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.
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/), their gross starting salaries were 4500 $ per person (18k for 4 people). Warm word of advice, spend time in other cultures :).
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> Edit: Looks like ghost has 38 direct dependencies in NPM, of which many have their own dependencies, etc.
That's awesome! There's so much bad JavaScript around where someone writes their own case insensitive sort() function, or their own state machine, or scrapes wikipedia for ISO codes or currencies rather than using country-data.
It looks like ghost is working on the parts that actual deliver value to their users and letting common, well maintained projects do the common stuff.
I've been working on a lot of node stuff and lately I've been noticing how crazy big some of the dependency trees end up becoming. So I just did a quick check on ghost: currently there are 487 total dependencies in the dep tree when you do an `npm install ghost`
To be fair, there is some overlap. For example, "debug", a fairly common package, is included in various parts of the tree 8 times, though there are 3 distinct versions being used.
(Keep in mind these numbers are not including dev dependencies. If we add those in, the tree balloons to over 1,400 dependencies!)
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
> 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.
They've proven that they've got a crank that takes in money (labour) and puts out money. The question is whether the ratio is good enough or if the right kind of investor can help improve that ratio.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is actually a decent first time rebill success rate. With a consumer website we see similar if not a bit worse. Recurring billing with consumers can be tricky - lots of fraud and expired cards leads to declines, which means often times you have to re-sell your value to the customer to get them to update said card.
Bigger B2B is a different beast, if you are a core piece of someones business they will not let you expire.
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.
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!
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.
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...
$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.
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).
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.
Not a clone, I've been developing a blogging platform with the same basic feature sets called CiiMS [1] since 2011, which is written in PHP. Unlike Ghost however, CiiMS has a working API, comprehensive documentation [2], and a dashboard. We also offer our own hosting as well [3].
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.
[+] [-] corford|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
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/), their gross starting salaries were 4500 $ per person (18k for 4 people). Warm word of advice, spend time in other cultures :).
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] forrestthewoods|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scalesolved|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colemorrison|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rodgerd|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shubhamjain|10 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] mintplant|10 years ago|reply
http://blog.ghost.org/august-2015-update/
[+] [-] jpatokal|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cthalupa|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nailer|10 years ago|reply
That's awesome! There's so much bad JavaScript around where someone writes their own case insensitive sort() function, or their own state machine, or scrapes wikipedia for ISO codes or currencies rather than using country-data.
It looks like ghost is working on the parts that actual deliver value to their users and letting common, well maintained projects do the common stuff.
[+] [-] drifkin|10 years ago|reply
To be fair, there is some overlap. For example, "debug", a fairly common package, is included in various parts of the tree 8 times, though there are 3 distinct versions being used.
(Keep in mind these numbers are not including dev dependencies. If we add those in, the tree balloons to over 1,400 dependencies!)
[+] [-] ionwake|10 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] rodgerd|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cheez|10 years ago|reply
1. Encourage investors to reach out 2. Marketing
They've proven that they've got a crank that takes in money (labour) and puts out money. The question is whether the ratio is good enough or if the right kind of investor can help improve that ratio.
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
Don't quit your day job.
[+] [-] jsonne|10 years ago|reply
So realistically, probably something like ~40k per employee is more accurate. That's not much for a developer.
[+] [-] brc|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rabbidruster|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codinghorror|10 years ago|reply
( Also the quoted number is from April here is the latest https://ghost.baremetrics.com )
[+] [-] martin-adams|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cullenking|10 years ago|reply
Bigger B2B is a different beast, if you are a core piece of someones business they will not let you expire.
[+] [-] benmanns|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikmobi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luckydata|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
Could you, or anyone else, expand on this point - what features particularly?
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonkester|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tacone|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kenshiro_o|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fweespeech|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mettamage|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] TomGullen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokoon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juddlyon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arahaya|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charlesportwood|10 years ago|reply
[1] https://github.com/charlesportwoodii/ciims [2] https://docs.ciims.io [3] https://www.ciims.io
[+] [-] dspillett|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danappelxx|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notNow|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] talmand|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corford|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foopants|10 years ago|reply
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