
Ghost: $411k Annual Revenue with a team of 6 - edpichler
http://blog.ghost.org/april-2015-update/
======
corford
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
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 :).

------
colemorrison
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.

~~~
rodgerd
> 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.

~~~
rmc
People only use 20% of the features of an app. The problem is that everyone
uses a different 20%.

~~~
coldtea
Sounds good but it's not true.

Most people use the same basic features -- let's say they use 18% of same
stuff, and 2% of more unique to them features.

The rise of "lightweight" apps that tons of people use has proven that taking
out the bloat is possible for most people (e.g. casual users can work with
Pixelmator or Acorn just fine, don't need Photoshop).

~~~
jakejake
Totally depends on the particular software and the market it serves. Mass
market stuff I think lends well to simplified designs.

Vertical market software tends to have very specific requirements which are
unfortunately not agreed upon by all of the big players in the industry. So
you can simplify it, but if your software doesn't support X, Y and Z then you
can't sign Corporation Foo. And you start getting feature requests (er, orders
some might say) from your bigger clients who are paying for thousands of
subscriptions/licenses. But Corporation Bar doesn't like that - so it has to
go in as an option/preference. Repeat this process for about 5 years and you
have what appears to be a bloated piece of software.

------
mintplant
This is from April 2015. Latest figures are here:

[http://blog.ghost.org/august-2015-update/](http://blog.ghost.org/august-2015-update/)

~~~
jpatokal
Better yet, live stats are here:
[https://ghost.baremetrics.com](https://ghost.baremetrics.com)

------
cthalupa
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.

~~~
ionwake
Coincidentally , this week, I made a post on how to setup your Ghost on AWS ,
including all the gotchas.

[https://twitter.com/craftfortress/status/635555503905603585](https://twitter.com/craftfortress/status/635555503905603585)

Unlike you (with respect to your opinion), I found it to be absolutely
perfect. I am surprised they don't make more revenue.

EDIT> Just to add more information regarding how Ghost stacks up against other
free alternatives for Blogging Coders:

Jekyll

I tried Jekyll with skeleton. Very easy installation onto github, and the fact
username.github.com automatically links to your blog is great. The downside is
ofcourse you have to install a them for it to be usable, and perhaps for many
, having your blog edits in your official github account, may not be perfect.

Medium

I also tried medium but I did not like:

1) The constant modals asking you to log in

2) The fact Medium posts are automatically negatively ranked by HN

~~~
ohitsdom
Just an FYI, you don't have to use Jekyll with github. The integration seems
convenient, but I run it on its own to build my static site (blog) on my own
domain.

~~~
KAdot
You can use your own domain with GitHub Pages
[https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-
domain-...](https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-with-
github-pages/).

~~~
ohitsdom
Wasn't suggesting otherwise, just trying to be clear that you can (and I do)
use Jekyll on its own to build a site.

------
Animats
$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
Holy entitlement batman! I'm sure there are plenty of people toiling away at
startups making less than this!

~~~
sk5t
Aren't those other startups _also_ not healthy businesses? Where does
entitlement come into the picture?

~~~
cpncrunch
It depends what your definition of "healthy" is.

------
codinghorror
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) )

------
martin-adams
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
Does anyone know how that compares to other services?

~~~
aculver
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 .

------
luckydata
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
>the features that got people excited got cut pretty much right away //

Could you, or anyone else, expand on this point - what features particularly?

~~~
cthalupa
The dashboard was one of the biggest selling points.

[https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/000/511/606/53cb7cffa27c89a...](https://ksr-
ugc.imgix.net/assets/000/511/606/53cb7cffa27c89a43bc91b40f604f7e2_original.jpg?v=1365807289&w=680&fit=max&auto=format&q=92&s=589b58b93da4ba8f96ddef9d9c1483b8)

>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.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
I run Ghost self-hosted, and have been pretty happy with it. If you watch the
progress on the next big release ("Zelda") you can see that the dashboard is
floating around in there, e.g.
[https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=da...](https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=dashboard&type=Code)

------
ChuckMcM
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!

------
jasonkester
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
Huge win except each would be doing 3x the work or more. That's not
sustainable, speaking from experience.

------
tacone
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/)

------
kenshiro_o
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...

------
johnward
$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
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
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?

~~~
fweespeech
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.

------
mettamage
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).

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

~~~
coldtea
Maybe everyone doesn't act with great strategies and achieving things in mind?
Maybe they just want to be transparent and share their journey?

~~~
TomGullen
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
They raised money through Kickstarter, so they should answer and report to
their stakeholders and have the obligation to update them with the
progress/challenges they're facing/seeing in their venture.

~~~
macintux
Stakeholders? Did Kickstarter suddenly change its spots?

~~~
coldtea
No, he obviously means the backers who have a stake in the thing they backed.
Doesn't have to be a legal stake.

------
jokoon
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.

------
juddlyon
This post is from back in April (2015).

------
arahaya
has someone made a php clone yet?

~~~
dspillett
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
Ghost in go already exists:
[https://kabukky.github.io/journey/](https://kabukky.github.io/journey/)

and is my preferred blog platform.

------
notNow
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.

~~~
tjsix
Even if the project delivered absolutely everything promised, and more, it's
highly unlikely that it could gain enough adoption to challenge WordPress in
any meaningful way. This is primarily due to being built on Node. One of the
primary reasons WordPress is as popular as it is, is that you can install it
on every single hosting provider out there and many of them provide a one-
click or automated installation option. Very few hosting providers, or at
least the shared and 'cheap' hosting providers have the ability to install
Node and even fewer come with it pre-installed. The simple fact is that your
average person that wants a website or blog will not have the knowledge or
want, to go through getting all of that set up when using something like
WordPress is as simple as clicking a button. Providers like Digital Ocean, are
simply not a feasible option, or would even be considered by most non-
technical people looking to build a blog/site.

~~~
notNow
I don't see why it would be difficult for hosting providers to adopt Node on
their servers. They're already doing this offering VPS and the likes.

Also, I don't see why there wouldn't be a viable Node blogging platform that
could be as user-friendly and as easy as WP if not much more. This definitely
is very doable and Ghost and Co promised to achieve to do that but they failed
yet to make any meaningful impact on the market.

~~~
tjsix
They probably could, but it's more likely that the demand isn't enough to
justify building out the required infrastructure and services to make things
work properly in a shared hosting environment.

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

~~~
coderjames
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
Profit tells you how much they can afford to expand in future, regardless of
whether they are a for-profit or non-profit.

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

