it's 100 times faster.

Isn't Dreampress a comparably affordable managed Wordpress host?

https://www.dreamhost.com/wordpress/

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

#27

Post by scrollaway »

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.

Hey, thanks for Ghost, seriously.

I was looking to port over our homegrown django blog app into a proper blogging engine and I immediately though of Medium because of HN conditioning, and had so many problems with it, all of them boiling down to lack of control: No way to embed stuff we wanted (we wanted to embed interactive graphs and tooltips), no way to disable some bullshit features (highlight popups), no way to get our own domain name, etc.

Ghost solved all this. And on top of that, it's markdown, which makes it just fantastic. And open source. And self-hostable. And you guys run a wonderful, exemplary foundation behind it. I have nothing but admiration for what you do, and I'm proud to be a paying client for it and recommend it to anyone for company blogs (it is unfortunately expensive for personal stuff however).

My #1 wishlist for it is better image embedding/resizing/thumbnailing support (native image gallery & captions, native thumbnailing, automatic thumbnailing of hero headers for the article list view).

My #2 wishlist is Postgres support. I'm very sad you dropped support for it :(

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

#28

Post by clarkevans »

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.

I'm curious what Ghosts' bylaws are, how is it actually organized? I presume it's not a 501c(3) since it's engaged in commercial space and doesn't take charitable donations.

Another question: are there any aspects of your product that are open core? Does the SaaS have any "special sauce?" Thanks.

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

#29

Post by wolco »

prophesi wrote: post #19
debacle wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two quick examples: A baseline WP host is not $50 a month. Ghost is not 20 times faster than WP.

That's for a managed WP host. I agree that the $50/mo price comes out of nowhere, but you're still not going to find one for $20/mo as you would with Ghost. Ghost is 20 times faster. And once you add a single WP plugin, it's 100 times faster.

Can't find 20 dollars a month for a managed wp?

For 4 dollars a month you can.

https://www.siteground.com/wpbeginner-managed

50 dollars a month seems extremely costly. For that amount $600 a year it would be cheaper to hire someone to self host for you.

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

#30

Post by wolco »

chatmasta wrote: post #21
a_imho wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very noble. I was under the impression being setup as a non profit grants various tax optimization strategies / returns. Which can be probably redistributed as salary.

There is a place for this sort of cynicism, for example when looking at Zuckerberg’s structure of his “family trust.” But in this case it’s really an absurd implication. There is literally no personal benefit to founders making their company a non-profit. Yes they can pull salary from it, but they could do that in a for-profit company too. Not only that, but it’s impossible to sell a 501c3 non-profit because there ar…

Is the salary information public?

Because one can cash out through a 500k a year salary

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