Breakout Startups PRO #22- Ghost
The non-profit organisation building open source technology for journalism
Hi,
Welcome back to Breakout Startups Pro. Today, I am writing about one of the startups that I am fascinated by, Ghost, the open-source publishing platform that provides its users with powerful tools to create online publications.
About
Launched in 2013 by John Nolan, the primary motivation behind starting Ghost was to create a modern alternative to Wordpress.
In 2012, John noted that WordPress was evolving more towards the site builder space. Not only this, there were also a number of other problems with WordPress in terms of the technology getting a little old. He then decided to build Ghost envisioning how WordPress look like if you rebuilt it for the modern-day and age with modern technology and a focus on publishers only.
You can read more about this in his inaugural post here:-
https://web.archive.org/web/20131215144152/http://john.onolan.org/project-ghost/
Motivation
Talking about the motivation for starting Ghost in a Stratechery Interview, John says,
I used to be a core contributor to WordPress and that’s where I really got my roots in open source and particularly building products and doing design in open source. What I noticed back in 2012 was that WordPress was evolving more towards the site builder space, but my interest has always been very closely in the publishing space. There are also a number of other problems with WordPress in terms of the technology getting a little old, it looks a little tired, and at the time I had an idea of what would WordPress look like if you rebuilt it for the modern day and age with modern technology and a focus on publishers only.
I wrote that vision up in a blog post which led to a Kickstarter campaign in 2013 that raised just over $300,000, ten times its funding target — the idea resonated with a lot of people. The big difference was that we built the platform in Node.js rather than PHP, it had beautiful design from the start, was heavily focused on writing and publishing, not just generic website building, and the business model has been one that is focused on sustainability and independence.
Product
Ghost offers two products:-
CMS- Ghost is one of most popular open-source headless Node.js CMS which comes with a default admin client and front-end, but one can also swap them out with their own JAMstack. It claims to be 19x faster than Wordpress.
Membership Software- Ghost also provides a tool that enables creators to build an audience with paid subscriptions. So, with Ghost membership software, a creator can get what Substack is charging ten percent for or Memberful is charging five percent for completely for free.
This comes with a modern publishing software that enables creators to distribute their content on every platform everywhere. Along with this, the tool integrates with every platform ranging from Stripe to Shopify allowing anyone to offer their users/subscribers a host of services.
Growth
Since its launch in 2013 with a Kickstarter campaign, the company has gained a commendable market share.
In fact, the company has clocked more than 2M Installs to date. In fact, last week only, 5,631 new sites were made with Ghost by people who publish content for work.
You can view the full statistics here👇
Ghost is one of the many companies out there to have adopted the open-core model. One peculiar advantage of building an open-source company is that you can attract an incredible community of open source contributors from all over the world who graciously volunteer their time and their code to the project.
Ghost has been able to attract incredibly talented developers which align with its mission and has more than 32000 GitHub Stars to its name.
Competiton
There are too many CMS tools available in the market.
Some of them are:-
Drupal
Joomla
Magento
ModX
Squarespace
Wix
Weebly
Wordpress
Despite this, Ghost has been able to make a mark in the product with its open-source approach to building a CMS.
Here are some of the companies that Ghost highlights that it is competing against.
Future Direction of the Company
Building a CMS that works is just the start for the company.
Next up, Ghost is working on subscription and payment tools to enable entirely new publishing business models - and we're growing the team with people to help us figure out how to do it.
You can read about it here👉 https://ghost.org/members/
Over here, the company is directly competing with Substack(the platform on which this newsletter is written) & Memberful. The USP for the product is that it will not be charging any commission from the its users unlike other players.
Customers
The platform enables its users to access a multi-user blog and invite other team members to get involved in writing about the areas they specialise in.
Funding
Ghost has raised no external amount of funding.
To date, Ghost has made $5,000,000+ in customer revenue whilst maintaining complete independence and giving away 0% of the business.
Team
John O’Nolan- Co-Founder & CEO at Ghost, Previously: Head of Design at Wordpress
Hannah Wolfe- Co-Founder & CTO at Ghost, Previously: Senior Developer at Moo.com
Jobs at Ghost
Awesome