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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.
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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…
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.
Really cool article. One perhaps dumb question because I don't know much about these things. How do you determine salaries for a non-profit?
In the early days there's no structure, you just get on with it. As the company grows, generally a board of directors (or non-profit: board of trustees) act as an independent governance level for the org above the exec team and (amongst other things) determine executive pay.
> 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.
Of all the places to put user docs, marketing is not the right one. :)
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It’s absurd because if you sit down and do the math, you’ll find there are basically no monetary advantages to paying yourself out of a 501c3 vs LLC/SCorp/CCorp. And even if you did find an advantage, there is no way it saves more money than you could make by selling your company. You cannot sell a non profit.
Still don't understand, when your organization pays less tax, you have more money to pay yourself, thus your salary will be higher. Conversely, there is little to no reason for being setup as a non-profit in Ghost's case. [1] https://www.upcounsel.com/llc-vs-nonprofit
As mentioned several times in this thread, our company is based in Singapore, not the US. The structures, laws and taxes are not equivalent.
I wrote a post about this a while back here: https://john.onolan.org/what-it-means-to-be-non-profit/
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?
I remember looking for better alternatives for WordPress(i felt they alienated the bloggers largely) and came across an article about Ghost. I was instantly hooked to the whole thing to this day. I just wish the non hosted versions get a better way to update to the latest version as well as a (official) script to automate the install easily.
I think this is what you're looking for: https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost-CLI I've only used it for a local install when playing with my site theme, but it worked great (albeit quite picky about the versions of the dependencies).
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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.
After reading this comment I went to check for myself. However I believe the grandfather post still has a valid point. It's not "obvious" how to use the self hosting open source version. However, I'm pretty sure a person that was really interested in self hosting would not have trouble figuring it out. I don't necessarily think it's bad that they don't emphasize how to use the open source version. After all, it is a…