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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

#91

Post by nickpsecurity »

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…

Great work and writeup at Ghost. I bookmarked it as an example to give to others wanting to do business and good things at same time. Far as ideas for reinvestment, two things come to mind:

1. Build more tools that solve people's problems created by others vendors. As in, move sideways a bit diversifying your operation. Even better if the tools/apps complement each other where you can increase benefit per customer while cross-selling. Although not endorsing them (not a customer), Zoho seems like a good example of this where they keep developing additional products that might benefit their customers on top of their original ones. Enough FOSS-oriented non-profits doing that in enough sectors can stop a lot of lock-in and abusive practices over time via the alternatives they provide.

2. Invest in maintenance or security improvements of dependencies, esp libraries or infrastructure. These are often treated as externalities leading to a lot of problems we see like in report below [1]. Ghost could deliver its good products/services on top of taking some responsibility for infrastructure it depends on. People buying Ghost get the immediate value plus knowledge they're supporting those things as well.

Just some ideas for you. Keep up the great work over there and good luck to you all! :)

[1] https://medium.com/@nayafia/how-i-stumbled-upon-the-internet...

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

#93

Post by tekacs »

> The stuff which is actually hard, nobody ever asks about. For instance: How do you know when someone is in a bad mood? How do you deal with loneliness? How do you foster camaraderie? How do you achieve urgency? How do you ever get to know people outside of work when you never spend time with them outside of work?

I for one would love to hear more from the Ghost team on how they approach solving these very essential problems - any insight is welcome!

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

#94

Post by throwbacktictac »

slim wrote: post #80
throwbacktictac wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They are claiming it is not a business

They didn't claim to not be a business in the blog post. They are a non-profit business. They still need to earn money to pay bill, pay employees, etc.

"Being a non-profit means that the company has no shares. I don't own it. Hannah doesn't own it. Nobody owns it - it's an independent entity. The company makes money and pays expenses, salaries and taxes as normal - but there's no way for it to be bought or sold either in part (investment) or as a whole (aquisition). Any profit the company makes can only ever be reinvested, not distributed. We can't cash out. Ever. Also the entire product is open source and has no copyright. Anyone can do whatever they want with our code, for free."

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

#95

Post by SkyPuncher »

johnonolan wrote: post #54
SkyPuncher wrote: post #46

We use hosted Ghost for our blog. For the most part, it's been great. My biggest complaint is that Ghost doesn't yet have a built in SSL/TLS option (e.g. Let's Encrypt). Their recommendation is to use Cloudflare. It's fine for hobbyist or personal blogs, but as a corporation it's basically prevented us from using SSL. We're in a regulated industry and need to do appropriate vetting of vendors. Onboarding a blog platf…

We do have all of those things :) For self-hosters, Ghost-CLI has deep Let's Encrypt integration. The tool will automatically guide you through provisioning an SSL certificate during the install process. On Ghost(Pro) we have full end to end SSL support (you're right we used to only support CF's UniverSSL but that is no longer the case) - so anyone who uses a custom domain with Ghost(Pro) will automatically have an S…

Heyo. Would you look at that! That must be pretty new?

----

This is great. That was my only complaint with Ghost so far.

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

#96

Post by e12e »

iends wrote: post #88
freeman478 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not really infrequent though. It’s like once a month.

You average around [ed:2M] views a month?

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

#97

Post by qrv3w »

neves wrote: post #87
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…

Very sad what the article says about GitHub. Which other changes would be nice to do?

I'm not sure - in my experience I find that issues from new GH users are usually suspect (e.g. see [1]). So it might be nice to have something like the "Limit to existing users" [2], except not limited to a 24-hour period.

I wish GH users felt obligated to disclose they work for a company when creating issues that are for their company, but that's not something GH could (or should) enforce.

[1]: https://github.com/schollz/find3/issues/66#issuecomment-3829...

[2]: https://blog.github.com/2017-05-30-introducing-temporary-int...

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

#99

Post by gcb0 »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #46

We use hosted Ghost for our blog. For the most part, it's been great. My biggest complaint is that Ghost doesn't yet have a built in SSL/TLS option (e.g. Let's Encrypt). Their recommendation is to use Cloudflare. It's fine for hobbyist or personal blogs, but as a corporation it's basically prevented us from using SSL. We're in a regulated industry and need to do appropriate vetting of vendors. Onboarding a blog platf…

what's the traffic and the avalable budget to hire a vendor that would be a Ultra-simple version of cloudflare: i.e. a caching proxy with a let's encrypt cert for https fronting your ghost blog?

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

#100

Post by gcb0 »

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.

please please more insight into the remote teams teaser you gave on the post! I would love to hear more that you have to say on that.
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