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What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M
- relaunched 8y agoI'm a little surprised to read that Ghost doesn't use gitlab. Given the companies are both open source and distributed work forces; not to mention they call out github as a big headache. >How open source works is: If you want something, you can build it.
- andrewvc 8y agoThe problems listed were with the interaction model. There's nothing I've seen in GitLab's UX that would indicate it's any better.
- relaunched 8y agoUnfortunately I think Github itself has a lot to do with this. The product has become too transactional - more support tool than collaboration. And Github themselves show remarkable disinterest in the open source community as a whole - they give us beta access to test new features every so often. That's about it. There's no wider involvement at all. I read it as two parts. Interactions are flawed & Github doesn't really care about open source. Just one guys opinion, and my wife works for gitlab, but there is a deep commitment to open source and contributors, as well as an abundance of places for deeper dialogues to occur, between projects / contributors / the general public / gitlab. +1 for also living in Minneapolis. We should get coffee.
- bovermyer 8y agoHuh, I also live in Minneapolis. How many HNers are around here?
- relaunched 8y agoThere are a few. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? A meetup?
- b3b0p 8y agoLive downtown Minneapolis. Checking in.
- thoughtpalette 8y agoI've nothing but a positive experience using the self-hosted Ghost instance for some clients. Glad to see this transparency and that they're doing well.
- debacle 8y agoI 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/mo for an entry level blog? Why isn't there any obvious mention of the OSS nature of the project on the pricing page, home page, or features page? - What's been done about the memory issues? Last time I tried ghost, it was a bit of a memory hog.
- michaeltbuss 8y agoTheir 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.
- debacle 8y agoAnd where is the github link on the home page, or the pricing page?
- jonesetc 8y agoI poked around the mobile site and couldn't find any of what you're saying. Then I checked non-mobile and there it is up front. So possibly the parent poster was only looking at mobile. For reference the mobile homepage only says "The professional publishing platform"
- 8y ago
- ljoshua 8y ago> 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?
- alex_anglin 8y agohttp://www.piedpiper.com/#company http://www.piedpiper.com/#company ;-)
- pault 8y agoAm I the only one that's disappointed that I can't actually buy pied piper coin?
- justinclift 8y ago> 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?
- erikpukinskis 8y agoI’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.
- justinclift 8y agoYeah, under "Product" sounds workable too. Under marketing just sounds (to me) bizarre. Of all the places to put user docs, marketing is not the right one. :)
- privacypoller 8y agoit can work though - sometimes the evangelist role is under marketing (with lots of cross-pollination); customer success is usually under marketing. Think more post-sale support (keeping customers happy and increasing engagement) vs. sales. I wish more companies focused on marketing to existing, paying customers instead of just new wins. It's (a) easier and (b) has real, long term value over short-term metrics.
- holychiz 8y agoUser docs are customer-facing, and therefore entirely fitting to be under marketing. Of course building the documents requires engineering contribution for technical details.
- 8y ago
- dxxvi 8y agoIt's very impressive that you need only $600k/year. How many people are there in your team (including everybody, not just developers)?
- dev1n 8y agolooks like 8 people total [1]. [1]: https://ghost.org/about/ https://ghost.org/about/
- icebraining 8y agoSeems like they haven't updated that page, since https://blog.ghost.org/year-3/ https://blog.ghost.org/year-3/ mentions 9. Or maybe the ninth person wants to remain... a ghost (ba dum tsh!)
- BrandiATMuhkuh 8y agoI'm sitting next to one of their team members. ~10 people is about right.
- johnonolan 8y agoGood 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.
- scrollaway 8y agoHey, 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 :(
- misterbowfinger 8y ago> How do you pay people if they live in different countries? What about contracts? — The things people ask about most often all have straightforward answers. Really? I just read a comment from the CEO of HashiCorp who has a very different take: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563 Unless all remote employees of Ghost are just contractors...
- johnonolan 8y agoYes they are exactly that. Same with Automattic, Zapier, Buffer - and most of the other big remote companies. In fact, we all use the same set of contracts. They tend to get passed around founders. All 3 of those other companies are USA based, so for anyone in the US they do standard employment contracts - and anyone outside = self employed contractor on a retainer. We're based in Singapore and don't have any staff in Singapore, so effectively everyone is a remote self-employed contractor. Our retainer contract looks a lot like an employment contract, practically speaking, and builds in all the same sorts of provisions as you would expect. We also cover expenses, where applicable, for team members to get independent legal and accounting advice to make sure everything is set up correctly for them. Mr HashiCorp has gone way too far down the rabbit hole, by the sounds of it. It makes sense to set up a subsidiary when you have a larger group of staff in a single location. For instance, Automattic have a subsid in Ireland because they acquired a company there and as a result have a lot of staff based there. But otherwise it doesn't make sense to set up a full blown subsidiary in every country when you're a tiny startup just trying to contract a couple of people.
- misterbowfinger 8y agoThanks for the insight! > In fact, we all use the same set of contracts. They tend to get passed around founders. Care to share? ;)
- shrumm 8y agoseconded! Early days still for our startup but we are also interested in pursuing the remote working route and we are incorporated in Singapore.
- qrv3w 8y agoThanks 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 business and just wanted free support from me.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- neves 8y agoVery sad what the article says about GitHub. Which other changes would be nice to do?
- qrv3w 8y agoI'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-382998197 https://github.com/schollz/find3/issues/66#issuecomment-3829... [2]: https://blog.github.com/2017-05-30-introducing-temporary-interaction-limits/ https://blog.github.com/2017-05-30-introducing-temporary-int...
- ehnto 8y agoMany large open source platforms address this particular issue with paid support plans. You might find that the company you ended up doing work for would be happy to have paid their way. I also find some of the best improvement suggestions come from people using the software in heavy real world use, which tends to be businesses. They have very real pragmatic needs.
- Rotareti 8y ago
- SkyPuncher 8y agoWe 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 platform is very, very easy because of the relatively low risk nature of a blog. Onboarding an infrastructure vendor, like Cloudflare, is very complicated. Making it more complicated is we'd have no interest in actually paying for a Cloudflare service so it's impossible to get resources to complete the vetting process. On top of all of that, last year's Cloudbleed incident cast some real doubt on Cloudflare's security practices and ability to properly protect potentially sensitive data. We will likely eventually self-host so we can get proper SSL support. I'm really disappointed by this since it will be more expensive than paying our Ghost subscription for several years.
- johnonolan 8y agoWe 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 SSL cert provisioned and deployed for them in the background. For business customers who require the use of their own, custom certificates, there a few extra steps but we support that too.
- SkyPuncher 8y agoHeyo. Would you look at that! That must be pretty new? ---- This is great. That was my only complaint with Ghost so far.
- harveynick 8y agoThis is awesome. I've had a todo list item to make SSL work on my site for a while. Today I find out that it magically does work...
- HHalvi 8y agoI 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.
- harveynick 8y agoI think this is what you're looking for: https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost-CLI 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).
- bluehatbrit 8y agoWhen they launched ghost cli with ghost 1.0 I moved over to it a few days after it had launched (small blog, not much readership). It was really easy to move over to it, and updating ghost is a single command. I update it every time there's a feature I want or once every few months. It's not without its issues, but they're being actively worked on and it's improving each time I update the cli as well. I'd recommend it to anyone self hosting a single instance blog.
- untilHellbanned 8y agoThe Ghost website borrows alot from Stripe's.
- iends 8y agoI 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.
- freeman478 8y agoI 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.
- lookingsideways 8y agoFrom 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.
- atomical 8y agoI gave up on the install. So many errors, some of which I found as open issues in their repo.
- amelius 8y agoI am not familiar with Ghost. Isn't it basically Wordpress, but built with modern tools, and with a modern look?
- abritinthebay 8y agoIn the sense that it’s a blogging platform, sure. But that’s about where the similarities end
- jeremiahwv 8y ago> 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.
- ulisesrmzroche 8y agoGhost is looking dated today with those templates and their script tags. Technically speaking, today, I'd rather use Gatsby as a Wordpress front-end.
- augbog 8y agoI feel Ghost is trying to be the ideal replacement for WordPress i.e. you have a lot of engineers who love JavaScript and node but also having a marketing team that wants a blogging platform. I also agree it feels like static site generators are starting to take over (personally think its an awesome direction the web is headed towards for some sites) but not everyone is familiar how to use them so Ghost is another nice alternative.
- ulisesrmzroche 8y agoI remember it used to sell itself as the most modern platform though, but that was back in 2013 or so, perhaps that's why it bugs me.
- davidkuhta 8y agoAfter the cell provider selling location article, this was a much needed encouraging read. Thanks for sharing and good luck Ghost in your next 5 years!
- NicoJuicy 8y agoGhost is already 5 years old... I'm getting old! I remember the first post...
- newsat13 8y agoGhost is great. Would love to see support for LDAP/Oauth.
- tekacs 8y ago> 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!
- me1337 8y agoonly drawback ghost has it doesn't support EL7. and there is documentation only for ubuntu. pretty bad :/
- DRW_ 8y agoI've really appreciated ghost, been using it pretty much since launch in one way or another. Been really cool to see it develop over the years.
- cygned 8y agoI was on board from the beginning! What a great product. Too bad they dropped support for Postgres at some point, otherwise it would still be my platform of choice!
- reilly3000 8y agoI’ve seen a couple comments about this issue, as well as it’s mention in the article. What about Postgres is appealing to the point that it is a deal breaker not to have? Is it familiarity or a specific aspect like scaling or ecosystem?
- cygned 8y agoI prefer Postgres because of its (in my opinion: better) features and my familiarity with it. It wouldn't be a challenge to setup a MySQL/MariaDB database if I wasn't already running a largerish Postgres instance where I want to store my stuff. So the deal breaker here is me not wanting to have two DBMS running on the server.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Giorgi 8y agois Ghost still a thing? I thought they ceased to exist after nobody used it. I guess wordpress beat them in every possible aspect.
- harveynick 8y agoOpenAI are nobody? Square are nobody? Apple are nobody? Interesting... https://ghost.org/customers/ https://ghost.org/customers/
- d989d9d9e9d 8y ago1) We were aware of the rock band named Ghost, so we considered other names such as Whacko Jacko, ABBA and The Snow Goons
- 8fingerlouie 8y agoCongratulations on your 5th aniversary :) I was a backer in the kickstarter campaign, but various "issues" eventually led me to look elsewhere. Ghost is (was?) rather good, but the thing that ultimately sold me on it back on kickstarter was the much hyped dashboard, which never made it. Before Docker it was a pain to manage dependencies and keep everything up to date, but with the official Docker image, things got better - until a flurry of almost daily releases to the 1.x branch made it a chore again. The final nail in the coffin was dropping PostgreSQL support. While it wouldn't be much of an issue if starting on a clean host, with a clean slate, i run all of my other stuff in PostgreSQL, and i much prefer to only administer/backup one DMBS. I'm currently on Hugo, and i really miss the online editing/publishing from Ghost.
- omegote 8y agoI was a Ghost user for ~3 years (from Jan 2014 to the best part of 2016) and eventually switched to WordPress. I loved Ghost minimalism and its usage of Markdown, but there were several issues that made it a no-no. I was kinda sad to let it go actually. I took the time to write to the Ghost support email with my thoughts on the switch and my main issues (namely no categories, lack of i18n, editor live-view performance with many images, no search -- this was middle 2016, maybe they have these features now but they didn't then) They took the trouble of answering my email, I found it rather nice.
- harrisreynolds 8y agoAll I got to say is that Hannah Wolfe is a beast (in a really good way!). Check out her number of commits compared to other contributors: https://chart.ly/github-dashboard/TryGhost/Ghost https://chart.ly/github-dashboard/TryGhost/Ghost Keep up the good work guys!
- guessmyname 8y agoWithout trying to offend… what's the quality of those commits? I have a co-worker who commits 6x more changes than me, everyday, but only because she commits many errors in the morning and have to fix them during the day after multiple code reviews. She often forgets to run the test suite before pushing her changes up. Even after the creation of a Git hook to pre-test the changes after every commit, she still manages to break things when they fall outside the scope of the automated tests. The number of commits mean nothing if the quality is low.
- johnonolan 8y agoGiven that she's the CTO of the company, lead developer of the project, the most senior engineer on the team, literally one of the top JavaScript developers on all of Github - https://github.com/erisds.. https://github.com/erisds... what do you think the answer to that question is? :)
- antigirl 8y agoI signed up for ghost when it was at its kickstarter phase. I was very excited by the promise. A year later there were still long winded discussions taking place on their github issues on how they should tackle responsive images. There were alot of JS hacks around to overcome their missing features. I lost interest over time
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- corinroyal 8y agoI've been rereading this article for days. Thanks so much for taking the time to share the sorts of insights that rarely see light. My company is looking into our options as to what sort of structure would be best. We've considered being a worker-owned cooperative, a B Corporation, an a non-profit. We have the same goals of developing the best products we can an never selling out. I wonder if you had any insight or suggestions on where to learn more about these options and the consequences. What do non-profits offer to funders? Everybody wants equity.