What's up everybody? This is Courtland from IndieHackers.com and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process. And on this show I sit down with these Indie Hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same. I'm talking to John O'Nolan, who's
so-ke-smooth voice-ill listening to. John is the founder of Ghost and the last time we spoke, I don't know where you were living. I think you might have still been in South Africa. It was like 2019 and now you're in Grenada, by the way. Yes, Grenada, suddenly most islands in the Caribbean chain. Yeah, you're like the OG digital nomad. You've been living this way your entire life. Everybody else is like trendy, it's like a fad. And you're like, no,
no, no, this is just how I live. I don't have a fixed home address and never well. What was it you were telling me about earlier this year? You told me, because I was actually going to come visit you in Grenada and then now it's all locked down and like my travel plans are ported. But you were like sailing across the Atlantic. So you weren't even necessarily in Grenada. You're just like in the ocean, home address like the middle of
the Atlantic Ocean. So I spent the last 10 years also traveling by plane and then living out of Airbnb's and kind of looking around to hopefully find a country slash area where I might eventually want to buy a house, have a bit more of a base and like various countries in mind for a while. But none of them quite felt right. It was either complicated immigration, complicated tax systems, complicated citizenship or like how you could and could not stay there
or very, very expensive. And so eventually I can change tack and thought, well, what if I buy a house that is not fixed to any one country, but rather can go with me. So I bought a sailboat instead of a house. And now I live on a boat and I'm talking to you right now from a boat floating in a place called Prickly Bay almost southern coast of Grenada. And yeah, this is next version of nomadding for me is floating around the world rather
than flying around the world. How does it feel to like sort of I guess take all of your possessions with you when you travel? Because that's like what living on a boat or living out of a car enables, right? Like wherever you go, that's where you live. You're not ever really in between living places. One thing I really like about travel is it confronts
you with a lot of challenging questions about yourself. And for better or for worse, people find out I think in lots of interesting ways who they really are through the act of travel. And some people like what they find out about themselves. Some people don't like what they find out about themselves, but almost everyone grows from it. And whether you choose to continue doing it or stop doing it is almost not the point. The point is finding out how it makes
you feel and what you learn about yourself in the first place. So I think it's totally unique experience to everyone. And I certainly recommend it, but I wouldn't expect anyone to have an identical experience to anyone else. If that makes sense. Yeah, the identity thing is such a mind trip because like at least like in some regard like my identity is probably American, probably like very tacky, you know, I spent 10 years
living in SF. And it's not until you get out of that and swim in different waters that you really can see where you really were. Like you can't really learn about who you are until you've experienced being a different person, being in a different place, I think. And with you, it's like you've been doing that in your entire life. It's like what is your bedrock? Like what's the core identity of John? When you go to a new place, does
every place seem weird? Is there any place on earth that seems like normal? It's almost exactly the other way around. I think everywhere kind of seems normal. It gets harder and harder to find things that surprise you and find things that are, you know, a culture shock. The first time you go somewhere completely different to a culture that's the opposite of one you've ever been to before. It's that the world is this weird, crazy place with
people and food and stuff in it that I didn't know about, didn't know existed. The more you travel the more that reduces, because there's just less and less novel new things. Equally the internet kind of reduces a lot of that via, you know, the last however many years of BuzzFeed top five, everything in the world lists. So it's getting harder and harder
to be amazed by things. And part of the attraction to me of, you know, being weird and living on a sailboat was being able to sort of re-challenge myself and go to places that are not easy to get to by plane that do not have well-trot and tourist paths with Instagram highlights along the way. But to kind of try and find wild weird places that less people go to again, that's a big part of the appeal. Obviously, it's a little more challenging in the last 18 months
than it might have been otherwise. But yeah, that's part of the ambition. I was on Twitter earlier this year and I think it was Paul Graham who occasionally tweets about advice that he gives to his kids. And he gave his kids some advice that I took to heart. I was like, that's pretty good advice. And he said that if you're going to be competitive, pick one or two things in life to be really competitive about and chill out
and everything else. And I read that and I realized like, oh shit, like I need this advice because I feel like I'm constantly competing and comparing in like every part of my life. Like I'm always seeking this novelty and I need to do things that others haven't done. And so like at the time, like even when it like it came to travel, I would think about
wherever I want to go. And instead of just picking a place to go that like I thought I would have a genuinely good time, I would like try to pick a place that like no one else had been to just so I could be like unique and say like I'm the only one of my friends who's been there. Which is not a not a smart reason. Like who cares? My travel's not supposed to
be this competitive thing. But for some reason, like because of Instagram, because of Twitter, because of Facebook, because of like all my friends and you know people online going all these places, like somehow they like robbed them of their luster to me and they made them seem less interesting if there had already been a ton of people who've snapped photos there and they've already been there. Yeah, I agree with that. All the most meaningful
moments in my life now are the ones that I don't put on the internet. So whether that's friends or family or travel, if it's something I really care about, I'll now go out of my way to keep it offline because that's a different differentiator now, right? It's not everything's offline and we put a few things online and those are the interesting ones. It's exactly
the other way around. Everything's online by default, every part of my my life in terms of work and a lot of friendships and communication is online and the things you keep offline and now the weird special moments that are separate from everything else. And that I think has been healthy for me to interact with or just appreciate those moments differently. When you know you're not thinking about who's going to look at it, who's going to like it, who's going
to make fun of it? Right. You're just having it for the sake of it. Whatever it is. I think that's the perfect way to go about it because that forces you to evaluate whether or not you're doing the same because you want to do it or whether or not you're doing it because you're playing some sort of status game or you're worried about other people think. You know, like if not posting something on the internet, Sunlean makes it lose all
of its luster. And that's probably not something you should be doing. It's clearly not something that you really enjoy doing. The full site of this is I think I'm a paying subscriber to your blog, re-divered. What was the last time you posted? I'm like I'm paying a monthly subscription for this. Where's my updates on John's life? Yeah, I'm doing a really bad
job of organizing that. So I have, I write on it really regularly, but I don't send emails really regularly because the way in which I write on my personal site is it's all over the place. Some areas are about business and I have like a whole section which each post is kind of a chapter that's semi kind of vaguely like a book. And then there's a few random
updates which are like travel things. Then there's some gear guides of just stuff I like, but I've done such a poor job of organizing a cohesive narrative where I can say to people, month to month, like here's what I'm doing. There's something I'm working on. So please don't cancel yet. I'm trying to figure it out. I keep paying you my $8 a month or whatever it is. Yeah, if you dig hard enough, yeah, I've
been adding like 3, 4,000 words a month. But and I keep saying to myself and others, I'm going to do an email update soon where I summarise to everyone all the new stuff
that's on the site. But yeah, the idea of the site was to create basically a pay world personal blog where I could write freely and kind of go back to the golden age of blogging where people just used to write about what was going on in their life stuff they're interested in without this kind of performative side of every blog post needs to get as much traffic
as possible. Therefore, it needs to be very friendly and like can't offend anyone and can't say anything that some people might not like which kind of just dulled and made everything really boring and flat. So putting a little pay world in front of it was my
idea to kind of reclaim a little creative space on the internet. And I would say the verdict so far is mixed because shortly after launching it, quite a few people who I admire and respect to far more successful than me subscribed and became paying customers and that immediately brought back my fears of like, well, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to make a silly joke now because whoever is subscribed and is reading and they're going to become a fool.
But maybe I should probably just lean into that and embrace that's the, I think the thing that the sort of old blogosphere had that you don't have now is like this anonymity, right? When everybody subscribed to things through RSS, you have absolutely no idea who subscribed to your RSS feed. It could be anybody, it could be nobody. I mean, I guess you can get like a number but that's basically it. Whereas now it's like, okay, you see exactly which
email address is a part of your list. You know who that person is and if like you really care about your reputation in that person's eyes and you're suddenly going to have this anxiety or this fear or this minimum quality bar about it becomes essentially performative. And the other, the reverse is true as well, right? Like you, your identity nowadays, one's identity on the internet is so much more, there's so much more attention on whoever is creating
whoever is writing about ideas. I wasn't too sure about the whole pseudonymous. I'm still not sure if that's how you say it, but the idea of having online pseudonyms, I wasn't sure if that was a trend I really understood or thought was going to take off from about
a year ago. Now it's seeming more and more attractive to me to have different identities for different compartments of life and not necessarily have all of them be tied together and linked because I think that again, that opens up the freedom of what you might explore, what you might do. I can tell you right now, if I do another business or another startup
at some point, it will not be under my name. I'm going to do it under, I don't know if I'm going to be a board A or something, but I'm definitely going to try and do it with a completely separate, identity, a completely separate set of concerns, both because it's interesting to try something new in a different format, but also because I think the more customers more users, more revenue, have the more you're deeply aware or I've found I'm deeply aware
of how much to lose, everything just feels more and more risky. Now really, hampers creativity, particularly in the context of coming up with new ideas and ideas that push any sort of boundary that might not occur. I'm talking to a friend about this in the context of finances because I think this applies to lots of different areas in life where when you don't have very much, the world is your oyster. It's all about gaining and exploring and trying new
things. When you're a young broke college kid, you can do whatever you want. And then as you make more money, you're actually gain more reputation or whatever more responsibility, it becomes more of a game of like, how do you not fuck it up? How do you not lose what you've already gotten? And that's got a boring, you know, it's kind of tragic. Like if you look out in the world, for example, and like you look at all these like billionaires,
for example, how many are you really doing cool, interesting things? Like if the occasional Elon Musk is like, I'm going to put a hundred million dollars into this unproven rocket company and hopefully don't lose my entire fortune embarrassingly. But everybody else is like, no, I need to pass down my wealth for generation to generation and preserve what I've gotten because it was so hard to get here and I don't want to lose it. And like that's
its own sort of prison in a way. And I think this idea of pseudonymous accounts, like I've like probably five or six pseudonymous accounts that I've created over the years. And then I've like literally never sent, I've never sent a single tweet or done anything in any of their names. I just get this like little well of inspiration like I want to be anonymous. And then I make it and I come up with a cool avatar and like a persona and then
I just like, I never touch it again. So they're ready for the day where I'm ready for like to do it. But like I haven't actually used it. But that's super freeing to have that and to be able to like create something new and take a big risk and not have people compare what you've done to the reputation that you've already established for yourself. I was talking to you know, body Elon Musk. I was talking to him on Twitter a couple of
weeks ago. I was like, how do you, you know, if you do this thing, how do you, how do you keep it private? Because you know, if I work at Twitter or anyone works at Twitter, you can just go and look at what the email address on the account is and then IP is and deduce a location like they can even analyze your like basically your writing style nowadays. Like there's like AI algorithms like connect people and be like, Oh, this is actually tweeting
exactly similar to this other personal account over here. It's probably the same person. Exactly. So he sent me this very, very long post. I don't know. It was practically Edward Snowden level kind of privacy advice. Very interesting, but very, very, very in depth. It advocated for spending like multiple thousands of dollars coming up with kind of decoy identities and all kinds of stuff. I don't know if I'm that invested, but it was, yeah,
it's interesting. I mean, he invests in all kinds of businesses now. It's funny. He's gone from like a parody account to a real investor and he's still nobody knows you. Yeah, too many followers on Twitter. So it's, I imagine very tempting once you've built up that kind of person that actually take advantage of it and leverage it and try to turn into something. We have a mutual friend who does this. I mean, AJ from Card, he's been
basically anonymous his entire career. And like, I know he lives in Tennessee. Like they've talked to him. I've heard his voice, but like, I don't know who he is. As far as I'm aware, no one else knows who he is. But he's like raising money and running a real internet business that people depend on. Like, he's never been like publicly unmasked. And maybe to some
degree, that means that people just don't care that much. Like they kind of like the mystery and like, you know, maybe one out of like a hundred thousand people is really going to do the work to try to dig up the information and try to find out who this person is. Yeah, I think it depends if there's some reason or motivation for why it would be worth finding out who a person is, right? Like Satoshi Nakamoto, there's a lot of reasons for
why I'm masking that identity would be particularly fascinating to a large group of people. I'm masking AJ. I love AJ. Not that interesting. So the last time we spoke, I think you had just released like Ghost 3.0. This is like late 2019. For people who don't know Ghost is one of the most popular and definitely the most high quality ways to build your own online publication, whether it's a blog or a newsletter
or things like that. Maybe the place to start here is I'm curious, this Ghost has grown. Ghost used to be super easy to describe, right? It was like a WordPress alternative. It's like a better WordPress. It's for blogging. Now Ghost is doing all these cool things. How do you manage to describe your company and what you're doing when it grows to have like five or ten things that it's great at instead of just one?
You definitely have to find new stories to tell. That's for sure. How I describe it now as I say, Ghost is the best way to turn your audience into a business. I think many, many great businesses start from an audience, even ones that are not predominantly content based. That's our core now that we think about. As you said, it evolved from publishing, but we got to a place where we asked what problems does every publisher have and unanimously
the answer was, how do I make a living from this? It was a natural evolution from once the other, but very much now, the business aspects, the commerce aspects of allowing creators to have subscriptions and earn recurring revenue in the same way as businesses have done for a couple of decades now. It has become the heart and soul of Ghost. The reason the thing people are excited about and why they are signing up to try it out.
On one hand, you've got this publishing software and part of Ghost's growth is just continuing to build up the number of people who are using Ghost to publish stuff online. On the other hand, you have this new trend, this new problem of people now are convinced accurately that they can actually make a living online from the stuff that they publish from their audiences. That probably was less true 10 years ago when you were getting started with Ghost. It's
difficult to decide what direction do we go in. Do we go with the shiny new thing that's definitely the future? Or do we keep going with our bread and butter? I have this same problem with Indy Hackers, where it's like, okay, Indy Hackers is a lot of things to a lot of people. It started off being primarily focused on software engineers who want to build SaaS companies. Nowadays, there's a lot more ways to make money online. Do I stick to
say true to my core mission and keep it simple? Do I pivot? Sort of be like a leaf blowing in the wind? If I do that, how do I stop myself from pivoting every year or two? Maybe that's the right answer. You're one of the few people I think you have an equally expansive project or a product. The evolution of Indy Hackers is awesome to watch from the outside as well as every cell phone when you've been gracious enough to ask me to come and hang
out on the inside. I've seen the audience firsthand change and shift from, as you identified, that early kind of hacker SaaS group into now a much more diverse and wide-ranging group. But I think you still have a common core of our common core, is people creating content on the internet who are passionate about that and want to be able to do that and have a
business that allows them to continue to do that. You have a similar core of creative people who are looking to start a business on the internet and find new and creative ways to do that using technology. I think whether that SaaS or something else, the core of doing something with technology on the internet to have an independent business rather than following the startup roller coaster model is still a really, really strong core, even if the versions of that and the expressions of that evolve.
I think we running these companies have to make a lot of decisions about what we believe the future is going to be. To some degree, you can survey your users and say, okay, what are your biggest problems? They can tell you, Andy Hackers, the biggest problems are not having the confidence to get started, not having the time or the money to get started, not knowing what idea to work on, not knowing how to grow their businesses. These are
sort of the perennial problems. But then we have to make bets. For example, personally, I'm not that really into NFTs. A lot of people are super into NFTs and they think it's the future and I'm just like, I don't see it. So it's like, I don't spend a lot of time interviewing people about it and talking about it and adding sections to Andy Hackers
about it. Maybe 10 years from now, I'm an idiot and we missed the boat and there's some new hub on the internet for startup founders and creatives trying to make money and it's not me because essentially NFTs were it. But it goes, it's kind of the same thing with you. Who knows if the creator wave is a blip on the radar? Five years from now, everybody's going to be a no-code creator. No one's going to be writing or all the publications are
going to be bundled up into these big publications that we don't even exist today. Like anything can happen. It feels like things are moving so fast. It's risky to make these bets. It is and I think it's part and parcel. It's the heart and soul of what it means to be an indie hacker to some extent is being forced into making these bets because whereas
funded startups move very quickly using capital, we can't do that. And every bet goes to this, taking whether it was on rethinking our editor and moving something that was much more powerful and dynamic or introducing membership and subscriptions as a different business model. We've had to place that bet so far ahead of the curve, even Node.js choosing that
as a tech stack right at the very beginning. We've had to place that bet so far ahead of everyone else that there was absolutely no certainty that those bets were going to pan out or be correct. And so we started with node in 2013. We started with art. It's kind of brand new dynamic semi block base editor in 2014, 15. We started it on memberships and subscriptions in 2016. Each one of those things took maybe four or five
years to play out. And by the time we had kind of just built each iteration of what that thing was and launched it was just when it was catching on and becoming mainstream. So we launched our editor around the same time as WordPress shifted its editor and medium became wildly popular. We launched memberships and subscriptions I think a month
before or after sub stack suddenly started taking off. So placing those bets really early and not being able to see the future, but kind of guessing what where you think it's going to go is how you compete with funded startups as an idiot. And I believe that really, really strongly is you don't have the advantage of being able to move fast. So you have to have the advantage of looking further ahead and trying to get there because you're going to move
slower. It's going to take more time. But if you place good bets, you'll get there at the same time as the funded competitor who realizes the opportunity much later, but can move much more quickly. And how do you beat the funded competitors at that placing because I mean, theoretically, they have the exact same resources that we, I mean, they could also be prescient. They
could also look ahead and make the right bets in addition to just moving quickly. So what's your framework for thinking about these big decisions that you want to make it ghost? So what I think is important is that to pursue a bet as an indie hacker versus to raise money against a bet as a startup, very different prospects in terms of potential upside and potential downside. So whereas you might say, I think, memberships and subscriptions are
going to be the future in five years time. And I'm going to start working on it today. So that in three or four years time, I'll have something ready to launch. There's not very much downside. It doesn't really, you don't need permission from anyone to place that bet other than yourself and the amount of time you're willing to spend on it. Funded competitors or funded startups typically, they have strings attached to the funding, right?
They need to show their investors and their board that they are placing a reasonable bet based on a market, which is probably going to provide a return on investment. So they, by nature, can't look as far ahead in terms of where they're going to use that capital, where they're going to spend it. So it's just a different set of parameters to operate within. And I thought about this a lot. I really don't think one is at a distinct advantage.
I think you kind of coalesce on the same point, whether you start early or you start later with lots of lots of money to get there faster. But if you're starting from a place of not having funding, you have to be thinking further ahead. That's right. And then how do you win against that? That's a harder problem. But it's a lot of positioning, I think.
I mean, every single one of our competitors that we've had over the years, and we've been compared at various points more or less to WordPress than more medium nowadays, more substack, sometimes Patreon. Every single one of them has had between 130 million and what is WordPress raised now? I think WordPress has raised 1.1 billion. And we started with a $300,000 Kickstarter campaign, you know, and been bootstrapped from there ever since
as a nonprofit and just growing off our own revenue. So we've been wildly outgunned 100% of the time. But we've positioned ourselves differently to others by being open source, by being decentralized, by being independent, by having a rock solid stories tell people, which is we're going to be around in 10 years. We're going to be around in 20 years because
the company can't be sold. They can't go anywhere. The technology can't be shut down. And if you can position yourself with a compelling story in a way that is meaningful and competing in an area where your funded counterparts can't, then I think you have a fighting chance no matter the amount of funding that you're up against. What's the story of Ghost? If I'm sitting down and I'm like, I could choose between all
of these funded competitors. You know, I could be on WordPress or Patreon or Medium or Stack. What is it that differentiates Ghost from being part of that? And the reason I ask is I think there are a lot of people listening who have companies that are going up against these big competitors and they have absolutely no idea what makes them special or makes them different.
There's a few different sides to this. The fundamental one that we organize, the whole company around in the culture around is that we just try to be good, not in the way, not in Google Sense. Don't be evil good, but actually good. So we make technology choices for the long-term for the benefit of everyone, not to make money. We release all of our
code as open source. We structure the company away. It can't be bought or sold. And then that becomes the story that is an interesting one because it typically doesn't resonate with people initially. When you say we're decentralized open source, non-profit, they're
like, okay, I don't understand why that would matter. And what tends to happen is over a longer time span, say three to five years, people will maybe try Ghost, maybe I've done quite work for them and they'll go and use some other competitors products, let's say medium. And then after around about the eighth or ninth pivot of medium where they pull the rock out from absolutely everyone, shut down various sides, kicked people off, changed
the design, thrown in revenue, taken out revenue, done a whole load of her own things. People then start to remember the story that they heard a long time ago of Ghost, which was always independent, always open source, always decentralized. And the meaning then has value to them. And that is a really significant and compelling thing that is about being around for the long run and being trustworthy and reliable for the long run. And in the short run, nobody
values it, but in the long run, almost everyone does. So if you can be around for long enough, then that kind of fulfills itself. I think one of our most ardent competitive advantages is just being around while lots of other people start up and then subsequently shut down again. And the more direct, how do we compete against everyone else at the moment is we have 0% payment fees. So another interesting benefit of choosing different structures and
different things to optimize for is we already have a business model. It's monthly, monthly fees for hosting. We don't need to take a percentage of anyone's payments. We are already profitable before that. So it's very, very easy for us to say, yeah, we can have 0% payment
fees. It doesn't matter like we already have a business model. And so in short term sense, that's quite attractive to people because most other creator platforms, especially the ones that are starting to get popular now have what's often referred to as a graduation
problem, which is it's very easy to get started. You can gain some success. And then as you start to grow and really break in lots of money, and just as the platform starting to make money off you because your payment fees that you're paying to them are meaningful, you look around and you go, hey, I've got leverage. I've got revenue. And now I want a serious technology platform. So I'm going to leave. And I'm going to set up my own website. It's
going to be something which has 0% payment fees. And I've graduated from the starter service to the main service or to the service that I now own and run. So a lot of the time that happens with platforms that have fees baked in and where do people end up very often on an open source decentralized self-host system, much like ghost. So how that applies to others is going to be very different depending on the market, depending on the other competitors
in that market and the structure of the technology. But if you can find different ways to position yourself that is not the same as every other startup out there, then you put yourself in a place where you can compete on a different set of grounds. I think one of the biggest mistakes I see in the hackers make sometimes and I include myself in this because we've made this mistake a lot is to try and compete with funded competitors on their terms.
So for example, if we want to compete with Substack and we started saying Substack is really good at PR, we're going to do PR, we're going to try and get news, we're going to try and get headlines. We'd lose every single time. Substack has a whole load of money raised. They have very high-powered investment investors who have PR people that help them get all those ad placements. I swear Substack could like introduce a new button in their
footer and they would be on the front page of tech crunch. That's the level of how good they are at PR. If we started trying to compete with them on PR, we'd lose every single time. It would be very, very, very foolish. But where we can win is on technology and on engineering because they just don't have a patch on us on that side of things. So the more we focus on our tech is better, our engineering is better, our product is better,
our business model is better. Then the more people listen to us talking about those things and focus on those things instead and those areas are much, much harder for Substack to compete on in no small part because of how quickly they've grown. It's much easier to change a technology product when you have 100 customers versus 1000 customers versus I'm sure they must have over a million users at this point. Suddenly technical debt
becomes very, very challenging to solve. So trying to think of ways in which you can do something different to your competition, why your competition will have a more difficult time matching you, I think is a really useful mental model. Yeah, it's super interesting too because when you talk about medium, for example, it's almost like their funding is like a thorn in their foot. Like the amount of times the medium has been able to pivot and kind of screw over everybody else who was like dependent
on their previous business model is staggering. And they wouldn't be able to do that if they didn't have a ton of money. They would have had to basically figure out how to get one of their first one or two models working. They would have had to have committed to that. And in a way, I think the combination of all of these other fund competitors needing to grow super quickly and needing to do these crazy pivots in order to maintain their growth
should suppose against ghosts which has just been slow, steady, patient, reliable. Ghost has always been here. It's always going to be here and you're not going to have to guess what ghosts is about because you guys have been so consistent. Just like that and
of itself is like a huge differentiator between you and the sort of incumbents. You know, I just got a message today in my Twitter inbox or someone said, Hey, I know you're busy, but like I've got this idea I want to run by you and I'm afraid to post it on Indie Hackers because like somebody else could build it and steal it from me. And then I look at like some of the people I've talked to on the podcast, etc. who like have some of the most successful
Indie companies and you're all going up against these these huge incumbents. I mean, you've got like you said WordPress, sub stack, medium, patreon. These are all hugely funded competitors. I talked to Andre Asimov on the podcast earlier this year. He has a website to help you make websites like he's going up against like webly and wix and square space and webflow and all of these other things that have been here forever and yet he's still able to
make you know, $10, $20,000 a month. And there's all these other big arenas, form builder, software, website builder software, blogging software, helping people with hiring, etc. where I think there is room still and probably always will be room to solve the problem in a different way than the incumbents are solving it and to like do it, you're saying have a different story and stand out and differentiate yourself.
That can be a frustrating message to hear because until you have some tangible experience that you can match that advice to, it can be so frustrating to hear because like how, you know, how do I apply that to what I'm doing is always when I heard these types of stories
in years gone by, I couldn't figure out how to make it apply. So it's, it can be a challenge to translate it into something direct, but I think to your point of someone, you know, being fearful of their idea being stolen and I think about this a lot, there's, you know, there's the old saying that ideas are worth nothing, excutions, worth everything. I actually don't think that's right. I think about this all the time because on the one
hand, it's absolutely right. Like if you, you can post any idea on indie hackers, it doesn't matter if it's the greatest idea that has ever happened. No one's going to steal it. It's just not going to happen because an idea without any execution is worth nothing. But equally, and the thing that gets talked about far less is the best execution ever is
completely meaningless when it's on the wrong idea. The best execution, perfect engineering, the best design products will flounder, will stagnate, will not become a success if it is in, in aid of a goal, which does not inspire people or in aid of a story, which people do not find resonates with them. The magic is when you, you hit the combination of both and there's like a handful of really great examples. If you haven't read the book called hatching
Twitter, I'd strongly recommend that to everyone. And there's a great quote in there by Mark Zuckerberg who describes the Twitter founding team as a bunch of, a bunch of guys in a clown car who crashed into a gold mine because for one of a better description, they fucked up everything that is possible to fuck up along the way in products, in design, in marketing,
in business, in fundraising, in everything. They screwed up, nonstop. And the idea of Twitter was a force that could not be held back because the execution was just enough to carry a critical mass of people wanted and enjoyed using it so much that it just kept going. I think a lot of the time in my past ideas where I've worked really, really hard on something I've thought to myself, the thing I've made is so good. It's so much better
than everything else. Like why is this not succeeding? Why is it not working? And each time in hindsight, the idea wasn't strong enough, no matter how good my execution was, the story behind the idea was not resonating with people enough for it to catch on. And Ghost was the first big change in that trajectory for me. So I wrote a blog post about a half big idea and suddenly it was on the front page of Hacker News, there were 30,000 email
addresses in my sign up form and the story had caught on. And that combined with execution is magic. If you can find that, it's magic. But one or the other without the counterpart, it doesn't work. But you can lose years if you're trying to force. Right. And I think the common wisdom that ideas are worthless comes about because probably
the common failure mode is people thinking that their ideas were so much. And people who haven't, they haven't ridden that manifesto and seen it rise to the top of Hacker News. They have no real proof that their ideas are a good one and yet they still think it is. And then they start investing all this time and money and resources in the building, the perfect product. And you know, a year later they released something that's a total dud
because the idea actually wasn't validated. Like nobody actually cared. And I think with you, what's cool is you have like this perfect combination of like having hit on the right idea before you wrote a single line of code. Like you knew that there was a lot of demand for what you were up to. I think with Andy Hacker's, I had a kind of a similar situation where I didn't have any sort of manifesto. But like I could see people engaging in the
idea behind Andy Hacker's on other websites and being super passionate about it. So I didn't even have to validate the idea on my own. Like people are already doing it. And I think that if you take that and combine that with this long term outlook, like Ghost is a not for profit company. There is no exit plan for you. Like you have to start a company that
you actually want to run for the long term. And I think that when you have that pressure, like it probably convinces you to make better long term decisions, which then make it easier to run your company for the long term. And that gives you this advantage that we were talking about earlier where like people can rely on Ghost. They can count on you being there. And you can sort of learn these lessons over the years. You can catch these trends.
You don't have to start Ghost at the exact perfect right moment in time to capture the creator economy trend or whatever in the newsletter trend, right? You've just been here forever and whatever trend comes about, like you're going to be there for it. That's the really funny thing is if I had gone with what I thought was a good business idea, I probably wouldn't be sitting here talking to you today because I thought Ghost
was a bad idea. I, you know, we would joke. I used to be a contributor to WordPress and we would joke among the other people on the core team, you know, who wants yet another blogging platform like everyone of us at some point came up with the idea of like, oh, let's, you know, start over and really do it right this time. And it was a running joke
like who could possibly want another blogging platform? There were already so many. So I thought it was, it was a bad idea, but it was an idea I couldn't get out of my head. And so I wrote, I wrote that blog post about it and the, the market for one of a better term, the audience educated me that this is actually an idea that resonated with a lot
of people way more than I had expected or anticipated. So it was a lesson in humility as much as anything that's my read of what was a good or bad idea, perhaps wasn't as good as I thought it was. But you're right, the framework based on the structure in terms of decisions that get made is very different. Being an on-profit and never being able to sell a company, I like to say every decision is about creating a company that you're happy to be stuck
with because if you can't sell it, there's no kind of ends that justify the means. There's no kind of what I'm going to do is and I hate it, but you know, maybe one day I'll get acquired and then it'll all be worth it. There's, you guarantee that outcomes not possible. So then like I get three sales emails a week from or sales request emails a week from companies saying, you know, we want to start an enterprise blog and can we have a call
and you can give us a demo and walk our, what is it called? Stupid enterprise companies are requisition team, provisioning team. One of those words, you can walk everyone through it and then send us a PDF procurement. That's the department. Then you can spend about six months haggling over price and then maybe we'll sign up. I get those all the time and it's very, very simple. I'd say, sorry, we don't have a sales team and then I close the ticket.
Because long term, that's not a company I want to be stuck with. I do not want to be doing that. And there's no ends that justify the means. If I spend my time signing up enterprise companies, I'm not going to be happier. My salary is not going to change. The valuation of the company doesn't matter because it's never going to sell. It doesn't make sense. So those decisions that can be very difficult when you're getting started and suddenly
it's a big company, they want to give you lots of money, become very easy. And I've been very grateful to have that framework as it goes to Skono on over the years because it's allowed us to create the type of company that I'm just really, really happy to be stuck with. I've got a team. I'm happy to be stuck with. I've got a product. I'm happy to be stuck with. It's kind of created a perfect thing in terms of what you would want to work on for a long period of time.
If I ever start a new company, I'm going to have a list of these sort of constraints. There's almost arbitrary decisions I can make up front that will force me to make better decisions down the road. One of them will probably be exactly what you have. What if I can never sell this company? What am I going to do if I have to do this for the rest of my life? I'm with hiring. What if I have to actually be friends with the people that I hire?
They can't just be the sort of work of acquaintance, but they have to be people that actually enjoy being around. That would change my hiring decisions. What if I can't ever raise money and I can't live on this borrowed time? I have to fund this business myself. How will that change what I'm building and who I'm selling it to? I think there's a lot of these questions you can ask that force you to probably make much healthier decisions compared to if the
world is your oyster in any decisions possible. You can go in any direction, then it's easier to just make a bunch of bad decisions. People massively underestimate the creative potential of arbitrary constraints. I would encourage everyone to try out arbitrary constraints, whether it's in your daily schedule or in the way in which you're going to go about an idea, like I don't know, I can only use one JavaScript file or one PHP file. It almost
does not matter what it is. Impose upon yourself an arbitrary constraint and watch how creativity suddenly flows from you in ways that you didn't know were possible before. Because the human brain, as it turns out, likes to get out of annoying arbitrary constraints and find ways around, find loopholes in things. It's been a remarkable sort of creativity
for me to just try out constraints. Make things hard for yourself. I mean, a massive amount of ghost was born out of me saying, I am no longer going to try and make a million dollar company. I'm going to try and make a company that goes out of its way to make as little money as possible, but to make a great product. I'll nonprofit structure, like it's never going to sell. Open source will give away all of our intellectual property. Distributed
with an office will just have all the team do whatever they want live anywhere. That's very unremarkable now. It was a little more remarkable in 2012. But those constraints are where so much of the creativity came from for building the products in the business later. And the good thing about constraints is you can choose constraints that are fun and positive for you. If you're just using arbitrary constraints, why not choose constraints
that you're going to like? I have a constraint that I started implementing earlier this year with ND hackers where I said, I'm not allowed to start anything on ND hackers. It's not going to be super fun for me to work on. It has to be fun. And that's just an arbitrary constraint. There's no law in the universe that the most fun stuff is going to be the most effective or successful for ND hackers. But it's an arbitrary constraint that I added.
And a lot of decisions have flowed from that. For this podcast, my entirety of the work I do for this podcast is a couple hours of preparation with my podcast boss, Ari. And then hopping on the call of people like you. And it's great. And I don't do anything else for the podcast. I don't title things. I don't edit things. I don't publish things.
I do zero of the stuff that I don't consider fun because of that constraint. And it turns out that that side effects are actually beneficial, which is that I put more focus into my prep sessions and they're more efficient. And I get spend way more time doing other things that are important and fun to me as well. And so, I mean, if you're a founder, you can say, okay, I have to do a company where I charge a lot per revenue per user because that's
what I want to do. Or I have to talk to people because I'm social and I like talking to people. Or it has to be fun or it has to be outdoors or it has to be something that allows me to work with my hands. And like you can have these constraints and still build a successful company. And no matter what set of constraints you have, like there are examples of people who've done it. And I think with you, we were just talking about this, I think a few
months ago, you have this other arbitrary constraint. I'm not sure why you have it. It might be like a side effect of the fact that you're a nonprofit, but you can't hire more than 50 people, was it? At which point you were very constrained and you have to figure out how you're going to grow and become bigger and better without hiring a single more person than 50. So where does that constraint come from? Yeah, I love that you brought this up because it's something I think more and more about
nowadays. So we're coming up on, I think, 27 people. So more than halfway there and the rate at which we're hiring is increasing. So the kind of 50, 60 numbers, very much on the horizon. It's within sight. And the constraint comes from, I have never worked at a company bigger than that, which didn't have office politics or disconnection from the mission or where things kind of stopped being fun. And from all the people we've hired
over the years, there's a remarkable amount of refugees who were at startups. They passed the 60, 70 person mark things stopped being fun. Middle management came in. The founders sort of left the early team behind and started pursuing growth goals at the cost of people. And everything just sort of like lost what made the journey special around about that point. And there are just so many people who have the exact same story. At a certain point
we said, okay, well, what if we just don't grow bigger than that? We'll just stick, like not bigger than 50-ish, 50-60 somewhere around then. I'm not going to like say be really belligerent about a fixed number. But around that point, what if we just put a line and say, okay, no more. And what will that do? So first of all, the same as what I was talking about earlier, it keeps ghost as a company I'm happy to be stuck with. I want to have a group
of 50 or 60 people where I know every single person. Well, not a large group of strangers who are all just working to a common economic incentive, but a team. We're people who really know each other deeply and meaningfully, which I think you can still achieve around that size. But then what the logical question that follows is, okay, well, what are the goals of the company? Once you have 50 or 60 people and you still have ambition, what do you want?
How do you fulfill whatever goals you have that kind of don't fit into the model of that size of company? And the answer is you have to change your ambition or you have to change the model with which you approach your goals. And so a lot of how I think about ghost now is less about growing one company and more about growing one centralized company more about
growing a large decentralized ecosystem. So whereas many slash most companies will try to grow bigger and absorb smaller companies and kind of be this big blob, consuming more and more of the market to become the holy grail of what everyone wants to become, which
is a monopoly that dominates a market. Kind of think about the opposite. How can we make ghost the product a really strong and stable core and then spin off all the other things for which there is demand from the market, but that we don't have a big enough team to build.
So maybe that's community features or maybe it's video and media that integrates with ghost really well or maybe there's an enterprise hosting option of people who do love to get those emails from large companies with a big procurement process and close those deals. If we can have our smaller team make a tight core that enables lots of businesses to exist around ghost and around that open source core, then an ecosystem will evolve around it
of multiple economic dependence. And it will probably function similarly to a large company except that I won't control all of it. And that's actually very appealing to me. I don't want to control all of it. I don't want to have the final say in how everything should
evolve. So as we kind of get closer and close to that size, I start thinking more and more about how can we decentralize features, how can we decentralize the architecture of products and how can we decentralize the market to be able to create opportunities for other
businesses to exist within ghost. And that's one of the things I'm most excited about at the moment is we have this two-sided ecosystem evolving where we have on the one hand creators that are starting to use ghost now to build subscription businesses and are already today making more money per year from ghost than ghost makes itself, which is
wild and exciting. But on the flip side, we're starting to see that market fuel the opposite end of developers and experts, which in the early stages is kind of coming in the form of theme developers and integration developers. But you're already starting to see people create companies like a comment platform for ghost is doing pretty well called cove comments by Dan Rowden. And there's a handful of other small hosting companies that are popping
up for ghost. And the more of these that pop up and become successful, the more excited I am about what could be possible for the future of ghost. I think about this a lot with Andy Hackers to you because Andy Hackers is really just like, we're three full-time people now. It's me, my brother, and then we have an engineer at Stripe. And then beyond that, we have a budget tire from contractors and stuff to help
out. But like, we have a very small core team. And so it's very similar constraint to like, well, how do we build this thing and get like you were saying, like some of the benefits that big companies have without like the downsides of having to manage a ton of people and jump through a bunch of hoops, have a bunch of paperwork and like all the things that just make it not that fun anymore to run a really big company. And I think
that that like forces some creativity on your part. And it's for the best because at the end, I think it's like totally achievable goal. Like with Andy Hackers, what that means is basically empowering community members and volunteers. Like we can have hundreds of meetups around the world every month. And I don't have to let the finger even know what's happening at the meetups because other people want to do this for their own sake.
Sort of their incentives are aligned to do it. And I imagine it goes to it's kind of the same thing. Exactly. And that's it's a much more exciting prospect to me to enable hundreds, if not thousands of independent businesses that are thriving ecosystem versus create one enormous, mega-monarchal company that controls everything. That they're just not even comparable goals to me. That one is fundamentally not interesting and the other one is incredibly exciting.
And I think it's less brittle too. Like I was just reading a post by Casey Newn who's like a famed journalist who went and he on the substach this year. And he was talking about how much less brittle it feels where you know at a bigger publication, just one month of you know, one quarter of like you know bad ad revenue could cost reporters their jobs.
Whereas with him, he has so many subscribers that it's so unrealistic for his business to tank like so many tens of thousands of people would have to like simultaneously decide that they don't like him anymore for that to happen. And like that's just a place of relative comfort. And I think that's also true when you don't have everything under this model of like entity and instead you have an ecosystem. Absolutely.
What's your advice? I always end the podcast with the same question. What's your advice for fludging indie hackers now or in the middle of 2021, the creator economy is in full swing. It's no longer just a buzz term, a buzz word, but like people are actually making living in publications on the internet. And yet all the old stuff still works. People
are still starting new SaaS businesses. People are still making a killing in crypto. People are still you know making new podcasts that are successful and popular despite the fact that these right we're in this new world. I think we're just there's more ways to make money on the internet and make living on the internet than ever. What's your advice for somebody who's listening to this and they have no idea what they want to do and they're just getting started?
I'll give you two answers to this. A bias one and an unbiased one. And I believe both of them holds equal amount of merit. The the bias answer is I think the creator economy and the subscription business model outside of software holds an unbelievable amount of
potential for the next decade that's coming up. And it's opening up the doors to people to be able to benefit from the subscription business model recurring revenue who don't need to learn how to or ever have the ability to code because it can turn content as a service into a business in the same way that we had software as a service. And I'm all in on that concept. So I'm heavily invested in it myself in right seeing that future
become a reality. And I wouldn't be unless I thought there was there's some real merit to it. You're not seeing the explosion of things like Ghost and Substac and Patreon all at the same time because there's nothing happening there. And unlike crypto the value
is extraordinarily tangible. It's creating businesses around audiences in a symbiotic relationship with publishers that I hope will also eventually put the trust back in journalism when a journalist's eventually circle around to figuring out that publishing content to serve audiences rather than get them to click on ads is a much better model for journalism
and people as a whole. So I think there's tons and tons of opportunities there and it's such a low risk low cost business to try out if you're just getting started you're not sure where to go. The other fringe benefit of it is establishing an audience and growing an audience is the single highest leverage thing you can do for starting any other type
of business down the line. There's a great quote in the stripe book called the The High Growth Handbook which has stories of how lots of big companies grew very, very quickly. And I can't remove the exact quote but the sentiment of it is about how most companies think that their advantage is in building products and they have product visionaries and they could create any product they wanted and sell it into any market and be very,
very good at it because product is their strength. But fundamentally what most companies get wrong is that products isn't their strength at all. Their strength is having an existing market that they have carved out a foothold within and can sell products too. And stripe
is a great example of this. They have a captive audience of entrepreneurs on the internet and so they sold payments and then later they added stripe atlas because entrepreneurs typically want to incorporate companies and then recurring billing and then capital. And do you see stripe strength that they are executing on is not coming up with lots of different products that are very good for lots of different market sectors but rather
selling different things to the same audience over and over again. So if you can establish and grow an audience of people who are interested in what you do and respect what you say that pays off over the long run again and again and again because every single time you do something new and you need to launch if you have a captive audience you have a massive advantage over anyone with a great idea just shouting into the ether.
Peter is great at. He's a huge audience with no mad list. Did you know mad looks to him for the future and technology around that and then he's just built product after product after product to the same audience. And what remote okay I think makes millions of dollars a year and that's just a job board that he launched the audience he already has. Single PHP file. Creative constraint. So I would say there's tons of opportunity for paid newsletters websites courses all
that kind of stuff. If you want to have a good start with it check out ghosts but yes this is a very biased answer. My unbiased answer I think as always to everyone would be one just start. Stop fucking reading articles about inspiration and how to succeed and the lean startup handbook just start making stuff you'll learn faster you'll go further even if everything you do flops and fails you'll progress much more quickly by doing that.
And I'll add a little flavor to that of the best ideas don't need the best execution to succeed they just need the minimum amount of execution to succeed and there's a handful of products that are around right now I sub stacks a great example and actually respect
them a lot for this if you try and use sub stacks a day the experience is dreadful it is fucking awful my god that product is bad if you sign up for it there's buttons all over the place half of the check boxes don't make sense and there's like a thousand
of them but people are going nuts for sub stacks there has the minimum amount of execution for a very good idea presented very simply so I would say try and build more stuff more quickly at a lower quality than you think you need to succeed and if you have the right idea and you're able to create something that people buy into the story of that is the best possible starting point you can have. Love it. John O'Neill and thanks for coming
on the show. Can you let listeners know where they can go and more about what you're up to with Ghost and what you're up to in your personal life as well with Rediverge?
Definitely you can find all my links personal newsletter and things that I'm doing personally on Twitter at John O'Neill and for Ghost check out Ghost.org that'll tell you everything the product does and how you can create a wonderful thriving content business within the great economy yourself which you can and should do not a sales pitch. Alright, later John. Cheers.