Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased
Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased
086 - Open source, open heart: Ghost’s John O’Nolan secret (spicy) sauce
Join Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit (CEO @ MarsBased) and John O’Nolan, founder of Ghost, as they delve into the world of independent, values-driven tech businesses. They discuss Ghost’s foundational structure, the role of transparency and bootstrapping in shaping the company, and how these principles impact product development and user loyalty. The conversation also touches on the challenges of competing with heavily funded competitors, the nuances of running a foundation, and the future of newsletter platforms.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur or a tech enthusiast, this episode offers deep insights into aligning business with core values.
Also, hot takes with hot salsas 🔥
🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/
Hello everybody. I'm Alex, founder of MarsBased, and in this episode we bring you John O'Nolan from Ghost, a company behind the popular open source newsletter and blogging platform that we have used here and there at Marsbase. I have used extensively as my personal website over the years. My founder to founder newsletter nowadays is built on Ghost. Ghost and with John we discussed many things that we have got in common as a company the transparency, the core values, remote work, bootstrapping, but also some particularities they've got. They are a foundation. It's a kind of company that cannot be sold. They will not be able to take the usual investment that other companies might be entitled to. We speak about the future. We also talk about their technological stack and we dive a little bit deep into the technical intricacies of their product, particularly regarding rewrites, technical depth and so on. And the question of the day for this episode will be what newsletter platform do you use for your company?
John O'Nolan:At.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:MarsBased. We're considering switching over from MailChimp to something else, and your answers will be particularly helpful, and so, without further ado, let's jump right into this episode. Good, I think this is recording. You don't look very nervous. How are you doing?
John O'Nolan:John, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me seems like you're used to this.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Not my first podcast, but I'm sure it will be the best you look more of a professional podcast recorder than I do, so it seems like you're very used to this. I think it's part of the remote setup, right?
John O'Nolan:yeah, that's right. After a while you get used to setup right. Yeah, that's right. After a while you get used to trying to have a nice setup and making video calls feel good.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I wish my team could hear this so that they also bought the nice cameras and mics and they don't have to be using these setups that introduce a lot of echo into the calls and stuff like that Good. I have so many questions. I've been using Ghost for 10 years, on and off. I have to say that my journey has been interesting with the platform. I remember trying it too early, but more recently I have rediscovered it as a personal user. I recreated my website Every two years. I've got this thing where I rebuilt my personal website with a different framework and I was eager to do it with ghost this time around. I have to say there's something in it that gave me the wow impression every step of the way. I think you guys nail it, and so here goes my gratitude and my you know I'm super impressed by it.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:How much of this is affected by the fact that you're a bootstrap company, independent company, and that you can take however long it takes to polish all the details.
John O'Nolan:Well, I think it is affected by us being a bootstraps company, but not necessarily because we can take all the time to polish the details. You know we have a lot of competitors, pretty big ones I think the smallest has $50 million of funding and the largest has $1.1 billion of funding and people, as in end users, don't particularly care if we're bootstrapped and independent. They just want to use the best product right. So if we took all the time in the world to just polish everything and make it perfect, we simply wouldn't be able to keep up with the expectations that people have from products like Ghost. But that said, I think being independent and bootstrapped allows us to have more focus, allows us to optimize for different things, allows us to take different strategic moves than we might otherwise if we had investors who were pushing for growth targets Exactly.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I take it that companies like Basecamp, ghost, buffer you know that you're more well known for being highly opinionated, bootstrapped or semi-bootstrapped. You can take more time to policies, and I know you're right. I grant you that you don't have all the time in the world. However, you are aware of a subset of users that they will buy your product, whatever it takes they don't really care about. Maybe there's a better competitor, maybe there's a cheaper alternative, but I will buy your product because of your values, your vision, and I'm totally aligned with your product. For instance, in our company values, your vision and I'm totally aligned with your product.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Like, for instance, in our company MarsBased. We created the company because we read the books of Basecamp and so for 10 years we were paying for that product and we knew there was better software out there. But we said, like, thanks to Rails, thanks to Basecamp, we're here and now right. So it took really long for us to kind of like, get rid of Basecamp when it was, you know, unavoidable that we had to use other products. But I find myself using products because I really believe in the vision, right? So have you calculated how much of a percentage of your user base is this fanatical user base that will pay for your product.
John O'Nolan:you know, whatever you do, or not really Haven't calculated the percentage. I think that might be quite difficult to do. There's definitely some people who are very passionate about Ghost based on structure and values, and that's a really important part of how we do things. I think the killer combination, though, is if you can combine the two. If you can have great structure and values as well as a great product, I think then you're really onto something right. I think of products outside or companies outside of the tech space with things like this right. So, like Patagonia is the classic example, people are aligned with their values. People buy Patagonia stuff because of their values, but if they made crappy t-shirts that fell apart after a while, then it wouldn't be what it is today. It's the quality and the care that goes into the product, combined with the values. That, I think, is where the magic can happen, if you get it right, exactly, you mentioned it.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:You created a brand, and one of the things about creating a brand is people will follow it more strongly than anything else. People will be or a user base will be less volatile, if you will, but that doesn't happen on day one. That doesn't happen on day 10. Are you aware of the day where that happened, when you made the click and you started getting it right, everything you made, and you started attracting this subset of users, the cult-like users that we were talking about before? Are you aware of the precise moment or movement you did in the company that kind of, like you know, turned the direction of the company into the right way?
John O'Nolan:Yeah, I think Ghosts is an unusual case where it did happen on day one, and that's actually to do with the origin story of the company, which kind of started as just this blog post pitch of what I wanted to exist in the world and the values that I thought it should have, and so the values for the company existed before the product, before the company, they existed as an idea and a concept that I put out into the world, and so it was actually that that captured people's attention as much as the idea for the product itself. So, as we went from blog posts to Kickstarter to the first launch, the consistent story that came along with Ghost was that we were doing this for love, not for profit, doing this for values, not for growth, and that was a huge part in the launch and then also a huge part in the continued growth that came afterwards.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Exactly. One of the things that really resonates with me is it's very similar to Basecams until the end of the internet, right, the fact that you are a foundation, I think, is something that stands out. You are a different kind of company, not only legally, but also existentially. If you create a company that you cannot sell, you will not do things that will drive you towards selling the company, right, and so you operate differently. Beyond the obvious consequences of running a foundation, that might not be obvious for 99% of the users of the internet, but you know, in terms of governance, in terms of leadership. In terms of leadership, have you found, for instance, any restrictions of things you wanted to do, something that has held you back because you were a foundation, perhaps, like you wanted to run faster, which is I don't believe it's in your ethos as a company, but what things did you find out along the way that were ah, this is holding me back.
John O'Nolan:Yeah, there's a bunch of weird non-profit regulations and things that you get surprised by, and every country kind of has their own set of them, so they'll be slightly different depending on where you are in the world. The one that comes to mind always immediately is if you're incorporated as a non-profit foundation, you are automatically classified by banks and financial institutions as high risk which is fairly logical, you know, like most non-profits are dependent on outside funding, typically don't sustain their operations without some kind of outside help.
John O'Nolan:So do you really want to lend money to an organization that may be not able to pay it back? As a bank, probably not, but it's a blanket rule. So, for example, a common thing that software startups do is they put their hosting bills which are usually quite extensive on American Express cards, and the benefit of that is you get a delayed timeframe for paying your hosting bills. But you also rack up a huge number of air miles and points and things that you can use elsewhere. Amex won't talk to us. They say oh, you're a non-profit, no, you're disqualified. And same with banks. We haven't ever needed lending facilities, but if we did, they're not available. Banks won't give you any lines of credit as a non-profit organization.
John O'Nolan:So the flexibility there is something that has kind of inhibited us a little bit, and a second one would be in a similar vein. Like all the bookkeeping and accounting and everything for non-profits is much more complex and because it's less common, it's much harder to find accountants who understand what it is they're supposed to do. You know, if you show up in the US with a normal C Corp, in the UK with a normal limited company, any accountant can help you out and do the normal thing that they do for all companies. But when you're a non-profit it's a lot harder to find anyone who understands what it is that they're supposed to do and you're supposed to do and how it should all work. So finding partners and suppliers on the kind of legal financial side in general is a lot more challenging. That's probably the biggest hurdle.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Well, one of the good things about running a non-profit and I created one in the past is that people will help you for free because it's a deep belief in the vision, right?
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:So that's something that maybe not at the level that I will do this multi-million financial bookkeeping for you, but maybe somebody will introduce you to this other person that will do this multi-million financial bookkeeping for you, but maybe, you know, somebody will introduce you to this other person that will do free consultation and this, or lend you some sort of services for free because it's a nonprofit and therefore you will also get some kind of I don't know if you need it, but like donations or sponsorships by companies that you wouldn't get otherwise, because big corporations most of the times they have these budgets allocated for nonprofits and social responsibility and stuff like that.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I don't know if that's the case, but if you want to run faster and again, I don't think this is the path to follow for Ghost, but you've gone from under a million in annual revenue around 2019, 2020, if I remember correctly to public numbers, you posted one month ago 7 million in annual revenue, right? So if you really believed in the long-term vision and adopting larger and broader user base by adding more money to the machine, right? What financial levers could you use for that, seeing that loans not available, vc money not available, maybe cash in the bank? What else is there?
John O'Nolan:There's not much. It sounds like you've either had better luck than I have or you have better friends than I do both as possible. But no, we've never had any donations from corporations that have a budget for giving money to nonprofits never once. And we don't. We get almost nothing for free. In fact, we have to pay for pretty much everything. It's very uncommon that we'll get totally free services. I think the biggest one is probably our GitHub account, where we have, you know, a GitHub pro account that they give for free to open source maintainers. But we do get generous discounts from some suppliers, but not as many as you would think.
John O'Nolan:To some extent, there isn't really much in the way of levers that you can pull. Of course, all investors looking for some sort of return on investment right, which usually means they need to own part of the company, which means shares. Nonprofits don't have shares, so investors are not so interested. I do get two or three emails from VCs every single week who have done enough research to see that Ghost is a fast growing tech platform and express their interest in investing, but not enough research to understand that we're a nonprofit and can't take investment, which is always quite amusing. So I often reply and say we're a nonprofit but donations are welcome, and to date I've never had a reply beyond that point, weird right, that's where you lose them, right.
John O'Nolan:Yeah, exactly, really strange, we also get sorry, go ahead.
John O'Nolan:There are funding sources for, sorry, there are bodies that do grant funding in various places. The highest concentration is in the US, but we're not a US company. Other nonprofits and do philanthropic work, typically have either regulation driven or investor driven or partner driven limitations on where they're allowed to distribute funds and that's almost always domestically. So there's not an opportunity for us there right now. So in some ways it's been an advantage. It's been a forcing factor for us to build a sustainable business, build a revenue stream that makes us 0% dependent on any source of outside funding and make sure that we can sustain our operations regardless of anyone else's support, and that's been a good thing for the long-term health of the business. But it's definitely been a limiting factor. The speed at which we're able to move right now is limited by how many developers we can afford to hire, and that's limited by how fast revenue grows, and it's been slow but consistent growth for about 11 years and we just grow at the pace we're able to.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:And actually one funny thing is we also get VCs trying to invest in March-based. We're a service-based company. It doesn't really make sense, but I guess that when you automate your email outrates, that's what happens. Second, the best investors in the world are well known for doing nothing with their investments and just sitting it out, and so it really makes sense. It would be a very, very good investment, a return on investment, to invest in something like sustainable growth and stuff like that.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Oftentimes and you know it also very perfectly is lifestyle businesses like, for instance, mine and we are regarded as unambitious, right, that's something I get all the time when I visit Silicon Valley is like, why don't you do something more ambitious? Why don't you raise funds? Or like merge with another company, start like hiring like crazy and triple your size every year and stuff like that. It's like I really don't want to do that. Like, who can really assure me that I will not grow to 200 people in one year and then go back to 100 and in the next year? Right, I don't want to be an accordion company, and we've seen plenty of those in the VC-backed world and in companies relying and believing in hyper growth. That's something that we're not really fond of. I'm much more leaning towards the side of lifestyle and sustainable and slow growth business. You know, 20% a year, it's really good. 20, 25, 30 on a good year, it's really good. For 10 years now I'll take it any day pay dividends and stuff like that Team is happy, pay good salaries.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:But I think that's not the mantra around the tech scene, that perhaps we have lost the narrative and I'd like to see the tables turn. But I don't think this is happening anytime soon. Look, by now I think we've lost 100% of the developers that were listening to the podcast talking about nonprofits and financial jargon. So I wanted to have a couple of more technical questions before delving into the vision and the other topics that I wanted to cover in the podcast. More like product and strategy, right, but the technical ones for the developer bait here is you chose a tech stack based on Nodejs. I don't know if you can tell us why and whether that was the original tech stack or has it changed and evolved over the years?
John O'Nolan:Yeah, no, that was the original tech stack we picked.
John O'Nolan:Nodejs when it was version 0.10 back in 2013. So Node was in its mostly hype, not really proven stage, and we'd started building the front end of Ghost in JavaScript point. We thought, well, what if the whole thing was javascript? And just started exploring that idea? The obvious benefit would be that it would be incredibly fast, and the tangential benefit, which people used to say a lot more at the time than they do now, was that you could have your full stack written in a single language. You know that seemed that was an advantage that was pitched of nodejs at one point, though I think at at this point, front-end and back-end have sufficiently diverged that it's almost irrelevant that they're both JavaScript, so it was a little bit of a bet. It was a punt on a new technology that seemed very promising, and it worked out. Part of the attraction of GhostFund we launched was that it was using this new technology. It was very, very fast, and that's what attracted people to it.
John O'Nolan:The disadvantage of choosing Nodejs was that it was so young.
John O'Nolan:It was a very, very immature ecosystem and, for the most part, up until relatively recently, people really weren't building full-stack web applications with Node, so there was quite a lot in the way of NPM packages for making APIs and microservices, but almost nothing when it came to building a full web app with Nodejs, because it just wasn't the popular use case. So most of the types of things that we needed to build for Ghost we couldn't just pull in a dependency or a package for to help. We had to write it ourselves we had expressed, basically give us roots and views. But other than that, we kind of had to invent everything from scratch, and that's been a real challenge over the years. I think our pace of development has been slowed versus if we had picked something like Laravel or Rails that are so well engineered, so well designed for doing exactly what Ghost does, whereas with Node we kind of had to invent a lot of our patterns, or essentially all of our patterns, from scratch, and that's just taken a lot more time.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:But maybe because you had to develop it yourself, you could continue being so opinionated as a company, like now, that we have to develop this framework for doing this exact functionality. We're going to build it the way we want it to be right. I don't know if that's the case or you have any specific examples about that. You would think, but no kind of the opposite.
John O'Nolan:I think you have to say, yes, it's lovely to imagine that, if you have the ultimate freedom to build whatever you want, that you will make better decisions and come up with a better architecture than something like Rails or Laravel, but in reality, we were focused on delivering the product to users, and whatever code needed to be written to deliver the value to our customers. That we needed is what is the code we ended up writing, and some of that was good code and some of it is what you would now describe as technical debt. It was not good code and we grew Ghost as a product while Nodejs was growing as a piece of technology, and a lot of the fundamental building blocks that are now common in Nodejs-based apps just simply didn't exist in 2013. So there's a lot of cruft, there's a lot of stuff that we don't love about our code base and there's a lot of bits of frameworks that I really don't think anyone's excited about writing.
John O'Nolan:You know, like an ORM In Nodejs, orm is like one of the great unsolved problems. That isn't a good one. There's a bunch of old ones, there's a couple that are sort of some sort of enterprise startup play, but there isn't an equivalent to ActiveRecord or Eloquent that's well-maintained, that is performant and that's compatible with the way most people build web apps. So yeah, I don't know, it's been a big disadvantage not having that. And now we're kind of 10, 11 years later in the place of trying to refactor and extract some of the fundamental parts of the app into something that resembles more of a framework. But that's a very slow process.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:That is a perfect assist and very timely. I was going to go into technical depth. So have you had to rewrite certain parts of the product or do a full rewrite over the course of this decade?
John O'Nolan:No, I'm a big believer in a full rewrite is never the answer. There's a good Joel Spolsky post on that that I think has aged very well and continues to be relevant. We have had to evolve and update parts of the architecture as we've grown, but we always try our best to do that incrementally. I think it rarely makes sense to pursue a refactor project which doesn't have a clear customer-based goal that it's aiding, just a developer-based goal of making the code nicer. So we try and always focus things around. Why do we need to refactor? Is it because we're blocked and adding a new feature? Is it because performance has become too slow? Is it because stability or downtime is being affected by this piece of code which is poorly tested and it's difficult to test? And as we do that, we kind of replace, upgrade, move around the pieces of the app that feel like they're causing the most problems. But it's always aligned with a customer problem or a user problem that we're trying to solve.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:And how do you approach technical debt in the company? Now that you mention it, do you have as a KPI internally? Some companies have got it as a business KPI, even I've heard recently. How do you approach it?
John O'Nolan:yeah, you know, probably we could do better in how we approach it. It's fairly abstract. We kind of discuss problems as they come up, we notice and try and record which parts of the app, which areas of the app, are the most common sources of friction within our development team. That's our kind of primary barometer for where the technical debt is and then we just try and prioritize it in the context of what fits with our goals for the quarter outside of technical debt. So we're always trying to address some of it and pay it back effectively as we go. But I don't know if we have a really clear, refined system for measuring it as a KPI or having specific goals around technical debt itself.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Well, also, your team isn't as weak as companies that probably have had to adopt a technical debt as a KPI because they have thousands of engineers and every day, between idea and going live into production, is probably millions of dollars in revenue. Right so, and your team? Right now, how many people have? You got 34, I think 34. That's great.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I mean, I love seeing the growth of these kind of companies because it gives me hope that good software can still be built. And actually, you know, going back to the bootstrap thing, I think that I shared the vision. In our last episode we had Greg Scown, one of the founders of TaxExpander, and he went really deep in explaining their product strategy and how they really polished and ironed out every single detail of the application. And I made the remark that I love products that don't change because it means they work right. So products like Harvest or TextExpander or Magnet they're products that are, you know, indie developers have made them, or they're bootstrap companies and they do change, but they change in the background so that users don't see it right.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Because Greg mentioned that this kind of software leaves a lot on reputation because otherwise, if the users get pissed, they will go to the next to do the biggest, the bigger commercial thing right, and so they have to change a lot of the background stuff. You know so back-end algorithms and calculations, stuff like that, not reflecting it on the front end, and by by doing so they don't break. These products don't break. I've been using now goes for for two months and three months now I haven't found any single point of breaking, not a single bug. That's very remarkable. The integrations you know connect to Stripe boom done. Connect to Cloudflare boom done. Everything works seamlessly. I love this kind of experience. I wish more companies would adopt that no-transcript repetitional damage to ghost over the years and the years that perhaps I missed kind of.
John O'Nolan:We had a pretty big fuck up that we sort of suffered from but it wasn't totally our fuck up in mid 2020, so we were all kind of locked down. Everyone's stressed with covid and what's going to happen in the world. There was a there was effectively a zero-day vulnerability in salt stack, which we were using to orchestrate servers and our hosting platform, and salt stack did a remarkably horrific job of to close disclosing that there was a vulnerability of any kind whatsoever. I think they, if I remember correctly, they sent one slack message to a private community the day before the patch was released and then just didn't tell anyone else there was any vulnerability at all. And so we discovered that this vulnerability had been exploited to install crypto miners on our app servers. Not a good discovery to make. You try and figure out why your CPU is like past 100% and what's going on, only to discover that someone's trying to get that sweet sweet Monero from your very expensive VPS Monero from your very expensive VPS. And so when we discovered this, we reacted very quickly to both patch the vulnerability, verify whether or not it had been exploited in any other way to gain access to our network, reset, basically wiped all credentials of every single user of any kind, from all of our database so that, on the next login users be forced to do a password reset, only to realize that we didn't have the functionality for wiping credentials and force people to do a password reset. So, building and deploying that quickly, and then we disclosed that the exploit had happened.
John O'Nolan:Now the problem was this all happened over a weekend and we move very quickly because we're a small team and we're able to get things resolved very quickly. It was not only us that had suffered this exploit, because salt stack had done such a terrible job of disclosing it. Essentially, everyone in the world using salt stack had been infected with the same crypto miner, which effectively blatted the internet looking for open endpoints that it could exploit and installed itself everywhere it could. But we were the first to disclose, and so what happened was the news cycle was Ghost has been hacked for most of the week.
John O'Nolan:Not, saltstack has a vulnerability. Not, this is affecting lots and lots of tech companies due to this underlying piece of open source technology that lots of companies are using. It was us in the headlines, us having been hacked, so reputationally, that was not good. I don't know if it probably did cost us some revenue, but it's always difficult to say how much right. But the lesson there was do the right thing but do it in the right timing. I think if we had just not been quite so quick to disclose it within kind of 24 hours of it happening, but had just got all our ducks in a row, got everything buttoned up, made sure everything was working again, then perhaps wouldn't have been quite so extremely focused on us for a solid week of the press cycle.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:One thorny thing about running companies that are focused on employee well-being can work like Valence and totally going against the hustle and the grind is that our employees are not supposed to work on the weekend or long shifts like in other companies. Right, we're not freaking McKinsey, we're not Deloitte, and our employees take their, of course, the natural time off of the weekends. And then some employees of ours, at 2 pm, they're done because they start at 5 am in the morning, right. But when it comes to working on a weekend for an emergency like that, what kind of policies do you have in place to compensate for that? How do you rally the troops?
John O'Nolan:We have an on-call team and incident management process. So essentially, if there's any downtime or critical emergency, we have a way of notifying team members and for our on-call engineers infrastructure team that's a part of their general job description. There's a rota that we have systems for managing it. And for other team members, we just ask people to help when we need it. And then on the flip side, on the kind of work-life balance side, we actually does a four-day work week and we have unlimited time off policy. So we kind of ask everyone to help out when we need it and we also try and give people freedom to help out when we need it and we also try and give people, you know, freedom and time off when they need it.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:That's amazing. Have you encountered any problem with people? Because we did have unlimited time off in the beginning, but we found out that people were actually not taking holidays. They were not taking days off because the founder team we were not doing it. So we had to start being really resilient and vocal on working only 40 hours per week even the founders right Because otherwise people were not taking holidays. Did you have an issue with that? Or have you set a minimum of days a year that you have to take off?
John O'Nolan:Yeah, we set a minimum. We found the same thing. We set a minimum of two weeks per year that have to be taken off, and if people haven't taken that off in December, then we closed the office at the end of December for the Christmas New Year period and if people haven't taken it off by then, we kick them out early.
John O'Nolan:Effectively, I think we've only had to do that maybe once, because if you say that then people are more likely to then just go and book it when it's convenient for them. But yeah, I think, I think it's always a bit of a thing as unlimited time off is great, but then if you can take unlimited time off, then you you always defer it to later. So it was part of the motivation for switching to a four-day week was to recognize the kind of intensity of work I think, especially just in quote-unquote this day and age being remote, crossing lots of time zones, having customers everywhere, having incidents that are sometimes out of hours that people have to deal with and trying to combat that with more of an intentional, conscious break for people every single week as opposed to only when they happen to have time off booked.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:One. I've been trying to do the four-day work week and it ends up on. You know you have meetings scattered all over the week. I could concentrate in three days or four only, and then the fifth one I would dedicate it only to admin work in my house, because everything is so accumulated and then you take this day off but it ends up. You're working on something else.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:But is there any other disadvantage you've found so far with the four-day work week? Because this is an experiment I think we ought to do eventually, being a services company, it's much more complicated because the clients pay for full weeks and they will not understand for that. But at the same time I know other agencies are charging for full days of work consisting of six hours only instead of eight. So at the end of the day it kind of like evens out. I don't know, but probably you can. You split the team in two and some of them work one half of the week, the other team works the other half of the week, and stuff like that. I don't know what disadvantages have you found with this new approach?
John O'Nolan:Yeah, I think what you mentioned about having other work and admin to do is one of the reasons why the four-day week is valuable. I think everyone has some version of of that, whether it's, you know, appointments or shopping or kids events or just life maintenance needing to go, and I don't know, do a tax return, talk to an accountant, figure out something with your bank account, and then a lot of those things can't be done on weekends because the place that you need to do the thing is closed or you just have run out of hours in the day to get to the, the life admin that is necessary of all of us and is difficult to do alongside a fairly intense workflow job. So we use the. The four-day week, I think, helps give people space to use that time where they might otherwise feel like they're losing the weekend, which which really sucks. I think that's a big advantage of it.
John O'Nolan:The most significant downside that I think we're still trying to figure out is the context gap between Thursday and Monday is much larger than you would expect compared to the context gap between Friday and Monday, if that makes sense. So having the three days off and returning to whatever it was you were doing last week is slower to get up to speed and conversations that start on a Thursday difficult to remember what we're talking about again when you get to Monday morning. Or if something on a Thursday afternoon is not quite done, it's very easy to kick it to Monday, but then suddenly you're at quite a big disadvantage after that big gap of time has passed. So I think figuring out how to operate efficiently in the four days that are available for work becomes much more important. I don't think we're super good at that yet, or we haven't figured it out got the playbook down just yet but it's one we've noticed and talked about book down just yet, but it's one we've noticed and talked about.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Also, there is not enough data out there explaining correlation between four-day work weeks and taking less sick days off or needing less vacations, and maybe people who used to take three weeks off in the summer break now they take only two. There's not enough volume of data or not enough companies that have implemented it for years, so the data set is not yet relevant, but I assume there will be something there. I can think that if I am working on a four-day work week for a year, I will not be burning out so easily and maybe I don't need to take those long breaks over the summer and stuff like that. But I don't know. That's my observation.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I wanted to circle back to the transparency topic. You've done a remarkable job at the sharing. The journey goes, the ups and downs and all the hard things about running this kind of business all the hard things about running this kind of business. In the same vein, joel from Buffer made something really extraordinary for me a few months back when he shared data openly about the plateau they hit and the loss of revenue they hit one year ago. Something like that, because usually building in public is great, but if you notice most people building in public, they only build in public on the way up. When they go down, they stop building in public, they stop sharing metrics because that probably causes an accelerated degrowth. Perhaps If people see that the business is going down, oh, I might as well change to another platform.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Right, and Joel shared that, and that was remarkable because not a lot of people will admit hitting a plateau or their numbers going down in public, and I think that's an exercise of responsibility that everybody should do.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I understand that publicly traded companies cannot do that I mean they have to do that but they cannot communicate certain things too early in order not to alter the value of the stock and alarm the investors and stuff like that. But more companies that are financially independent should be more open about this kind of data. I found myself that when I shared some stuff not working or some problems, we had internally some fuck-ups. I'm very public about our fuck-ups as a company and not only we get a lot of engagement in social media. It's not a metric I really care for, but we get recognition and perhaps better contacts. We're contacted by people like, oh look, you shared that, that was a fuck up. It was great. I learned from that. I want to work with you guys. I don't know if you notice like a spike in talent or kind of like signups every time you share your data.
John O'Nolan:Yeah, particularly the. You know it's the tried and true indie hacker thing. Quite easy to move the needle on the startup mri chart in the early days. You know you, you do one big new thing and mri doubles or there's like a 50 change. I think a lot of people stop sharing revenue, not necessarily when they plateau, but when they just get above a certain size. When you pass around a million dollars a year in revenue, sharing revenue metrics I think starts to be more of a disadvantage than an advantage. At that point. You've been around for presumably long enough that people kind of already know who you are within the startup space and you're not small enough anymore to be considered an underdog or like someone to be rooting for because they're just getting going. But you are starting to become a target for competitors and competitors. Having insight into your data and your growth rate and what's working, what's not working as intelligence for what they should do and how they can compete with you becomes an increasing risk. So I can understand why a lot of startups stop sharing revenue as they get to a certain size. At the same time, it's very difficult to influence those metrics in a meaningful way. That tells a good story as you get bigger. Any changes I make for the next six months, I'll be lucky if it moves the needle by 10%, which is just not nearly as much of an interesting story.
John O'Nolan:But in the context of Ghost, we are very committed to the transparency piece, in part because it aligns so much with the ethos of the open source projects as well as the nonprofit foundation. I think transparency goes hand in hand with both of those. But I do think you have to be mindful of the way in which you do it and the reasons for why you're doing it. For us, the reasons are that it's aligned with the project and the structure. For other people, the reasons they do it are for marketing and because they want to get attention. But I don't necessarily think everyone should share metrics always and it's always good. I think you should have a goal in mind for why you're doing it and then measure against it.
John O'Nolan:But to your point, undoubtedly it's something that we hear is a strong signal when it comes to hiring team members, something that they like, something that they appreciate, like the transparency and the rest of the structure of Ghost is a huge pull for us being able to attract talent to work here and it's a big pull for customers who have, at various points, had the rug pulled out from under them from other tech companies that start up, shut down. They have no idea if they're doing well or poorly, or if they're running out of money or need to raise more. In them being able to trust that we're going to stick around, we're doing okay and they can invest their time and energy into building on top of Ghost without the fear that it's going to sell to Yahoo next year.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Yeah, exactly, I mean on the building in public for indie hackers. There's a lot of upside, there's literally no downside, to saying, oh, we're doing 2000 euros in MRR in our first month or year, something like that. There's no downside to that. I have never set the limit from which it is dangerous or calculated risk. One million in AR makes sense. For another reason that doesn't apply to you guys, which is you will never sell your company. But when you're sharing your data publicly, you're also sharing your valuation, your potential sale price, right. So that's some kind of numbers they can use to negotiate against your asking price, and so it doesn't apply to you. But you have to take it into consideration if you have another kind of company structure.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:The other question I have for you with regards to communication and style because this is one of my personal struggles is by having this transparency core value in the company. Where do you set the line in transparency right? Over-communication versus under-communication? What's the right timing to communicate? Oh, look, guys, in three months we'll have no projects for everybody. You better start looking for another job or you know you're going to overcome that situation. So you just don't share beforehand, so that you don't create an internal sense of alarm and an emergency in the company, right how to set a protocol for that and a standard in communication, especially not of bad things, but of preparing people for potential bad things that might happen.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:You know, when there was COVID hit, potentially we could lose all our clients Didn't happen, but it could have happened. Other companies shut down. In the last 24 months, most boutique agencies like ours have either shut down or sold to other companies at a discount because they were doing very poorly, and so our employees shared the concern like, hey, everybody is doing poorly, how are we doing? We're doing great. But I have to let you know that this is happening out there. It's very cold out there, salaries are going down, there's a lot of layoff season and stuff like that. But I don't know Like I don't know if you've got the recipe for that or, because you look very calm and very you know very thoughtful about everything you say, it looks like it's pretty calculated every time you share it, but I don't know if you also internally struggle with this.
John O'Nolan:Yeah, I guess I kind of think about this in the context of we try and share as much data with the team as possible, particularly data that will help them be able to do their jobs more easily. So on day one when someone joins ghost, they get full, unlimited access to revenue analytics that they can dig through the entire thing, every single metric that we have performance over the last 10 years, and see how the company has performed. And it serves two functions. One, it kind of sets everyone's mind at ease about how we're doing, like, how are things going? Are we flatlining, are we going down, are we going up? You know, you just take away that whole category of questions Because in reality, if it's tough, if your team are worried about that, if they're thinking about that, then it's going to be difficult for them to be productive on what you hope it is that they're working on. So you potentially could be wasting energy in that area when you don't need to. Another thing is they can see the effects of their work. You know, if they launch something or work on something, it can see like did the numbers go up, did they stay the same? Or if they have a theory about a segment of customers like we think business customers, who are all asking for this new feature, are growing faster than the other customers and we need to devote more resources to them. If they have access to the data to go and validate that and look at the segment of those customers and how they're performing and what they're doing, then they can make better decisions in product development.
John O'Nolan:So we try and open up as many things as we can unless there's a really clear reason not to. We essentially default to. Everyone can see everything, unless there's a particular reason of some kind legal compliance or otherwise that they shouldn't be able to. And then when it comes to signaling you know, signaling bad news or talking about potential disadvantages that are coming up we do our best as the. When the team was really small, we did, you know, a weekly all hands and we just talked openly about everything with everyone.
John O'Nolan:Now we have, you know, a multitude of teams working on different things, different priorities. You a weekly cadence would probably be more distracting than helpful. So we do a big all-hands every quarter now, sorry, a big all-hands every month. And then that includes a strategic kind of planning session and bigger picture view every quarter and that's the place where we bring up any things that, as a company, we feel like we're struggling struggling with risks that are potentially on the horizon and then open it up for anyone who has feedback or questions to talk about it.
John O'Nolan:And and then we do the same thing in person once a year on our team meetups, which is always a good venue for bringing if there are difficult topics that need to come up around company performance or like how we're doing or whether we're working well together or there's room for improvement or people are frustrated, perhaps with processes or systems that aren't good. You know, the one of the biggest downsides of remote is empathy doesn't translate particularly well through 2d zoom calls. Being in person makes it a lot easier to have those conversations. There's just much more of a human element to it. So we try and always create space for those things to come up when we're sitting together, hanging out in person, and that always is a good reset or a good place to do those types of things.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Good. And to wrap up the topic of transparency, I wanted to ask because, before you share a tech fuck-up that was probably somebody else's fault, do you have any personal fuck-up that you've done in the company that has resulted in some kind of like financial? In other words, what's been your most expensive fuck-up at Ghost? It has to be yours.
John O'Nolan:Yeah, I've had plenty.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:It's a signature question of the podcast, so yeah, I've had tons.
John O'Nolan:It's just difficult to pick one. I don't know like, yeah, you could probably tie this back to revenue somehow, but it's it's difficult one. I once managed to get our entire website banned from google, for it might have been two months, oh wow, which is pretty, pretty fucking bad. So the what happened was we were getting inundated with spam. So these and this enterprising seo agency in malaysia had decided that they were going to exploit ghost's free trial system so you could sign up for a free trial which would give you a website, and then they would put loads of porn the website and try and use that for SEO. I'm not entirely sure what the motivation was, but it was. Maybe it was an SEO agency working for a porn company. It's not entirely clear. In any event, we were like a five person company. I think this was 2014 or 15.
John O'Nolan:And the resources that they were using up with this spam, this automated spam, was intense, like it was costing money. It was making servers go down because of the level to which they were doing it, and so, eventually, how did I do it? I found through some source code. I can't remember. I found the agency in malaysia. I called them up 2 am in the morning. That time I clearly worked some dude up, presumably the owner of the agency, and I said please, can you stop spamming us? We, we need this to end.
John O'Nolan:And I'm trying to remember the sequence of events here. I think he sort of said he would and then he didn't. In any event, we had a big influx of requests, spam requests, and again one day, and we were going through the server logs, I was looking through Cloudflare and there was a big influx from this IP. That was Google, you know, like Google Cloud Platform, so it blocks that whole IP range like no more VPS spamming our servers for you. Anyways, long story short, that wasn't Google Cloud Platform, it was Google Web Crawler trying to index our site who had just been banned from absolutely everything. It wasn't until, I don't know, a month later or something, when I Googled something in our docs, that nothing came up. That's strange, it always comes up. And then I realized that none of ghostorg was coming up, and then I realized that we were no longer ranking for a single thing whatsoever.
John O'Nolan:And that was entirely on me and a hasty click in a Cloudflare dashboard. Fortunately it recovered just fine, great.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Well, thank you for doing this, because actually we need more examples of that. People think that other companies work perfectly and seamlessly, while our personal projects are always like shit, but I think we make a pretty good job at democratizing failure in this sense. Look, I was worried because I had another block of topics that was how to more like product strategy and stuff. We will not be covering this because we're running out of time, and one of the key questions there was, like I haven't found the formula to sort of resell Ghost as an agency, because for me it looks like a very good platform to build projects on. But there are certain things that you guys are so opinionated on like the multi-language support, natively or not adding content blocks and stuff like that that other platforms use it, and you guys have got very legit reasons not to give them out of the box, and so I was going to go into that.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:But I think from this answer you've just given me, I've inferred how not to use Ghost, which I think it's as valuable, if not more so. Well, let's just wrap it here, because you've been extremely generous with your time. I'm rolling out the carpet for you. You got one minute left to say how we can help you, how we can help ghost and any announcements or anything you want to share with our community love the hot ones reference yeah, if you want to check out to get it?
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:yes, I would.
John O'Nolan:if you publish online and you have an email list or you have thoughts to share with the world, check out ghostorg. We're doing a lot of interesting things. The most interesting of which that is coming up, that is kind of on the horizon, is activity pub-based federation. So soon all ghost sites in the world will be networked with one another through decentralized protocols that will give you a social graph inside an independent website, so you'll be able to like reply and interact with other publishers and audience out there in the big wide social web, which is very exciting.
John O'Nolan:We've been working on this in beta for a few months and it completely changes the shape of the product in a way that I think in the next year or two is going to be pretty transformational. So that's one of the fun things we're working on and, yeah, love it. If anyone wants to check out the platform, shoot me a message on any of the social platforms at Jono Nolan If you have questions or want to chat.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I totally endorse that as a personal user and before you go, you got it coming. Favorite Hot Ones episode so far.
John O'Nolan:I mean, the DJ Khaled's always a classic right so far. I mean the dj khaled's always a classic right, just for for its incredible failure. What was the one I watched just last week? Oh, ryan reynolds, that one was really good yeah, that's, that's very good there's a few. I'm struggling to think of them all on the spot. Jimmy fallon is the one I just watched. He was very funny. What's yours?
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Shaquille O'Neal, probably Like I don't understand most of the time we're speaking, but the faces and the entire performance is superb. That for me is like an all-time great.
John O'Nolan:Ricky Gervais. The Gordon Ramsay one was good as well, just because of. Gordon Ramsay because of how angry he got throughout the whole thing.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Like why angry you got throughout the whole thing, like why do you do this exactly? Exactly they're. They're really good ones. And then I'm really surprised by people who you wouldn't expect it but they tolerate spiciness so well, like charlize their own, for instance and I'm surprised gary venetro. Yeah yeah, exactly, some people are like yeah, yeah, spicy, but you know, I'm like yeah, holy fuck like I. I have the bomb, the bomb, I have it in my fridge. It's like literally unbearable stuff like that I love spicy, and that's why I buy all of these terrible sauces.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:And when I see some of the guests that they don't break a sweat, I'm like, no, I don't know how they can do it. I don't know how they can do it, but anyways, I don't know how they can do it. I don't know how they can do it, but anyways.
John O'Nolan:I'm a big Hot.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Sauce fan. Yeah, love having you on and congratulations on what you've built. Much success for the future. And also thanks for getting the Hot Wins reference first First person in 150 episodes. So far that gets it.
John O'Nolan:Amazing, I'll take that, thank you.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Thank you very much.