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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

#61

Post by freeman478 »

iends wrote: post #55

I would love to switch to hosted ghost, but the pricing makes very little sense for a personal blog. An article will make the front page of hn or some larger subreddits and I'll get 30k views in just a few hours. I'd have to pay close to $200/mo to get the same number of page views I can get with a $10/VPS that I ssh into maybe once every 6 months to patch. The pricing levels simply do not offer enough page views.

I was thinking like you but they say they compute usage on a 3 month rolling average basis. So an infrequent hit should not be an issue.

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

#62

Post by johnonolan »

snowwolf wrote: post #56
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.

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 mission of the organisation - which has many aspects but the main ones in our case revolve around creation and education for journalism and open source software.

Some pipedream ideas we throw around from time to time:

- M&A (boring/obvious answer, but valuable)

- Create either grant-funding, or sensible investment funding (like indie.vc) for other open source projects and publishers.

- Create an independent media company, reporting on issues and stories we care about (running on Ghost)

- Buy some land and build a collaborative space for us and for others to work on open source, journalism and social good projects

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

#63

Post by dsr_ »

snowwolf wrote: post #56
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.

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?

It would be a nice problem to have, eh?

Some things which come to mind:

- lower prices

- hire more staff to provide new features

- make everything faster and more reliable

- provide more free services

- give everyone raises

- donate to charities which are reasonably related to the aims of the non-profit

- make investments to improve the long-term financial health of the non-profit.

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

#65

Post by erikpukinskis »

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?

I’d argue they should be part of Product.

The skills overlap much better there: user research, usability testing, copywriting, information design... these are all things UX teams think about and are part of making good docs.

The only similarity between engineering projects and documentation projects is... there are engineers around.

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

#66

Post by extra88 »

oddevan wrote: post #45
extra88 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Dreampress a comparably affordable managed Wordpress host? https://www.dreamhost.com/wordpress/

I imagine there's a difference between "managed hosting" (host handles OS/package updates and maintains your LAMP stack) and "managed WordPress hosting" (host handles all of the above AND core WordPress updates, basic security, etc).

Dreampress's non-shared hosting plans include "Wordpress Service Updates" which surely includes core Wordpress updates and updates to plugins they include, like Jetpack. It might also cover updating a list of the most popular plugins.

For security beyond running updated software, it includes a Wordpress-tuned web application firewall and the $24.95/month tier includes "Malware Scanning & Repair."

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

#67

Post by lookingsideways »

iends wrote: post #55

I would love to switch to hosted ghost, but the pricing makes very little sense for a personal blog. An article will make the front page of hn or some larger subreddits and I'll get 30k views in just a few hours. I'd have to pay close to $200/mo to get the same number of page views I can get with a $10/VPS that I ssh into maybe once every 6 months to patch. The pricing levels simply do not offer enough page views.

From the "unusually fair billing policy" section on the pricing page:

> Our plans are limited by how many readers you have, and how often they visit your publication. We only enforce these limits on a 3 month rolling average, so we'll never make you upgrade plans if you happen to have one big traffic spike or particularly successful month.

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

#68

Post by jeremiahwv »

> We wanted to know: What would it look like if you built a technology startup which could not make anyone rich. If you eliminated all the promises of wealth from the roadmap up front, and tried to build a good company, how would that affect the product, business, customers, and every little decision in between?

...

> We're currently looking at testing an affiliate program whereby we'll pay out a 30% commission every single month on the lifetime revenue of anyone referred to Ghost(Pro).

...

I believe this is called colocating your money and your mouth. I'm inspired.

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

#69

Post by [deleted] »

qrv3w wrote: post #39

Thanks for the post, its great to hear that Ghost is doing well - I love using it. > [Github] has become too transactional - more support tool than collaboration I strongly agree with this. I wish Github "Issues" were relabeled "Comments" and need not be "Open" or "Closed". Issues need action, comments do not. I've been burned many times now by solving someone's issue and then finding out they use my code for their b…

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by johnonolan »

detaro wrote: post #36
johnonolan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why are they a fair comparison point, and not e.g. wordpress.com?

Shared hosting - $1.99, here's your server, good luck

Managed hosting - $29, you get your own server, app, automation, backups, and 24/7 support to make sure everything is working great

Centralised, multi-tenant application - $0-$9, you get no server. You get access to our app for your use. You cannot modify it or run any third party code.

We do managed hosting - and managed WP hosts... also do managed hosting. That's why it's a reasonable comparison point.

WordPress.com is not managed hosting. It's a heavily modified centralised multi-tenant application which loosely resembles WordPress. It does not run the open source codebase at all.

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