14 ms·

Ghost: $411k Annual Revenue with a team of 6

234 points by edpichler 11y ago

ChuckMcM 11y ago
That is pretty awesome, if they can keep it lean and treble their subscriber base they could likely become operationally cash flow positive. I built a blog using their stuff, after getting to know Handlebars is was pretty straight forward, and I really like that in 'production' mode it is essentially a static page (so easy to serve lots of variable bandwidth with nginx). Haven't deployed it yet though because, well it got to be 90% done and then ... ooh shiny!
Animats 11y ago
$411K annual revenue with a team of 6? $68.5K per employee? And that's revenue, not income? Don't quit your day job.
- bobbles 11y ago
  Holy entitlement batman! I'm sure there are plenty of people toiling away at startups making less than this!
  - dmak 11y ago
    Even so, it's not really note worthy.
    - zongitsrinzler 11y ago
      Note worthy is them sharing this publicly
  - sk5t 11y ago
    Aren't those other startups _also_ not healthy businesses? Where does entitlement come into the picture?
    - cpncrunch 11y ago
      It depends what your definition of "healthy" is.
  - pervycreeper 11y ago
    Where's the growth potential?
  - nothrabannosir 11y ago
    Not at all. He said "don't quit your day job," which is a cheeky way of saying: this is below market rate. It was a comment on the status quo; not on how things should be, but on how things are. Entitlement would have been: "programmers deserve more than that." Maybe he's very grateful for the high market rate many programmers can command? I know I am. Does that mean that I would advise people to go below market rate? Heck no.
  - s73v3r 11y ago
    Wait, why is it entitlement to want to get market rate for your skills?
- Gigablah 11y ago
  Actually, I would...
  - throwawayredux 11y ago
    Hope your boss ain't reading this!
- deleted 11y ago
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- brc 11y ago
  My thoughts exactly. It's nowhere near enough revenue to even keep going, unless revenue is about to expand a lot without a commensurate expansion in employees or marginal costs.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Companies have been going for decades or half a century on similar revenue. Not everyone leaves in the Bay Area, or wants to be Google. Making ends meet plus a small profit is OK too.
- jsonne 11y ago
  Not even. Factor in taxes, benefits, office space, software, hardware etc. Most employees actually end up costing you between something like 1.2-1.5x. So realistically, probably something like ~40k per employee is more accurate. That's not much for a developer.
  - cmadan 11y ago
    Not much for a developer in the Bay Area. The article mentions 6 developers ACROSS 3 continents. If any one of them is Asia, then $40k is a very, very good income. Don't quit your day job... if you live in the Bay Area and want to still live there.
    - deleted 11y ago
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      - webstartupper 11y ago
        The math comes out to about $6k per year. I am guessing that is the starting salary for a fresh out of college engineer.
        jussij 11y ago
        I hope you are joking!! I started fresh out of college with an engineering degree back in 1987 and my starting salary was $AUD20,500.00 per year. EDIT: AUD is Australian dollar.
        hnonymous5 11y ago
        You realize that's over 50k in today's money right?
      - asenna 11y ago
        >> Too low, median income for an Indian software developer is 60k in USD I am pretty sure that figure is Rs 400k a year. Which is about $6k. That's per year. I am from India and that sounds about right. I have friends in many of the consultancy firms like TCS, Infosys, etc who are in that range. It's obviously for people early in their career but then again, it is $60k for developers early in their career in the US. http://www.payscale.com/research/IN/Job=Software_Developer/Salary http://www.payscale.com/research/IN/Job=Software_Developer/S...
- deleted 11y ago
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- deleted 11y ago
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- honest_joe 11y ago
  How come that people are shocked ? Thanks to google and others that taught people not to pay or that services like this can be free and paid by the ads or from other sources. And people got mad about the ads and started blocking it..even the avg joe does that.
- rabbidruster 11y ago
  I assume they're figuring this revenue would continue for a while even if they all quit tomorrow. From their August numbers their churn rate is down to 6%. Even at this rate it seems like they could make pretty good passive income if they all decided to stop working on this today and pick up a new day job tomorrow.
- coldtea 11y ago
  Not everybody lives in the US. In other parts of the world, $411K is more like $5M compared to the cost of living. Though this team is from Australia, so the difference will be smaller.
  - jussij 11y ago
    Australia has some of the most expensive cities in the world. For example the Sydney median property price has just hit $1 million. Many sources rate Australia as one of the most expensive places in the world. Here is one example: http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/why-australias-still-the-worlds-most-expensive-place-to-live-20150415-1mm3lt.html http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/why-australias-st...
- jpatel3 11y ago
  or quit your day job and try to go up from here...
cthalupa 11y ago
That seems rather disappointing considering the amount of hype the project got with the kickstarter, and then launch, etc. I've played around with an install and ran a blog on it for a bit, and was never too impressed. The functionality and features all seem simplistic (Which isn't a bad thing in itself), but made me wonder why I had to download what felt like hundreds of packages with npm when I installed it. Even with all of the features they promised in the kickstarter that have now been cut, I never quite understood why they needed so much funding to create the project. I hope they are able to do better in the future, if only to have a good alternative to WordPress, and to maybe deliver on things that they have shelved. Edit: Looks like ghost has 38 direct dependencies in NPM, of which many have their own dependencies, etc.
- rodgerd 11y ago
  > Edit: Looks like ghost has 38 direct dependencies in NPM, of which many have their own dependencies, etc. This ended up putting me off. Sure, npm makes it easy to install/upgrade all the deps, but if one of the problems with WordPress is that it's a sprawling maze of potential security holes, this sort of setup really isn't the answer.
  - philjackson 11y ago
    As opposed to writing it all from scratch? I don't mean to be facetious...
    - Retric 11y ago
      Most of the time you probably want 5% of any huge products features, the issue is everyone wants a different set. Often you can find a more focused project that works or roll your own with far less work than you might expect. Especially if you would need a highly customized version of that "huge" project.
    - rodgerd 11y ago
      As opposed to just using WordPress (and getting all the extra features and whatnot) like everyone else, or going with another blog engine.
codinghorror 11y ago
Regardless of whether you feel these numbers are "impressive" or not, this kind of financial transparency is amazing and exceedingly rare. Kudos to the team, I personally use Ghost for my blog and love it. ( Also the quoted number is from April here is the latest https://ghost.baremetrics.com https://ghost.baremetrics.com )
colemorrison 11y ago
I will be honest. I use ghost as my blogging platform for about a year, and in comparison to wordpress... it just doesn't hold up. Everything from stuff as big as upgrading, mid range as plugins, and even simple things like spell check were overlooked (at least in the version I have). It kind of reminds me of the Pepsi Vs. Coke test. Went to it for that initial appeal of simplicity.. and now am very dissatisfied due to how much its lacking.
- shubhamjain 11y ago
  This reminds me of 10X rule [1] - "A technology needs to be 10x better than a previous one for widespread adoption". Although, the initial appeal of Ghost as a cleaner, sleeker blogging platform seems attractive, if that's the only thing you want to sell, then I am not sure how successful you can be. Is there a reason, why someone can't use a similar theme and markdown plugin with wordpress to achieve the same? [1]: http://www.minidisc.org/econ113-paper.htm http://www.minidisc.org/econ113-paper.htm
  - brianwawok 11y ago
    well for devs, a lot of us don't want stuck in php. though I don't want to be stuck in node either :(
- rodgerd 11y ago
  > Went to it for that initial appeal of simplicity.. and now am very dissatisfied due to how much its lacking. I am reminded of (but unable to find...) the Joel on Software essay that noted that it's always trivial to write simple, unbloated software, until people realise that they all have a different, lightly overlapping 10% of features that they need.
  - gknoy 11y ago
    OTOH, sometimes you might be building something that gets beginners into something, before they need those extra features. E.g., I don't yet blog, and if I were to, starting out with Ghost or similar would be very appealing. Only later would I understand what I need/want enough to roll my own.
mintplant 11y ago
This is from April 2015. Latest figures are here: http://blog.ghost.org/august-2015-update/ http://blog.ghost.org/august-2015-update/
- jpatokal 11y ago
  Better yet, live stats are here: https://ghost.baremetrics.com https://ghost.baremetrics.com
arahaya 11y ago
has someone made a php clone yet?
- danappelxx 11y ago
  Wouldn't that pretty much be wordpress? (expect it's not a clone - it came first).
  - 0x4a42 11y ago
    Wordpress with a cleaner architecture and a more modern API wouldn't be a bad thing.
    - gibrown 11y ago
      Maybe give the WP REST API a spin. Very active development, but needs more real world examples before its ready for WP core. http://wp-api.org/ http://wp-api.org/
      - 0x4a42 11y ago
        Well... no thanks. :) Wordpress has some undeniable qualities for quicly building simple websites. Making it a whole framework for apps and big websites just sounds silly to me. If I need to build large webapps I don't see any reason to do it with Wordpress (or even PHP) nowadays.
- dspillett 11y ago
  There will be one somewhere (even though there are already a great many PHP projects covering similar use cases) though PHP isn't exactly a show-off platform these days so you'll not see it advertised loudly as "GHOST IN PHP!". Same for "Ghuse in Ruby". Maybe we'll see "Ghost in Go" or "Ghost in Clojure" soon though.
  - Tiksi 11y ago
    Ghost in go already exists: https://kabukky.github.io/journey/ https://kabukky.github.io/journey/ and is my preferred blog platform.
kenshiro_o 11y ago
They don't seem to be making a lot, considering all the hype surrounding Ghost for the last year or more. I am using Ghost (self hosted) for my blog and find it brilliant but I think the ecosystem needs more time to develop and sustain itself. So the jury is still out I guess...
viach 11y ago
Why would you blogged about your startup constantly increasing revenue? I see the only reason.
jasonkester 11y ago
This seems like a good case for keeping your team size small. Those sort of numbers split two ways instead of six would turn this into a huge win. Hopefully they'll keep ramping upwards and find ways to avoid adding any more headcount to dip into the pie. This also seems like a great market to have jumped on, and I'm kicking myself for not having done so. Blogger used to offer essentially this same product: Easy editing tools with FTP export so you could host raw HTML cheaply instead of having to deal with keeping a LAMP box alive to run Wordpress. But they killed it off and left a huge hole in the market that sat vacant for years before these guys stepped in to fill it. Nice work.
- nkozyra 11y ago
  Huge win except each would be doing 3x the work or more. That's not sustainable, speaking from experience.
mettamage 11y ago
For my use case -- a simple blog -- Ghost felt a better fit. Wordpress has so much stuff visually in the beginning that I felt I didn't need. Ghost on the other hand hides that away, and then when I started tweaking I was beginning to realize there's a lot more it than meets the eye. I guess I need that initial simplicity. I love the platform and always asked myself how they were making money, because it isn't me (I combined it with Jeckyll and upload it as HTML).
- 0x54MUR41 11y ago
  Did you mean Jekyll instead of Jeckyll?
luckydata 11y ago
Ghost was one of the most disingenuous kickstarters I've ever seen: the features that got people excited got cut pretty much right away, showing that the team was never serious about it. The blog itself came to light with some heinous overlooked areas in the user management, stuff that nobody has any right to get wrong in this day and age. My personal opinion after being a user for a while is that we need less of this kind of projects (a LOT less) and more quality software.
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  >the features that got people excited got cut pretty much right away // Could you, or anyone else, expand on this point - what features particularly?
  - mattlutze 11y ago
    From a little browsing, there was a quick-start package that looks like didn't actually provide early access. Then from this update [1] they said after the first release they'd introduce plug-ins and the dashboard, of which at least the dashboard had been advertised on the original campaign rather predominantly. They were also showing off multi-user collaboration and the content tools, both of which as well got pushed to after release. Not sure if that's what the previous posters have been talking about. 1: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-blogging-platform/posts/581464 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a...
  - cthalupa 11y ago
    The dashboard was one of the biggest selling points. https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/000/511/606/53cb7cffa27c89a43bc91b40f604f7e2_original.jpg?v=1365807289&w=680&fit=max&auto=format&q=92&s=589b58b93da4ba8f96ddef9d9c1483b8 https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/000/511/606/53cb7cffa27c89a... >Ghost grabs all the important data about your blog and pulls it into one place, so you can see it all together. No more clicking through tens of browser tabs to view your traffic, social media subscriptions, content performance or news feeds. Drag and drop the widgets most important to you into your own custom dashboard, and stay on top of your blog's performance. Considering how important social media is for blog growth, this was a really exciting prospect for people. Being able to see all of the details on how your content was doing there, growth figures, etc. It got completely cut.
notNow 11y ago
Over promise and under deliver. Apparently that's the motto of the folks at Ghost. I'm really disappointed at the progress of this project that I thought would take on WP in 1 or 2 years time since launch but we're heading to year no 3 and they still at 0.6 milestone with no stable and production-ready WP caliber version in sight. Shame that it had to be like this. I was really looking forward to abandoning ugly and frustrating PHP to JS/Node and bringing new life to blogging platforms but shame.
- coldtea 11y ago
  Yeah, because their huge market position (or the Kickstarter money) guarantee them being able to hit a 10+ year old project which powers 40% of the web, and has a multi-million dollar company behind it. Shame of them for not delivering magical unicors sprinkled with pixie dust.
  - briandear 11y ago
    If they promised magical unicorns, then yes, shame on them.
  - notNow 11y ago
    I was not expecting them to take on WP even in a 5 year time but I was hoping to see them grow and chip away at WP's market share and reach 20% - 30% by of the blogging platform market but two years in and Ghost still going nowhere in terms of adoption and even worse it lags behind feature-wise. So yeah I'm really disappointed at them and equally at Assemble as well but Ghost is supposed to have had better chances of making it since they are well funded and have/had the support of the JS community to build a decent node-powered blogging platform that takes the market by storm but this yet is to materialize.
    - nhangen 11y ago
      have you considered that maybe the market doesn't want a "decent node-powered blogging platform?" Building a quality product takes time, and often times a lot longer than you think it will take. Lots of things get in the way, and with a product like this, education is a huge part of the adoption cycle. At 500k/year, they are poised to have healthy growth until they reach that point. Might not happen on your timeline, but at least they are still chugging.
TomGullen 11y ago
I'm struggling to think of why a startup would want to do this? What's it achieve?
- coldtea 11y ago
  Maybe everyone doesn't act with great strategies and achieving things in mind? Maybe they just want to be transparent and share their journey?
  - briandear 11y ago
    Isn't achievement the point of a company?
    - coldtea 11y ago
      No, the point of a company is what its owner(s) have in mind. Some could just want freedom from being employees, and could be satisfied with just basic revenues to get by. Others might want to change the world in a positive (as they see it) way with their product (e.g. help save the environment). Others might want to be millionaires, etc.
  - TomGullen 11y ago
    How much money they are making is a pretty minor aspect of transparency which doesn't seem to serve much purpose except to satisfy peoples curiosity (and possibly act as a vanity metric which I feel Ghost's example reads a bit like). Here in the UK all Ltd companies (and most startups are Ltd) have public accounts, customers in B2C businesses in my experience tend to not look up and read them because at the end of the day it's not important for them. Publicising them so openly seems like it could backfire and create problems. Customers demanding more, putting a target on yourself for patent trolls, another thing to maintain which could go wrong/mislead etc etc. Cynics might argue they are not doing this for customer transparency, but as an attempt to put themselves on the radar for potential investors/acquirers.
    - notNow 11y ago
estefan 11y ago
I couldn't give a rats ass about revenue. What's the profit?
- Rainymood 11y ago
  "I couldn't care about Twitter's revenue, what's the profit!" "I couldn't care about Uber's revenue, what's the profit!" "I couldn't care more about AMAZON's revenue, WHATS THEIR PROFIT!!!" While important, there are other things to take into consideration when evaluating a company imho.
  - puranjay 11y ago
    "They made $100Bn in revenue last year, but they had a loss, so I'll probably value the company at like $0 because the concept that revenues can be turned into profit has escaped my comprehension"
- coderjames 11y ago
  From their about page, they are a non-profit, so there isn't any. "Ghost(Pro) is what funds the Non-Profit Organisation which organises and runs the Ghost Open Source project."
  - estefan 11y ago
    Profit tells you how much they can afford to expand in future, regardless of whether they are a for-profit or non-profit.
martin-adams 11y ago
Very interesting looking at their live stats: https://ghost.baremetrics.com/ https://ghost.baremetrics.com/ I noticed they had 654 failed charges, and over 4,133 customers, that's 15.8%. That's around $6,200 of revenue they failed to collect first time each month - basically, a whole person's salary.
- benmanns 11y ago
  Does anyone know how that compares to other services?
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - aculver 11y ago
    Yeah, so I run http://churnbuster.io/ http://churnbuster.io/ where we help a lot of companies with this exact issue. As a rule of thumb we would typically expect about 10% of initial charge attempts to fail for a B2B business, and it wouldn't be abnormal to see 15-20% for a B2C business. It's a huge problem, and that's even on a best-of-breed payment processor that provides automatic card updating in the background. For anyone interested in digging in deeper on some of the lessons we've learned, I posted a bunch of thoughts on Quora earlier this year: http://qr.ae/RFWy23 http://qr.ae/RFWy23 . Otherwise, feel free to reach out to me directly at andrew@churnbuster.io .
- nikmobi 11y ago
  whoa. why are we able to see these stats?
  - joshdance 11y ago
    Because they chose to make them public using Baremetrics.
  - jlgaddis 11y ago
    RTFA?
corford 11y ago
A lot of hate for ghost here but I'm a paying subscriber and love it. Building a custom theme is really easy (found it much more pleasant than WP) and they give you enough hooks in to the core engine to largely achieve whatever design you need. The interface and post editor is a piece of cake to use. The only bit that I think still needs work is the separate account management interface - lots of room to improve the UX.
- napoleoncomplex 11y ago
  Agreed, they're sticking to their core strength, and I feel are executing their vision quite well. It's depressing to see snide comments about both the company and the amount of money they're making. Some people have a completely unrealistic view of how much money is needed to run a company outside of SV/how much money is needed to live more or less worry free. Considering the revenue, and living outside of bubbly salary areas (John O'Nolan lives in Egypt for example), they're all living a comfortable life on their current paychecks, and as the revenue continues to grow, it's only going to get better. They aren't beholden to anyone, run a successful open source business and are growing nicely every month. If that's not a great story, I don't know what is. As a reality check for SV folk, according to their report on how they spent their Kickstarter money (http://blog.ghost.org/year-2/ http://blog.ghost.org/year-2/), their gross starting salaries were 4500 $ per person (18k for 4 people). Warm word of advice, spend time in other cultures :).
- deleted 11y ago
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- forrestthewoods 11y ago
  I use Ghost. I'm very happy with it. I hope they can grow it into a larger success.
- scalesolved 11y ago
  Agreed! I was hosting my own Ghost but decided I loved it that much that I'd rather let the updates be automatic and let them deal with all the hosting issues. More than happy to be giving my money to them.
notNow 11y ago
Are you a paying customer or paid evangelist coz I'm sorry this reads like an advertorial to me?
- corford 11y ago
  Ha, no. I pay for it, use it and like it. They do a free trial - check it out yourself and make your own mind up.
- talmand 11y ago
  It must be rough living in your world of every positive review is by a paid shill.
  - mfisher87 11y ago
    To be fair, it's a common business practice now to shill your products. In order to keep one's beliefs consistent with reality, one has to assume that some Internet comments are made by shills. To assume that shills don't exist is self-deception. Not saying that it's valid to assume a shill in this case, but my point is that American consumers don't have enough information to determine whether a product review is genuine.
    - notNow 11y ago
      Apparently, he/she is not aware of the fact that tech companies hire people, most likely techies in product evangelism related roles, to publicize their offering and also to counter bad publicity/press offering different narratives and talking points like any regular PR operation out there. Some are good at it and can conceal their true intentions and some are not really good.
      - bmelton 11y ago
        It was especially clever of them to register this account years ago, before Ghost was even invented, and pad the account with years' worth of comments to hide their obviousness.
foopants 11y ago
Meh. My consulting company has a $1MM revenue with a team of 4.
juddlyon 11y ago
This post is from back in April (2015).
jokoon 11y ago
What was this blog platform which was html only ? I remember seeing one some time ago, but I don't remember which it was. It was a very clean, simplistic way of posting things online, I wonder if it's ghost after all.
tacone 11y ago
I think it's fair to point out they are a Not for Profit Organization: https://ghost.org/about/contact/ https://ghost.org/about/contact/
johnward 11y ago
$411k isn't impressive and it isn't sad either. To me that sounds about right for a team of 6 just getting started. I'm sure that won't support the salaries those people could get in the valley.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  Yes, but they have to make 50-100% more to live in the Valley vs. an average CoL area. I'm not sure they'd make more than $90-$120k in the Valley.
  - encoderer 11y ago
    There are no experienced engineers in the SFBA working for $90k unless they're choosing alternate comp over base salary. Most internships pay more than that on an annualized basis nowadays. But you may know something I don't about these roles, they may not all be engineers?
    - deleted 11y ago
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    - fweespeech 11y ago
      Given they can pick the location they live in, they could hit the equivalent of $120k if they wanted. If they went with $90k, its because they had a higher cost of living area they preferred. So I'd call that "alternative comp" myself.

234 points by edpichler 11y ago

That is pretty awesome, if they can keep it lean and treble their subscriber base they could likely become operationally cash flow positive. I built a blog using their stuff, after getting to know Handlebars is was pretty straight forward, and I really like that in 'production' mode it is essentially a static page (so easy to serve lots of variable bandwidth with nginx). Haven't deployed it yet though because, well it got to be 90% done and then ... ooh shiny!

Animats 11y ago

$411K annual revenue with a team of 6? $68.5K per employee? And that's revenue, not income? Don't quit your day job.

bobbles 11y ago
Holy entitlement batman! I'm sure there are plenty of people toiling away at startups making less than this!
- dmak 11y ago
  Even so, it's not really note worthy.
  - zongitsrinzler 11y ago
    Note worthy is them sharing this publicly
- sk5t 11y ago
  Aren't those other startups _also_ not healthy businesses? Where does entitlement come into the picture?
  - cpncrunch 11y ago
    It depends what your definition of "healthy" is.
- pervycreeper 11y ago
  Where's the growth potential?
- nothrabannosir 11y ago
  Not at all. He said "don't quit your day job," which is a cheeky way of saying: this is below market rate. It was a comment on the status quo; not on how things should be, but on how things are. Entitlement would have been: "programmers deserve more than that." Maybe he's very grateful for the high market rate many programmers can command? I know I am. Does that mean that I would advise people to go below market rate? Heck no.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  Wait, why is it entitlement to want to get market rate for your skills?
Gigablah 11y ago
Actually, I would...
- throwawayredux 11y ago
  Hope your boss ain't reading this!
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brc 11y ago
My thoughts exactly. It's nowhere near enough revenue to even keep going, unless revenue is about to expand a lot without a commensurate expansion in employees or marginal costs.
- coldtea 11y ago
  Companies have been going for decades or half a century on similar revenue. Not everyone leaves in the Bay Area, or wants to be Google. Making ends meet plus a small profit is OK too.
jsonne 11y ago
Not even. Factor in taxes, benefits, office space, software, hardware etc. Most employees actually end up costing you between something like 1.2-1.5x. So realistically, probably something like ~40k per employee is more accurate. That's not much for a developer.
- cmadan 11y ago
  Not much for a developer in the Bay Area. The article mentions 6 developers ACROSS 3 continents. If any one of them is Asia, then $40k is a very, very good income. Don't quit your day job... if you live in the Bay Area and want to still live there.
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    - webstartupper 11y ago
      The math comes out to about $6k per year. I am guessing that is the starting salary for a fresh out of college engineer.
      - jussij 11y ago
        I hope you are joking!! I started fresh out of college with an engineering degree back in 1987 and my starting salary was $AUD20,500.00 per year. EDIT: AUD is Australian dollar.
        hnonymous5 11y ago
        You realize that's over 50k in today's money right?
    - asenna 11y ago
      >> Too low, median income for an Indian software developer is 60k in USD I am pretty sure that figure is Rs 400k a year. Which is about $6k. That's per year. I am from India and that sounds about right. I have friends in many of the consultancy firms like TCS, Infosys, etc who are in that range. It's obviously for people early in their career but then again, it is $60k for developers early in their career in the US. http://www.payscale.com/research/IN/Job=Software_Developer/Salary http://www.payscale.com/research/IN/Job=Software_Developer/S...
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honest_joe 11y ago
How come that people are shocked ? Thanks to google and others that taught people not to pay or that services like this can be free and paid by the ads or from other sources. And people got mad about the ads and started blocking it..even the avg joe does that.
rabbidruster 11y ago
I assume they're figuring this revenue would continue for a while even if they all quit tomorrow. From their August numbers their churn rate is down to 6%. Even at this rate it seems like they could make pretty good passive income if they all decided to stop working on this today and pick up a new day job tomorrow.
coldtea 11y ago
Not everybody lives in the US. In other parts of the world, $411K is more like $5M compared to the cost of living. Though this team is from Australia, so the difference will be smaller.
- jussij 11y ago
  Australia has some of the most expensive cities in the world. For example the Sydney median property price has just hit $1 million. Many sources rate Australia as one of the most expensive places in the world. Here is one example: http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/why-australias-still-the-worlds-most-expensive-place-to-live-20150415-1mm3lt.html http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/why-australias-st...
jpatel3 11y ago
or quit your day job and try to go up from here...

cthalupa 11y ago

That seems rather disappointing considering the amount of hype the project got with the kickstarter, and then launch, etc. I've played around with an install and ran a blog on it for a bit, and was never too impressed. The functionality and features all seem simplistic (Which isn't a bad thing in itself), but made me wonder why I had to download what felt like hundreds of packages with npm when I installed it. Even with all of the features they promised in the kickstarter that have now been cut, I never quite understood why they needed so much funding to create the project. I hope they are able to do better in the future, if only to have a good alternative to WordPress, and to maybe deliver on things that they have shelved. Edit: Looks like ghost has 38 direct dependencies in NPM, of which many have their own dependencies, etc.

rodgerd 11y ago
> Edit: Looks like ghost has 38 direct dependencies in NPM, of which many have their own dependencies, etc. This ended up putting me off. Sure, npm makes it easy to install/upgrade all the deps, but if one of the problems with WordPress is that it's a sprawling maze of potential security holes, this sort of setup really isn't the answer.
- philjackson 11y ago
  As opposed to writing it all from scratch? I don't mean to be facetious...
  - Retric 11y ago
    Most of the time you probably want 5% of any huge products features, the issue is everyone wants a different set. Often you can find a more focused project that works or roll your own with far less work than you might expect. Especially if you would need a highly customized version of that "huge" project.
  - rodgerd 11y ago
    As opposed to just using WordPress (and getting all the extra features and whatnot) like everyone else, or going with another blog engine.

codinghorror 11y ago

Regardless of whether you feel these numbers are "impressive" or not, this kind of financial transparency is amazing and exceedingly rare. Kudos to the team, I personally use Ghost for my blog and love it. ( Also the quoted number is from April here is the latest https://ghost.baremetrics.com https://ghost.baremetrics.com )

colemorrison 11y ago

I will be honest. I use ghost as my blogging platform for about a year, and in comparison to wordpress... it just doesn't hold up. Everything from stuff as big as upgrading, mid range as plugins, and even simple things like spell check were overlooked (at least in the version I have). It kind of reminds me of the Pepsi Vs. Coke test. Went to it for that initial appeal of simplicity.. and now am very dissatisfied due to how much its lacking.

shubhamjain 11y ago
This reminds me of 10X rule [1] - "A technology needs to be 10x better than a previous one for widespread adoption". Although, the initial appeal of Ghost as a cleaner, sleeker blogging platform seems attractive, if that's the only thing you want to sell, then I am not sure how successful you can be. Is there a reason, why someone can't use a similar theme and markdown plugin with wordpress to achieve the same? [1]: http://www.minidisc.org/econ113-paper.htm http://www.minidisc.org/econ113-paper.htm
- brianwawok 11y ago
  well for devs, a lot of us don't want stuck in php. though I don't want to be stuck in node either :(
rodgerd 11y ago
> Went to it for that initial appeal of simplicity.. and now am very dissatisfied due to how much its lacking. I am reminded of (but unable to find...) the Joel on Software essay that noted that it's always trivial to write simple, unbloated software, until people realise that they all have a different, lightly overlapping 10% of features that they need.
- gknoy 11y ago
  OTOH, sometimes you might be building something that gets beginners into something, before they need those extra features. E.g., I don't yet blog, and if I were to, starting out with Ghost or similar would be very appealing. Only later would I understand what I need/want enough to roll my own.

mintplant 11y ago

This is from April 2015. Latest figures are here: http://blog.ghost.org/august-2015-update/ http://blog.ghost.org/august-2015-update/

jpatokal 11y ago
Better yet, live stats are here: https://ghost.baremetrics.com https://ghost.baremetrics.com

arahaya 11y ago

has someone made a php clone yet?

danappelxx 11y ago
Wouldn't that pretty much be wordpress? (expect it's not a clone - it came first).
- 0x4a42 11y ago
  Wordpress with a cleaner architecture and a more modern API wouldn't be a bad thing.
  - gibrown 11y ago
    Maybe give the WP REST API a spin. Very active development, but needs more real world examples before its ready for WP core. http://wp-api.org/ http://wp-api.org/
    - 0x4a42 11y ago
      Well... no thanks. :) Wordpress has some undeniable qualities for quicly building simple websites. Making it a whole framework for apps and big websites just sounds silly to me. If I need to build large webapps I don't see any reason to do it with Wordpress (or even PHP) nowadays.
dspillett 11y ago
There will be one somewhere (even though there are already a great many PHP projects covering similar use cases) though PHP isn't exactly a show-off platform these days so you'll not see it advertised loudly as "GHOST IN PHP!". Same for "Ghuse in Ruby". Maybe we'll see "Ghost in Go" or "Ghost in Clojure" soon though.
- Tiksi 11y ago
  Ghost in go already exists: https://kabukky.github.io/journey/ https://kabukky.github.io/journey/ and is my preferred blog platform.

kenshiro_o 11y ago

They don't seem to be making a lot, considering all the hype surrounding Ghost for the last year or more. I am using Ghost (self hosted) for my blog and find it brilliant but I think the ecosystem needs more time to develop and sustain itself. So the jury is still out I guess...

viach 11y ago

Why would you blogged about your startup constantly increasing revenue? I see the only reason.

jasonkester 11y ago

This seems like a good case for keeping your team size small. Those sort of numbers split two ways instead of six would turn this into a huge win. Hopefully they'll keep ramping upwards and find ways to avoid adding any more headcount to dip into the pie. This also seems like a great market to have jumped on, and I'm kicking myself for not having done so. Blogger used to offer essentially this same product: Easy editing tools with FTP export so you could host raw HTML cheaply instead of having to deal with keeping a LAMP box alive to run Wordpress. But they killed it off and left a huge hole in the market that sat vacant for years before these guys stepped in to fill it. Nice work.

nkozyra 11y ago
Huge win except each would be doing 3x the work or more. That's not sustainable, speaking from experience.

mettamage 11y ago

For my use case -- a simple blog -- Ghost felt a better fit. Wordpress has so much stuff visually in the beginning that I felt I didn't need. Ghost on the other hand hides that away, and then when I started tweaking I was beginning to realize there's a lot more it than meets the eye. I guess I need that initial simplicity. I love the platform and always asked myself how they were making money, because it isn't me (I combined it with Jeckyll and upload it as HTML).

0x54MUR41 11y ago
Did you mean Jekyll instead of Jeckyll?

luckydata 11y ago

Ghost was one of the most disingenuous kickstarters I've ever seen: the features that got people excited got cut pretty much right away, showing that the team was never serious about it. The blog itself came to light with some heinous overlooked areas in the user management, stuff that nobody has any right to get wrong in this day and age. My personal opinion after being a user for a while is that we need less of this kind of projects (a LOT less) and more quality software.

pbhjpbhj 11y ago
>the features that got people excited got cut pretty much right away // Could you, or anyone else, expand on this point - what features particularly?
- mattlutze 11y ago
  From a little browsing, there was a quick-start package that looks like didn't actually provide early access. Then from this update [1] they said after the first release they'd introduce plug-ins and the dashboard, of which at least the dashboard had been advertised on the original campaign rather predominantly. They were also showing off multi-user collaboration and the content tools, both of which as well got pushed to after release. Not sure if that's what the previous posters have been talking about. 1: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-blogging-platform/posts/581464 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a...
- cthalupa 11y ago
  The dashboard was one of the biggest selling points. https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/000/511/606/53cb7cffa27c89a43bc91b40f604f7e2_original.jpg?v=1365807289&w=680&fit=max&auto=format&q=92&s=589b58b93da4ba8f96ddef9d9c1483b8 https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/000/511/606/53cb7cffa27c89a... >Ghost grabs all the important data about your blog and pulls it into one place, so you can see it all together. No more clicking through tens of browser tabs to view your traffic, social media subscriptions, content performance or news feeds. Drag and drop the widgets most important to you into your own custom dashboard, and stay on top of your blog's performance. Considering how important social media is for blog growth, this was a really exciting prospect for people. Being able to see all of the details on how your content was doing there, growth figures, etc. It got completely cut.

notNow 11y ago

Over promise and under deliver. Apparently that's the motto of the folks at Ghost. I'm really disappointed at the progress of this project that I thought would take on WP in 1 or 2 years time since launch but we're heading to year no 3 and they still at 0.6 milestone with no stable and production-ready WP caliber version in sight. Shame that it had to be like this. I was really looking forward to abandoning ugly and frustrating PHP to JS/Node and bringing new life to blogging platforms but shame.

coldtea 11y ago
Yeah, because their huge market position (or the Kickstarter money) guarantee them being able to hit a 10+ year old project which powers 40% of the web, and has a multi-million dollar company behind it. Shame of them for not delivering magical unicors sprinkled with pixie dust.
- briandear 11y ago
  If they promised magical unicorns, then yes, shame on them.
- notNow 11y ago
  I was not expecting them to take on WP even in a 5 year time but I was hoping to see them grow and chip away at WP's market share and reach 20% - 30% by of the blogging platform market but two years in and Ghost still going nowhere in terms of adoption and even worse it lags behind feature-wise. So yeah I'm really disappointed at them and equally at Assemble as well but Ghost is supposed to have had better chances of making it since they are well funded and have/had the support of the JS community to build a decent node-powered blogging platform that takes the market by storm but this yet is to materialize.
  - nhangen 11y ago
    have you considered that maybe the market doesn't want a "decent node-powered blogging platform?" Building a quality product takes time, and often times a lot longer than you think it will take. Lots of things get in the way, and with a product like this, education is a huge part of the adoption cycle. At 500k/year, they are poised to have healthy growth until they reach that point. Might not happen on your timeline, but at least they are still chugging.

TomGullen 11y ago

I'm struggling to think of why a startup would want to do this? What's it achieve?

coldtea 11y ago
Maybe everyone doesn't act with great strategies and achieving things in mind? Maybe they just want to be transparent and share their journey?
- briandear 11y ago
  Isn't achievement the point of a company?
  - coldtea 11y ago
    No, the point of a company is what its owner(s) have in mind. Some could just want freedom from being employees, and could be satisfied with just basic revenues to get by. Others might want to change the world in a positive (as they see it) way with their product (e.g. help save the environment). Others might want to be millionaires, etc.
- TomGullen 11y ago
  How much money they are making is a pretty minor aspect of transparency which doesn't seem to serve much purpose except to satisfy peoples curiosity (and possibly act as a vanity metric which I feel Ghost's example reads a bit like). Here in the UK all Ltd companies (and most startups are Ltd) have public accounts, customers in B2C businesses in my experience tend to not look up and read them because at the end of the day it's not important for them. Publicising them so openly seems like it could backfire and create problems. Customers demanding more, putting a target on yourself for patent trolls, another thing to maintain which could go wrong/mislead etc etc. Cynics might argue they are not doing this for customer transparency, but as an attempt to put themselves on the radar for potential investors/acquirers.
  - notNow 11y ago

estefan 11y ago

I couldn't give a rats ass about revenue. What's the profit?

Rainymood 11y ago
"I couldn't care about Twitter's revenue, what's the profit!" "I couldn't care about Uber's revenue, what's the profit!" "I couldn't care more about AMAZON's revenue, WHATS THEIR PROFIT!!!" While important, there are other things to take into consideration when evaluating a company imho.
- puranjay 11y ago
  "They made $100Bn in revenue last year, but they had a loss, so I'll probably value the company at like $0 because the concept that revenues can be turned into profit has escaped my comprehension"
coderjames 11y ago
From their about page, they are a non-profit, so there isn't any. "Ghost(Pro) is what funds the Non-Profit Organisation which organises and runs the Ghost Open Source project."
- estefan 11y ago
  Profit tells you how much they can afford to expand in future, regardless of whether they are a for-profit or non-profit.

martin-adams 11y ago

Very interesting looking at their live stats: https://ghost.baremetrics.com/ https://ghost.baremetrics.com/ I noticed they had 654 failed charges, and over 4,133 customers, that's 15.8%. That's around $6,200 of revenue they failed to collect first time each month - basically, a whole person's salary.

benmanns 11y ago
Does anyone know how that compares to other services?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- aculver 11y ago
  Yeah, so I run http://churnbuster.io/ http://churnbuster.io/ where we help a lot of companies with this exact issue. As a rule of thumb we would typically expect about 10% of initial charge attempts to fail for a B2B business, and it wouldn't be abnormal to see 15-20% for a B2C business. It's a huge problem, and that's even on a best-of-breed payment processor that provides automatic card updating in the background. For anyone interested in digging in deeper on some of the lessons we've learned, I posted a bunch of thoughts on Quora earlier this year: http://qr.ae/RFWy23 http://qr.ae/RFWy23 . Otherwise, feel free to reach out to me directly at andrew@churnbuster.io .
nikmobi 11y ago
whoa. why are we able to see these stats?
- joshdance 11y ago
  Because they chose to make them public using Baremetrics.
- jlgaddis 11y ago
  RTFA?

corford 11y ago

A lot of hate for ghost here but I'm a paying subscriber and love it. Building a custom theme is really easy (found it much more pleasant than WP) and they give you enough hooks in to the core engine to largely achieve whatever design you need. The interface and post editor is a piece of cake to use. The only bit that I think still needs work is the separate account management interface - lots of room to improve the UX.

napoleoncomplex 11y ago
Agreed, they're sticking to their core strength, and I feel are executing their vision quite well. It's depressing to see snide comments about both the company and the amount of money they're making. Some people have a completely unrealistic view of how much money is needed to run a company outside of SV/how much money is needed to live more or less worry free. Considering the revenue, and living outside of bubbly salary areas (John O'Nolan lives in Egypt for example), they're all living a comfortable life on their current paychecks, and as the revenue continues to grow, it's only going to get better. They aren't beholden to anyone, run a successful open source business and are growing nicely every month. If that's not a great story, I don't know what is. As a reality check for SV folk, according to their report on how they spent their Kickstarter money (http://blog.ghost.org/year-2/ http://blog.ghost.org/year-2/), their gross starting salaries were 4500 $ per person (18k for 4 people). Warm word of advice, spend time in other cultures :).
deleted 11y ago
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forrestthewoods 11y ago
I use Ghost. I'm very happy with it. I hope they can grow it into a larger success.
scalesolved 11y ago
Agreed! I was hosting my own Ghost but decided I loved it that much that I'd rather let the updates be automatic and let them deal with all the hosting issues. More than happy to be giving my money to them.

notNow 11y ago

Are you a paying customer or paid evangelist coz I'm sorry this reads like an advertorial to me?

corford 11y ago
Ha, no. I pay for it, use it and like it. They do a free trial - check it out yourself and make your own mind up.
talmand 11y ago
It must be rough living in your world of every positive review is by a paid shill.
- mfisher87 11y ago
  To be fair, it's a common business practice now to shill your products. In order to keep one's beliefs consistent with reality, one has to assume that some Internet comments are made by shills. To assume that shills don't exist is self-deception. Not saying that it's valid to assume a shill in this case, but my point is that American consumers don't have enough information to determine whether a product review is genuine.
  - notNow 11y ago
    Apparently, he/she is not aware of the fact that tech companies hire people, most likely techies in product evangelism related roles, to publicize their offering and also to counter bad publicity/press offering different narratives and talking points like any regular PR operation out there. Some are good at it and can conceal their true intentions and some are not really good.
    - bmelton 11y ago
      It was especially clever of them to register this account years ago, before Ghost was even invented, and pad the account with years' worth of comments to hide their obviousness.

foopants 11y ago

Meh. My consulting company has a $1MM revenue with a team of 4.

juddlyon 11y ago

This post is from back in April (2015).

jokoon 11y ago

What was this blog platform which was html only ? I remember seeing one some time ago, but I don't remember which it was. It was a very clean, simplistic way of posting things online, I wonder if it's ghost after all.

tacone 11y ago

I think it's fair to point out they are a Not for Profit Organization: https://ghost.org/about/contact/ https://ghost.org/about/contact/

johnward 11y ago

$411k isn't impressive and it isn't sad either. To me that sounds about right for a team of 6 just getting started. I'm sure that won't support the salaries those people could get in the valley.

fweespeech 11y ago
Yes, but they have to make 50-100% more to live in the Valley vs. an average CoL area. I'm not sure they'd make more than $90-$120k in the Valley.
- encoderer 11y ago
  There are no experienced engineers in the SFBA working for $90k unless they're choosing alternate comp over base salary. Most internships pay more than that on an annualized basis nowadays. But you may know something I don't about these roles, they may not all be engineers?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    Given they can pick the location they live in, they could hit the equivalent of $120k if they wanted. If they went with $90k, its because they had a higher cost of living area they preferred. So I'd call that "alternative comp" myself.