Rethinking Open Source w/ John O'Nolan of Ghost

I'm kind of backtracking my choices as of late, but, a fantastic publishing platform. When I went from WordPress to ghost to run a particular newsletter that I have called the podcast setup, I was like, man, this is great. And the one thing that pulled me back. Into WordPress, which is ironic to say was gravity forms. I'm now an employee full disclosure. I'm an employee at gravity forms, but at the time I wasn't, and I was like, I just need some automation form features from gravity forms.

And I just need when people sign up to do an interview, I need it to do things on the site. And that's what brought me back to WordPress. But I had a fantastic time. using ghost. I thought it was great. Promise not. This is not just a full on ad for ghost, but how do you wrestle with like looking at WordPress and the ecosystem that it has developed?

This is a big question that the ecosystem that it has developed with third party add ons like, like gravity forms, like the theme ecosystem, like so many other integrations. How do you wrestle with that as a, an open source CMS founder?

Sometimes update servers that you may or may not have access to all those things. and I think different platforms have different answers depending on. Should have different answers depending on what they're trying to do. WordPress is, what I would call a generalized CMS. You can kind of decide what you want to build with it and it can become that. It can morph into an e commerce platform or a real estate directory listing or a blog or a business website.

And the extensibility allows you to fulfill those different use cases. So it's absolutely critical that you kind of have this really deep set of, capabilities that plugins can hook into. What we do with Ghostus is in many ways kind of the opposite. it, we focused in on a single set of use cases, which is publishing and publishing Professionally, effectively. And so we try and take all of the things for those sets of workflows and just build them natively into core.

So the way we kind of think about extensibility is it's just quite different. If there's something that everyone's asking for, it kind of should be in core. And if there's a longer tail set of things people are trying to do. Then usually we try and do that via an integration with a product that lives outside of core, usually by API.

or in some cases, it's just really indicative that you're trying to do something that the product wasn't designed for, and there might be better capability or better other options out there that have the capabilities you need.

Is that same kind of educational and onboarding structure available to, for folks coming from the WordPress world or like, Hey, I'm looking for new opportunity. How can I do it here?

probably the best way to try it out is simply to kick the tires. you can sign up on ghost. org for a free trial, no obligation. We will not be automatically charged at the end of it. And, have a fully managed instance spun up working and get a sense of, of how things work. Have a look at the theme layer, have a look at the integrations layer. ghost theme labs. Modeled after WordPress. So if you are a WordPress theme developer familiar with, you know, all of the hooks and functions and

data outputs that you would normally use there, it's going to feel fairly familiar, there's a couple of concepts, which are different. But the syntax is not a million miles away from what you're most likely already used to.

if you wanted to do integrations or, kind of more powerful things with Ghost, then you're kind of looking at interacting with an API and you do that with whatever you're most comfortable with. That could be PHP, it could be JavaScript, anything you like. But most people don't need to know what Node. js is unless they're trying to self host, and then you kind of have to run it and install things. But for most developers, pretty straightforward.

showing me the data and the information that is important to that business, which was email subscribers, revenue, you know, I had a small like, you know, donation slash sponsorship thing going on with that. and it was clean. There was nothing distracting me. from the work I needed to get done when I logged into my go site versus my WordPress site where I'm like, Oh damn, there's another banner that's popping up.

you know, there's a, an update notification yelling at me like, God, didn't I just update all these plugins? Right. And I've been doing this now for nearly 20 years. Like I should be used to it by now, but it was still sort of like this drain on my energy every time I log in. and that was, fantastic. So how do you balance, Hmm. This is a tough one. How do you balance.

What customers want and what let's say the ghost community wants and can you address what the ghost community looks like because we say WordPress community it means a lot to us us in the WordPress world It means you know developers designers giving back to this ecosystem helping people and a lot of us the reason why we're struggling with this recent incident is that we all felt like we've been building WordPress now for nearly 20 years. And we always felt like we had a say in the direction.

There's what the customers wanted and there's what we wanted or want. And that's a, that's a tough line to balance. So how do you approach like what your end users want and what the community wants and what does that look like from your perspective?

I think the, the job of, the core team as we see it is to listen to as many inputs as possible and then make good decisions about which to, which requests and things to follow, and which to discard. And sometimes that looks like, features, which are. The most aligned with the product and the core audience, the core target users that we're trying to attract.

sometimes it's the things we're most excited about, but all of the time, it's trying to make sure that the platform stays true to what it says it is. that is something that has always been kind of deeply important to me. And, yeah, so it's, it's really a mix of inputs. There's not like a clean answer, but it, it always starts with, with listening to what people are saying and taking into account all the different perspectives, all the different ways in which people are using it.

Like, what's your position on like impacting the web, impacting the open web? What, what, what are your thoughts on, of course, like the pie of, of the internet. How much of the slice are you trying to get? Oh,

so Ghost is a, a not for profit organization, single. Nonprofit foundation. There's no other companies, you know, with venture funding or other motivations. it's just one nonprofit foundation and our goal, with lots of goals, but one of them is to never grow to more than 50 people in headcount around, around 50 people might not be exactly that number, but around, around that mark and the point.

In my eyes or how I think about the future is not to try and grow the biggest company possible, or to try and capture as much value of the web as possible. And certainly not to try and capture a percentage of, the web's total market share, but to grow an ecosystem, which a core team, in the structure of a nonprofit foundation is able to support. And in my mind, that looks like.

Lots of different companies doing well, not one giant company, you know, making the majority of the money and controlling how everything works, but really more of a chaotic, some in some ways, chaotic, decentralized ecosystem. I think of it as, you know, like a city, you might have lots of shops, lots of houses, lots of different businesses. The. The goal of leading a good city is to create infrastructure that can allow a diverse set of people to thrive within it.

not to control everything and to own everything and to buy up everything and to, turn it into some dystopian nightmare. So we're trying to really do

the biggest possible thing with the smallest possible team and make it work. enough revenue to sustain, to make what we do possible. But, but not more than that in, in business terms. And, usually when I say this, people get very confused. Why not? Why don't you want more? and the answer to that, I mean, has been underscored quite a lot in the last few weeks is the web, not exclusive to WordPress. The web has been driven by a lot of greed and a lot of very wealthy people. And I don't think.

That we've had the best, that we can have from the web and from humanity more broadly. From having power be concentrated in, single platforms or single individuals. I think, a long tail of small businesses, small platforms, small websites, that's what I want to see more of. And so in many ways, I'm just with Ghost, we're trying to make more of what we want to see more of.

I can understand that task alone is stressful and could lead to some real wacky decisions, outbursts and comments. Is that 50 to stopgap, that growth and that unruliness that could happen in an organization?

There's a lot of hard problems you have to solve along the way, but there are also a lot of easy things that you can not step in along the way. And I think the things we've seen within the WordPress community in the last three weeks have not been representative of the hard problems of running a 1700 person company. They have been some of the one on one basics of things you don't do, whether you are a freelancer, a one person company or a two person company.

and that's, that's the thing that I've found a bit disappointing, but the stop gap that you were kind of alluring to in our context is less about, I think companies get on by definition, get unruly at scale. And, that's something I. I'm worried about it's more, it doesn't seem like fun to me. My idea of a good time is not having eight layers of management and, not knowing anyone's name. My idea of fun is honestly, hearkens back to my WordPress contribution days where I would show up on IRC.

I would chat shit with a bunch of the other contributors and we would make cool stuff together. And at the end of the day or the month or whatever it was, we would release stuff that I, sitting on a laptop in a pair of 2 shorts on a beach in the Philippines, had written with no status, no money, no clout, and it would get released to hundreds of millions of people.

That's my idea of a good time, having a tight knit team of people doing really cool stuff at a scale that doesn't make sense just because of the amazingness of open source and how far and wide it goes. So I simply don't want to run a company more than 50 people, because I think that's the point at which you start to lose that. And we have a lot of team members who've come from, startups that grew past that point.

And they all kind of have the same story, which is like, it was great at the beginning. It's really fun. We were doing all this cool stuff. Amen. Around 60, 70, 100 people, it started to break down. New leads of management were acquired, the priorities changed, it didn't feel the same anymore. It just doesn't sound like fun to me. So there's a selfish goal in there of, you know, with Ghost being a non profit, I don't stand to sell it one day or, Make a shitload of money off it.

So it has to be something I enjoy. It has to be something that I'm fully invested in that feels like something I could do for a long time. Cause if it's just a slog, for the sake of scale, there's nothing to it. So keeping it small, keeping it focused is a creative constraint we've chosen. And what's fun about choosing constraints is. invariably you have to try and get around them, right? You've got this constraint. What are we going to do with it? We've only got 50 people.

Well, that changes what's possible with the product. It changes with what's possible of what portion of the market you serve, what type of market that is. It changes all kinds of things that then, there's an amazing amount of creativity that comes from those and trying to figure them out. so I'm, I'm a huge fan of, of creative constraints of any kind. And this is just one of us.

What happens if, what's the bus factor for John O'Nolan? If there's no John O'Nolan, what happens to Ghost and the, the non profit side of the house illustrate how that works is a lot of us are kind of worried about our own plumbing in WordPress.

you cannot have a venture backed arm on the one hand, a nonprofit foundation on the other and a dot org website on the third or controlled by the same person, even though they have conflicting priorities and expect everything to be smooth sailing, it was always going to be a matter of when, not if this happened, The amusing thing is that all these conflicts, were what inspired a lot of ideas for Ghost of how not to do that.

I was very bought into the idea of democratizing publishing when I was working on WordPress and that still means a lot to me. And the conflicts of interest around kind of all the positioning that goes on behind the scenes, was not what I was excited about at all. So a lot of the ideas for Ghost were based on what would an open source product that's trying to just democratize publishing look like if it lived up to its ideals.

Now, I don't know if we've succeeded in that, but the angle we came up with was an attempt at trying to answer that question. So Ghost is a single nonprofit foundation and that nonprofit foundation sells a managed hosting service, which we modeled after WP Engine. It seemed like WP Engine had a great business model. You had the full power of WordPress, but you didn't have to worry about servers. Whereas by comparison, as you'll remember, WordPress.

com was not used by anyone who knew anything about WordPress. These days you can do themes and plugins, but for a very long time you had no option to run themes or plugins. So in my mind, I wanted to have the simplicity of a nonprofit organization to steward the open source project.

The business model of WP Engine to fund that open source project and the transparency and integrity of what an open source project should be, which is to have no outside influences or ulterior motives that come whether you want them or not, the second you take venture capital. And. So far so good. You know, we're 11, 11, 12 years in now. we are at seven and a half million dollars a year in revenue and we were profitable from the very first year.

There were enough people that kind of believed in that model. Although there were many more who didn't quite understand what was the point? Why do you need this weird nonprofit model? And, if anything, I think the last few weeks have, I've drawn attention to why it can be a good idea.

Ha, ha,

And that requires just simply moving quickly. one of the things I see often is, you know, people coming out with a big manifesto and a big governance structure before they've built a product, which is the wrong way around of doing things. Cause people aren't buying your governance structure.

They're buying your products, but when, why people stick around, Often when something gets popular or large is if it does have a good governance structure, which allows it to persist without inadvertently decimating itself at some point. And so as Ghost gets bigger, my intention, and I'm going to write a bit more about this soon, is to have, the board of trustees grow to have independently appointed, people that we have selected, but also to have, board seats that are elected by the community.

And I think that's going to. It's going to be interesting figuring out, what are the different constituencies within that community? How long should a board seat work? But equally, there's some great reference material out there, you know? Rails has a foundation that seems to work pretty well. Drupal has a foundation, with, with elected board seats that seems to work pretty well.

There are all kinds of organizations outside of software development and direct open source that have, collaborative board seats that oversee the larger direction of a nonprofit foundation, and that's, that's really That's exactly where, I want, I want to stand up. The buffs factor of me should eventually be zero. I do not want to be a benevolent dictator for life. I honestly, I think BDFL stuff is the dumbest idea alive. it was coined, I don't know if you know this already, you probably do.

It was coined by the creator of Python who said it as a throwaway line, as a joke, that he was a benevolent dictator for life, not as a serious thing. And then for some reason.

A whole bunch of people latched onto it and what bothers me about benevolent dictator for life Is that the word benevolent is doing way too much work in that sentence If you just said dictator for life in any other context, we would universally agree that that's a bad idea and when you have a A mission of democratizing publishing that it just doesn't feel like it makes sense So no my my intent I currently have a bus factor of 50 percent of the foundation.

I would like to reduce that to zero I plan to not be in charge of, of Ghost for Life. I plan to very much not be even in control of Ghost for Life. I don't, at the very least, I don't own any of the assets. I don't own anything to do with it personally. Every single thing is owned by the foundation. So in that sense, the bus factory has already reduced the domain, the trademarks, all those things. those are already not mine. I have no financial or legal claim to them.

I feel like there always needs to be like this grand visionary and one person who is leading that project. Real cutting edge decision making in an organization in the WordPress world. it, it's always felt like, Oh, we all have some choice, right? Don't we, don't we have some, some choice in this direction? And it's seemingly getting more obvious that, you know, all this, all roads lead back to Matt, right. And, and, and that decision making, how do you balance your grand vision for the platform.

For your platform, Ghost, and how are decisions made in, in your world? Are, are you the, the leading decision maker, innovator, and like, you're setting the, the, the five to ten year roadmap, and, and sure, people can have their sort of say in it, but largely you're 90, 95 percent of the visionary behind Ghost?

new ideas started, new products made to have someone who is deranged enough to believe they can change the world or whatever the correct version of that quote is. And I do think great products by and large are made, by individuals, certainly not by committees. think that the staying power of a company or, or an organization. Has to, at some point transcend one individual and, you know, to pick up on a couple of the examples you mentioned that Apple continue to thrive after Steve Jobs.

Now we can argue about whether or not they still make good products and whether there's the right person calling product shots there. And I would tend to say the answer to that is no. But the organization has outlasted because it was able to transcend. It was able to evolve after the founder was no longer around. Microsoft's, another great example, because we have, we have three axes to it. You have Bill Gates who got it going, had the big vision.

You have Steve Ballmer who by all accounts made Microsoft flounder, but had the organization become very profitable, which is kind of what Tim Cook's doing now, and now we have Satya Nadella who's come in and okay. We now have big visionary ideas coming out of Microsoft. We have for a few years now, Microsoft is doing some of the most impressive hardware, software, investment, and acquisitions of any large tech company.

And it is a visionary individual with big ideas, making decisions, but it's not the founder. So to the extent that I think you, you need one person. making big shots in order to do big things. I think that's true. I think I agree with that. Does it have to be one person for life or, the original founder of the company? I don't think so. in the context of ghosts, that's currently me. Yes, I am that person. I make those decisions. I think I do an okay job.

Although some would look at the size of ghosts as compared to WordPress and say, I've not done a good job and that's okay, but I don't intend for it to be me forever. I also don't intend for it to someday be a committee. I think you need one leader with clear ideas. I think the key difference that. I really hope WordPress ends up at, and certainly where I want us to end up at, is if you're going to democratize publishing, then that person should be democratically

elected somehow. There should be some ability for the broader community to decide who that leader is, and then trust them to make good decisions and vote whether or not they are. without that, It is just a dictatorship, not a dictatorship in the sexy good way. If there is one of those, just a textbook dictatorship and history shows that, they usually all end the same way.

It starts at 11 bucks a month for 500 subscribers, 500 of your own subscribers to your email list or members as you call them. 11 31 63 to 49. This is monthly pricing and then there's yearly discount. Folks might say, well, If there's never a chance for outside funding, or maybe there is, I don't know, I'll let you highlight that. why not ask for a donation? you know, hey, Ghost is open source. we also need to survive and maybe hosting isn't going to carry us all the way.

What are your thoughts on like that long term sustainability that goes outside of the pricing page? Hmm.

If you never write a single pull request, but you use our hosting, you're directly funding the nonprofit foundation that makes this possible. And that's not a coincidence. the idea of this business model was exactly that was to make it so that the users of the products are the people who are investing in the future of the product. We have tried having like a donation button or mentioning it on the site.

I think we found much the same, thing as the WordPress foundation has found, which is you don't get very many donations. people, for the most part, don't donate to things like tech companies and tech products. It just doesn't, that's not a thing that happens. And I had in my head that, when Go started, I was like, Oh, maybe You know, Google will give us a bunch of money. Like they give Mozilla, these grand ideas of philanthropy that hasn't panned out either.

So making the hosting model work, making sure that we have enough margins to run the business has been super important. but it also hasn't been very complicated. I think when I think about what could be other ways that we would make, the organization, you more financially successful or to kind of have other revenue streams. There's a lot of options, but they all kind of hinge on incentives.

something that I think has been missing in the WordPress space is why should anyone contribute 5 percent back? What are they getting in return? Because if it's just a kind of give me 5 percent or I'll go nuclear, it's just not a very good incentive, but there's lots of other projects that have done this better. And we're not one of them because we haven't tried this yet.

But if you look at Laravel, you know, they have a sponsors section and for, I think it's thousands of dollars per month, you can, sponsor the Laravel. community, the open source project, and you will get a prominent partners page on the website listed as an official partner, recognizing what you do, marketing your services if required. So it seems like the price point would be pretty high if WordPress did something similar.

It seems like if there was something you got in return for financially contributing to the WordPress project, Then you're selling a product. but if you're just saying, give us money and we're not giving you anything back, yeah, that's a harder sell. It's a harder sell, for

really anyone, but particularly for a software product that you can't see, you know, you have to come up with something, I think.

For instance, you might say, I built this page builder. It's actually helping people use wordpress. I'm getting paid, let's say 200 bucks a year for it. Therefore, I'm contributing to WordPress. Where do you stand on that? I see that. I'll frame it, and I'll give you a second to think about it. I think of it as, well, you're contributing to, let's say, the greater ecosystem of WordPress, right? Users and other businesses kind of benefit from you building this product.

But you're not contributing to open source WordPress. Like, you're not contributing to the core of WordPress, which impacts WordPress. All millions of people who use WordPress, you're contributing to the ecosystem, which helps maybe, let's say, a hundred thousand people in the ecosystem use WordPress better. That's the way I see it. Where do you draw the line between, I'm contributing by making a product, or I'm contributing by committing lines of open source code?

If the answer to that is no, then it follows that the people who have created. Those themes and plugins have been in part responsible for the growth and the success of WordPress. And if that's true, then they have contributed in my mind, they've contributed a lot, regardless of whether or not they make money from the things they've worked on. You should be allowed to make a business that no one should forbid you from doing that.

so those, those contributions I think are completely valid and it's not an impossible thing to measure. It's yes, it's a hard thing to measure, but you know, again, Drupal, Does this pretty well. They have a really clear framework for how contributions are measured and what things are included. It's self reported, but there's oversight. There's a clear decision making framework around what things are and are not recognized.

And they've created incentives around, what it means to be a contributor and how you're recognized as, you know, being a maker or a takers as Dries put it. So. There's ways to do it, but I think every participant in an ecosystem is contributing to that ecosystem. Is there another definition of, of contribution, which is purely about core and evolving the core platform? Sure. but you know what, I'm not sure. I'm not sure if that should be entirely volunteer. Based all the time.

I remember when I, you know, I was never paid to contribute to WordPress. And I remember it was almost a dirty word to consider like, being paid to contribute to open source, almost like it should be purely altruistic and we should all just collaborate because then the thing gets better and we all benefit from it and that's a lovely idea. But in the meantime, The rest of the web is moving forward without us.

And as Morten has pointed out on more than one occasion, there's a lot of people contributing meaningfully to WordPress who are struggling to put food on their table. and the idea of bug bounties or paying open source contributors is kind of, Ooh. No, we can't talk about that, but this is, this should be everyone volunteering and working together. And I think maybe this is just a, maybe a controversial opinion. I think maybe we're at the end of the road for that ideology of open source.

I think maybe

open source projects need to generate revenue and they need to pay their contributors. And in doing so create an incentive for people to contribute. I don't know what that looks like. I don't even know if that's right, but that's kind of where I'm leaning. after. Two decades of doing this,

you know, plenty of integrations, check it out. Don't, don't just listen to me about my bias to gravity forms. There are a ton of integrations there, in, in the platform. And again, if you're doing a newsletter and especially monetizing a the dashboard, the, the data that it surfaces for your, publishing business is great. But, I am plagued, you know, I've been addicted to the power user like page building experience in WordPress.

And that's, that's the part that is also like tying me to WordPress. Like, I just need to, I just need to Can I add another column here? Can I make category pages? Can I do this in a browser? Cause I don't know a lick of code for any of this stuff. it's a powerful drug and it does have me hooked, but ghost is fantastic. And check out the themes that are available. because maybe it'll make, make your life easier. it did. It does. It does. For me, it did for me. And then.

Yeah, I got hooked on that automations thing that I needed. Ghost. org. Check it out, John. Fantastic conversation. Thanks for hanging out today.

And, I think it was in 2012, Dries encouraged everyone to simply go out into the world and look at other open source projects, look at other products, see what you could learn from them. And so, you know, I don't want anyone to come and use Ghost and leave WordPress. But I would love everyone who uses WordPress to try Ghost and see what they think and, tell us where we could improve. there's, it's a good thing that we have a diversity of platforms. It should not be.

large proportion of the web all on the exact same thing. Let's have lots of different options.