
Interview with John O'Nolan of Ghost - riqbal
https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/ghost
======
gchp
> What's your advice for indie hackers who are just starting out?

> Honestly my single piece of advice would probably be to stop looking for so
> much advice. Shut the fuck up and go and build something.

I like this. I see a lot of people, and I fall victim to this myself, over
analysing the best way to do X, rather than just trying it and learing /
adapting as you go. I think there is some value in figuring things out up
front, but not at the cost of never taking the plunge.

~~~
notheguyouthink
The little success i have in life is largely due to this exact model. I have
home-built so many big grandiose apps and solved many problems learning them
myself. I didn't make any hits, hell i didn't even finish half of them, but i
largely solved a lot of problems myself, figuring and learning.

Now (for better or worse) i think i'm at the stage where i need to actually
improve and deploy them fully. Learn maintenance, learn upkeep, maybe even
learn some minor advertising and metrics.

Self taught experience has been so insanely valuable. Value derived from
pain.. but still value.

~~~
gchp
Yeah I think at the start there is a lot of value in just starting, perhaps
without even finishing. It's that stage of just getting over the first hurdle
and getting into it.

That's fine for a while but then as you say you get to the place where you
have to finish. I think this can be almost as big of a hurdle as starting as
it can involve a whole host of new challenges, some of which you've mentioned
above.

Finishing is also, in my opinion, typically not as exciting. You've likely
already solved all the intersting problems and are left with the "lesser"
tasks involved in getting it over the line. This is something I've been
learning myself over the past year or two.

------
felixrieseberg
Hi, I'm one of the volunteer core devs on Ghost

The company is a non-profit that supports journalism and professional
publishing. Everything is open-sourced. I'm leading the work on the Desktop
App ([https://github.com/tryghost/Ghost-
Desktop](https://github.com/tryghost/Ghost-Desktop)), but all projects
(server, admin interface, etc) can always use more love.

If your company allows you to donate some time to non-profits and you think
that democratized journalism is important, consider helping us out

~~~
matart
I am interested and have the cycles. What issues should be started with?

~~~
felixrieseberg
Neat! To avoid being sucked into anything too big, you might want to check out
the "good first" issues on the Desktop App
([https://github.com/tryghost/ghost-
desktop/issues?q=is%3Aopen...](https://github.com/tryghost/ghost-
desktop/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Agood-first)) or the beginner
ones on the heart of it all
([https://github.com/tryghost/ghost/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Ais...](https://github.com/tryghost/ghost/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Abeginner)).

------
iends
I've never understood the pricing of ghost. I started a personal blog and my
first post got almost 50k uniques when it got to the top of /r/programming and
the front page of hacker news.

So the pricing model of ghost is problematic because:

1) I don't know what level of plan to buy to support this kind of traffic.

2) $19/mo seems really expensive for a personal blog. (and wouldn't support my
traffic load)

3) A $5 instance at DO handled the load really well with room to spare and
conservatively took about an hour to setup.

So, I guess I'm not their target customer? I want to pay around $10/mo for a
hosted blog and support like 500k uniques. There are some wordpress hosts that
handle this level of traffic at this price point I think.

~~~
mattferderer
Their pricing didn't make sense for what I wanted either. I wanted to set up
two very low traffic blogs that may some day get real traffic. So as any
developer would do, I spent much more money when considering my billing rate
per hour in making my own version.

I have a couple Ghost blogs set up with Docker, Let's Encrypt SSL & NGINX that
run on AWS. It works great for me but I haven't taken the time to open source
it yet because I very slightly modified the Ghost code to play nicer on AWS.
I'm also using the SQLite database which may not be ideal for everyone but it
prevents me from having to pay to use multiple "real" databases from AWS.

The perks are that it is really quick & easy to add multiple blog sites. Each
one lives in its own Docker container. It's also very fast on the AWS free
tier. Since it's on Docker, I can boot it up anywhere very quickly as well.

If anyone is interested in working with me on improving it, I'll gladly push
it to a public GitHub repo.

~~~
iends
I'd take a look. I'm curious about what you tweaked to the code?

~~~
mattferderer
I originally put this on GitHub when I started. Then I ended up doing a bunch
of work & hosting it on BitBucket to a private repo while I was learning
Docker & Ghost. I was trying to prevent any accidental leaks of secret keys or
passwords. This linked repo has my Ghost changes in it.

I added ghost-storage-adapter-s3 to package.json so that the files would be
stored on s3 instead.

I think the only other change to Ghost I made is purely optional & was done
out of my taste. That was to remove the date directory appended to file
uploads. [https://github.com/mattferderer/ghost-
blog/commit/7d373913a5...](https://github.com/mattferderer/ghost-
blog/commit/7d373913a5c239f8bbd7f4abfe84a81dddcc9bc2) I understand why they
did that, I just didn't like it. It may have also caused issues with my AWS S3
but I can't remember.

------
ianstormtaylor
It's weird that a company as well known as Ghost has a site that feels like a
wholesale copy of Stripe's old design.

I don't know how I feel about it, slightly negative probably. I think Stripe
does a lot of stuff really well, and it makes sense to copy many of the things
they do, mostly from the UX and information design aspects. But to copy the
branding itself seems like it defeats the point, because it makes Ghost feel
cheaper.

Check out the Wayback Machine...

\- Ghost 2017: [https://ghost.org/features/](https://ghost.org/features/)

\- Stripe 2016:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160304012926/https://stripe.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160304012926/https://stripe.com/us/features)
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013548/https://stripe.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013548/https://stripe.com/relay)
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160304014557/https://stripe.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160304014557/https://stripe.com/subscriptions)

I normally wouldn't have commented on this, but I just saw the "Scale API"
startup's site yesterday and noticed that they too were doing a wholesale copy
of not just Stripe's information design, but their branding too...

\- Scale 2017: [https://www.scaleapi.com/](https://www.scaleapi.com/)

\- Stripe 2017: [https://stripe.com/radar](https://stripe.com/radar)
[https://stripe.com/](https://stripe.com/)

It doesn't seem like a smart approach to take, but maybe it works.

~~~
wwalser
Besides the gradient background I'm not really seeing it on the ghost site. On
the Scale site I see what you're saying. This comment does bring to mind
something I heard a while back.

What web developers say to you when they see something you made with
bootstrap: "Another bootstrap site."

What everyone else says when they see the same thing: "I didn't know you were
good at design."

------
vickychijwani
I've been using Ghost since v0.6, 2 years ago, and I love the community.
They're quite helpful on Slack.

One thing I think Ghost is missing right now is a solid mobile experience. I'm
working to fill this gap with Quill [1], a native Android app for Ghost with
an offline mode, image uploads, full Ghost Markdown support, and a sweet
design. And it's open-source :)

Offline support in particular is IMO going to turn out to be an important
feature, because I can imagine Ghost's target audience of journalists wanting
to publish quick thoughts from places with a spotty connection. Admittedly I
haven't actually validated this - building offline support presents an
interesting engg+UX challenge, so that was the original motivator.

Feedback has been really positive so far [2], so I'm gonna keep going! Would
love to get feedback from HN as well.

[1]:
[https://github.com/vickychijwani/quill/](https://github.com/vickychijwani/quill/)

[2]: [https://github.com/vickychijwani/quill/wiki/What-users-
say](https://github.com/vickychijwani/quill/wiki/What-users-say)

~~~
dchuk
Are you aware of this library in a very similar space?
[https://github.com/quilljs/quill](https://github.com/quilljs/quill)

Not trying to put you down, just want to make sure you are aware of the
potential naming conflict (both things are for authoring content) in case that
creates a legal headache for you one day.

~~~
vickychijwani
Yes - I only found out about it after I had my app out there with a feather
logo and everything.

However I don't think it will cause big issues, as quilljs is a JS library,
while Quill (the app) is targeted directly at Ghost's users who will largely
(presumably) be journalists. The slight name confusion within dev circles is
something we'll just have to live with.

------
scalesolved
I used to self host Ghost on Digital Ocean and then switched over to their
hosted offering.

I'm really happy I went with them, the culture and idea behind the company
appeals to me and the lack of bells and whistles is made up for in a really
simple and fun to use editing experience. At least in my opinion it far
outshines Medium.

~~~
fusiongyro
I went in the other direction because their personal plan went from $5 (IIRC)
to $20. I have a $5 droplet hosting it and the only difference is that I have
to restart Ghost nightly or it will eventually seize up.

Honestly I don't know why I'm using it though. I probably should be using
Jekyl or something like that.

~~~
ylk
Did you try adding a swap partition? I'm using the ghost image from digital
ocean on a 5$ instance and even when I set it up manually before I didn't have
the problem you described.

~~~
fusiongyro
I didn't, but I'm not sure my constitution will withstand setting up a swap
partition for a system that could be replaced by make and a trivial HTTP
server.

------
cridenour
> The other one was that we started out on hardware servers. This was right at
> the early stage of cloud VPS services catching on and becoming mainstream,
> and we were just behind the curve. It was an expensive mistake.

I wouldn't think 2013 was early stage of cloud VPS services - but maybe I
don't have a good enough memory of the time.

~~~
johnonolan
It wasn't, technically, but it was in terms of mainstream availability.
Digital Ocean started around the same time as us, for reference. So it cloud
VPS was just starting to become the popular option, but it was still far from
being the obvious default option.

The other reason we went with hardware that I didn't mention was that we
wanted to cram a whole lot (thousands) of node apps onto every server and we
figured being on a bare metal setup would be an advantage to optimising that.
(In practice: Not really, as it turns out!)

------
audleman
The founder thought he had hit upon a real need in the world, but put that the
test before starting development. How many people only figure this out two
years down the road and thousands of dev-hours wasted?

> I wrote down my thoughts in a blog post, and about 1 week and 250,000
> pageviews later, I decided to start working on the idea properly.

> The next question was: Would they also open their wallets? For this, we went
> to Kickstarter. If we could get enough validation for people to actually
> fund the development of the software to a production-ready state, then we
> knew we would be on to something.

I love that his demo for kickstarter was 50% mockups. Truly an MVP.

------
koonsolo
His first "idea" blog post seemed to have 250,000 pageviews in 1 week, which
is quite impressive. I wonder where that inflow came from.

~~~
johnonolan
It was from right here, on this very website, the news of hackers

------
eugenekolo2
I really like ghost. It's very simple, and straight forward. I've built a
couple of websites based on it now, and wrote my own themes. I'm not sure I'd
pay for it, but as an open source self-host project, it's pretty great.

------
diminoten
Is it just me or was Ghost at one point a "Show HN"?

I remember playing with a minimalist blogging platform in Node.JS at one point
a couple of years ago, but honestly that could be one of a dozen or so
projects.

------
donjh
I set up Ghost on a DO droplet the other day. Even opting to manually install
it rather than use the Ghost on Ubuntu image, installation and setup was a
breeze.

------
scancmdr
I found the ghost pro product to be very well done. Nice clean and simple
interface with only the knobs and buttons needed. Everything worked 100%. It
is well worth the $20/month for a company blog.

I'm currently hosting my own ghost blog and its just as great, just takes more
attention to operate it.

The DNS configuration doesn't yet support my provider. I believe they're on
cloudflare (!)

------
caycep
Hm, I never realized ghost was non-profit....

------
cdnsteve
" I had about 30,000 people on a mailing list," This, so much of this.

~~~
csallen
People underestimate how significant a huge mailing list can be!

------
mtgx
Is there a serious Wordpress/Ghost alternative written in Go yet?

~~~
Curiositry
There’s a lightweight clone written in Go, Journey [1], which uses Ghost
themes. It got a fair amount of attention at one point, but development
doesn’t look very active at the moment.

[1]: [https://github.com/kabukky/journey](https://github.com/kabukky/journey)

------
simonebrunozzi
Well, interesting:

> Initially I got a ton of offers for development help from people on Hacker
> News, which materialized to precisely nothing.

------
molly0
I was experienceing really poor SEO results for my previous ghost site (self
hosted on digital ocean). Never understood why...

~~~
netinstructions
I migrated from Wordpress to Ghost (using some sort of provided Ghost tool)
and my site started getting way more hits from search engines.

I'm guessing it's because the ghost site was noticeably faster and was mobile
friendly, which my old WordPress site was not. I didn't do any SEO tuning or
anything.

~~~
type0
> I migrated from Wordpress to Ghost (using some sort of provided Ghost tool)
> ...

More people should do this. Recent security issues of WP is kinda horrific,
but then again it always been a security nightmare. It makes me sad that
people don't realize it, the only answer you get is: " but it's so popular so
it must be good", well smoking has also been popular - it doesn't mean it's
good for you.

------
Jazcash
I don't have much to say, except that I've been using Ghost for a while and
love it.

------
ChicagoDave
$20/month? Seriously? No thanks.

~~~
choxi
Why does that feel like too much? Just curious how you're thinking about the
pricing.

~~~
ChicagoDave
I guess if I was a journalist, it might not be bad price, but I'm just a
casual blogger. I currently host my own Wordpress site and keep it up to date
myself. As the other reply to your comment mentioned, we're pretty technical
here on HN and Ghost is probably something we can hack together on our own.

Even so, for the casual blogger, $5/month is probably the max.

~~~
curuinor
He notes right there that super price sensitive people are actually more
demanding and more annoying than less price sensitive folks.

------
huskyr
The headline is a bit misleading, i thought a subscription is $62,000 per
month, which is a bit steep :)

~~~
remx
According to their pricing[1] their lowest price is $19.00/mo. Assuming the
bulk of their customers are on this price band it's roughly 3000 paying
customers, paying each month.

[1] [https://ghost.org/pricing/](https://ghost.org/pricing/)

~~~
rdudek
What the, didn't this used to be a lot cheaper?

~~~
remx
I cant recall it being cheaper than $10.00/mo. If you're looking for something
cheaper than ghost there is Posthaven[1]. I'm not affiliated with Posthaven in
any way, I just wanted to offer an alternative if anyone is looking.

[1] [https://posthaven.com](https://posthaven.com)

------
dreamfactory2
> (1) old, unfocused open-source platforms which are tired and broken, or (2)
> new, amazing publishing systems which are completely proprietary and closed

Nothing against Ghost, but I've spent about a decade in the area of content
management and publishing and don't recognise 1 or 2. The proprietary market
leader is AEM which is atrocious to actually implement once you get past their
sales demos, and in open source you have Drupal which is a well proven
solution for large and small scale publishing, particularly relevant with
Drupal 8 and its publishing focused distro Thunder (both particularly adept at
services and deployment, tricky areas in publishing)

~~~
type0
I like Drupal but I would not advise anyone to start a new project on it. Not
in a world where we have Django CMS and Wagtail.

