The Ghost team, makers of an open source blogging platform, write about running the company, its revenue, and lessons from building it.
HN links it for candid company posts on revenue and the move to Singapore; commenters defend the team's focus and recommend Ghost for blogging.
Heyo, John from Ghost here. Thanks for the kind words so far about 2.0 — it’s been a hectic few months! Earlier this year I talked about how we were shifting focus from simplicity to power - https://blog.ghost.org/5/ - and this is the first big release since that move. Whereas early versions were extremely opinionated and rigid, we’re now starting to bake in more flexibility and configurability to allow for a more diverse set of use-cases.
Some fun technical details from this release:
- New features require building a routing map for all possible URLs on boot, which is a dramatically heavy operation. We were eventually forced to forgo our traditional ORM layer entirely to get any degree of performance (insert: shock/awe)
- Related: It turns out SQLite3 has a query limit of 999 SQL variables, so we had to implement a recursive query strategy for SQLite only. Wild. Default is MySQL though, which was fine.
- Conquered a pretty spectacular memory leak when running in development as a result of trace-logging promises in Bluebird, which is “a full featured promise library with unmatched performance” — …unless you implicitly enable debug traces
Also: Let me be the first to say that I can’t believe there’s still no Postgres support, which is absolutely outrageous.
On a serious note, thanks for all the support and there are several of us hanging out in the comments if anyone has technical questions which they’re curious about.
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 :).
> We should be praising the companies that take the time (or implement the automated process) to send the rejection letters and not leave us hanging.
Its interesting that there is an article on the front page [0] right now singing the praises of Ghost (ironically named in this case) which does exactly the opposite.
From their careers page [1]:
> Unfortunately due to the volume of submissions that come in whenever we open a position we aren't able to respond to every single application, but if yours is successful - you'll hear back from us within around a week.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17082228
[1] https://blog.ghost.org/infrastructure-engineer/
I'm just suggesting that a service that touches email would benefit from being easier to trust. I never said he should commit to never making money or anything close to that. Like you literally invented that.
In fact I suggested he look into the open source + hosted business model. Ghost seems to be doing alright with it:
https://blog.ghost.org/5/
> It seems like it would be easier for you to just not evaluate new mail clients.
There are plenty of OSS mail clients. I was just looking at RoundCube the other day. It's actually pretty slick as far as traditional email clients go.
https://roundcube.net/
According to the features page:
"You can host it on your laptop, or you can host it on a public server. The code is open, and so is the MIT license."
It's currently not public, so I would imagine at the moment it's all hosted on their servers, but according to their blog[0], they're going public on the 14th of October, meaning it should be self-hostable from then, one would assume.
[0] http://blog.ghost.org/ghost-0-3-1-maintenance-release/
> I would like to continue using the service, but I have no interest in maintaining my account.
Just do "logout"
> Why is account deletion not an option?
Because, each submission & comments posted by you should be stored for historic reason - somebody already bookmark or quote it.
Think, HN has something like "Hemingway Mode"[0], there also related XKCD[1].
[0] https://blog.ghost.org/hemingway-mode/
[1] https://xkcd.com/1540/