#227 – Constraints, Longevity, and Avoiding Competition with John O'Nolan from Ghost
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What's up, everybody? This is courtlandt from ni hacker's that com. And you're listening to the ni hackers 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 andy hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities and the strategies they're taking adventures of so the rest of us can do the same. I'm talking to john, no, lyn, that whose socks smooth voice stal listening to john is the founder of ghost. And the last time we spoke, I don't know where you were living and thinking about the student in south africa, there was like twenty nineteen and now you're in grand correctly yes.

create a sudden most islands in the carbon chain.

So yeah, like the g that you've been in this way, you're entire life, everybody else is like trendy, is like a fat and you're like, no, no, no, this is just how I live. I don't have a fixed home address and never will. What was that you're telling me about earlier this year? You told me because I was actually going to come visit even and then now it'll locked down. And like my travel planes are worked, but you were like sAiling across the atlantic, so you won't even that. And you like in the ocean home, just like middle of the ocean.

So I spent the last ten years also traveling by plane and then living out of A B M B 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, was either complicated immigration, complicated tax systems, complicated citizenship, poor, like how you couldn't could not stay there, or very, very expensive.

And so eventually I can change tag 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 cell boat instead of house, and now I live on, I live on a boat talking to right now from a boat floating in a place called prickly bay on the southern coast of grenada. And yeah, this is next version of, no matter for me, is floating around the world, rather than flying around the world.

That is a biotic sort of, I guess, take all of your processions with you when you travel because that's like what living on a boat are. Living on a car enables, right? Like wherever you go, that's where you live. You're ever really in between living places.

One thing I really like about travel that 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 in 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 and what you learn about yourself in the first place. So I think it's a totally unique experience, everyone. And I certainly recommend IT, but I wouldn't expect anyone to have .

an idea is the the such a monitor because like at least like in some regarding my identity is probably american, probably like very techy united ten years of nsf. And it's not do you get out of that some in different waters that you really can see where you really were? Like you can only learn about who you are until you experience being a different person, being a different place, I think.

And with you this since, like you been doing that your entire life, like what is your bedrock? Like what's the core identity of john? right? When you go to a new place, this, 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 you know a culture shock the first time you you go somewhere completely different. So a culture that the opposite of one you've ever been to before the world, the world is this weird, crazy place with people and food and stuffing IT that I didn't know about didn't know exist IT.

The more you travel, the more that reduces because it's just less and less novel new things. Equally, the internet kind of reduces a lot of that via in the last how many years of buzbee 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 wear and living on a cell boat was being able to sort of recher ge myself and go to places that are not easy to get to by plane, that do not have well troubling tourist paths with instagram highlights along the way. But the kind of tron find wild, weird places that less people go to again, that's a big part of the appeal. Obviously a little more chAllenging in the last eighteen month than IT might have been otherwise. But yeah, that part of the ambition I was .

on twitter earlier this year and I think IT was pol gram who occasionally tweet about advice, city gifts to his kids. And he gave his kids summer device that I I took to heart. I ask pretty advice, and he said that if you're going to be competitive, pick one or two things and like to be really competitive about and chill out and everything else.

And I read down, I realized that I H shit like, I need this advice because I feel like i'm constantly competing and comparing, and like every part of my life, like i'm always seeking this novelty. I need do things, I need to do things that others haven't done. And so like at the time, even when I like came to travel, I would think about where 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 one of my friends, he's spent there, which is not a not a smart reason I who cares like travels that supposed to be this competitive thing but for some reason, like because of instagram, because of winter, because of facebook, because of like all my friends and you know, people online going all these places. Like somehow they like rob them of their luster to me and made them seem less interesting if they're already been ton of people who snap photos there and they .

ve already been there. Yeah, I agree with that. All the most meaningful moment in my life now are the ones that I don't put on the internet.

So whether that's friends or family or or travel, if it's something I really care about, I will now go out of my way to keep IT offline because that's a differentiate now, right? It's not everything's online and we put a few things online in those the 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 off line. And now the weird special moments that are separate from everything else and that I think has been healthy for me to interacts with or just appreciate those moments differently when you know you're not thinking about who's gna look at IT, who's going to like IT, who's gonna a make fun of the right. You're just having IT for the sake of IT, whatever IT is.

I think that's the perfect way. Go about IT because that forces you to evaluate whether not you're doing the same because you wanted do IT or whether or not you doing IT because you're playing some sort of status. Can you worried about people think you know, like if not, posting something on the internet simply makes you lose all of its luster and that's probably not something you should be doing.

It's clearly not something really enjoy doing. The outset of this is I think i'm about paying subscriber to your blog redirect what was the last time you posted? I'm like i'm paying a where is my updates on john's? Like.

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 the way in which I write on my personal site is IT all over the place. Some areas are about business, and I have like a whole like section, which each posts is kind of a chapter that semi kind of fagi like a book.

And then there's a few random updates which had like travel things than the some gear guides of just stuff I like. But i've i've done such a poor job of organizing a cohesive narrative can say to people months to months like here's what i'm doing, do something i'm working on so please don't cancel yet. I'm trying to figure IT out .

keep paying you my eight dollars a month whatever IT is yeah.

if you take hot enough, you have been adding like three, four thousand words a month. But and I keep saying to myself and others, i'm going to do an email objects where I sumas everyone, all the new stuff that's on the site.

But the idea of the site was to create basically a payout personal blog, where I could write freely and kind of go back to the gold nager blogg, where people just used to write about what was going on their lives if they're interested in. Without this, the kind of performative side of every blog person needs to get as much track as possible. Therefore, IT needs to be very friendly, like, can't offend anyone and can't anything that some people might not like, which kind of just dulled and made everything really boring in flat.

So putting a little pay on front, that was my day, that kind of trying to reclaim a little creative space on the internet. And I would say the vertical so far as mixed, because shortly after launching IT, quite a few people who are admire and respect to far more successful than me subscribed and the campaigners. And that immediately brought back my first of like why I don't I don't make a silly joke now because whoever is subscribed in is reading and they're going to come a fool. But maybe I should .

I should provide land that and embrace log you had, you don't have now is like this. Everybody is subscribed to things through R S S. You have absolutely no idea, he described to R, S, S.

feet. That could be anybody. IT could be nobody.

I mean, just get a number, but that's basically IT? Or is now it's okay? See exactly which email addresses are part of your list. You know, that person is. And if like, you really care about your reputation in that person's eyes, and you're suddenly can have this anxiety, a or this fear or this minimum quality bar about becomes essentially performative and the other.

the reverse is true as well, right? Like you you're at and see nowadays one's identity on the inter net is so much more uh this the summit, more attention on whoever is creating. Writing about ideas, I I wasn't too sure about the whole sudanese.

I'm still not sure that's how you said. But the idea having online students, 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 more attractive mates to have different identities for different compartments of life and not necessarily have all of them be tied together and links.

Because I think that again, that opens up the freedom of of what you might explore, what you might do. I can tell you right now, if I do another business or and not start up at some point, IT will not be under my name. I'm going to do IT under I don't know i'm gonna a boy a or something, but i'm definitely going to trying dit IT with a completely separate identity, a completely separate set of concerns. Both book is 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 deeper ply aware or i've found i'm deeply aware of how much is to lose everything just more and more risky that really hampers craziest, particularly in the context of coming up with the new ideas? And is that push any sort of boundary that might might not .

be a friend about this in the context of finances because they think this applies to lots of different areas in life. We're like when you don't have very much, the world is your own twist. Ter, it's all about gaining and expLoring and trying new things. You know, like a Young Brown college kid. You can do whatever you and then like as you make more money, you are you game 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 got and that's get a boring, you know, it's kind of tragic.

Like you look on the world, for example, and like you look at all these like billionaire, for example, how many really doing cool, interesting things like give you the occasional elon mosk s like, I want to put one hundred million dollars into this unproven rocket company and hopefully lose my entire fortune, embarrassing. But everybody else is like, no, I need to pass down my wealth for regeneration to generation and preserve what i've gotten that because I was so hard to get here. I don't want to lose IT and like that it's it's a one sort of prison in a way.

And I think this idea of sudden named accounts, like i've like probably five or six synonomous accounts, they're created over the years. And then i've like literally never sent i've never sent a single tweet or done anything at any of their names. I just give this like little relevance brain. Like, I want to be anonymous and then I make you in. I come off the cool abbati and like a personal and I just like, I never touched again so they're ready for the day or am ready like to do that but like I haven't actually used IT, but that super freeing to have that and to be able to like create something new and take a big risk and that half people compare what you've done to the reputation that you've already establish yourself.

I was talking to um you know, body lon musk. I was talking to him onto the a couple of weeks. I 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 IT to IT off or anyone works IT to IT of, can just don't look at what the email dress on the account is then right? I peers and deduce the location.

like they can even analyze like basically your writing style. Nobody is like there's like A I algorithms like connect people like so this is actually tweet exactly something to this other personal account. Here is probably the same person exactly.

So he said me this a very, very long post. I don't know if he was practically at with snowfall. L kind of privacy advice, very interesting, but very, very, very in depth that advocated for spending, like mullion, thousands of dollars coming up with kind of decay.

Identity is no kinds of stuff. I don't know how far I don't know and that invested, but I was interesting. I mean, he invest in all kinds of businesses now as funny he's come from like a parody account to a real investor, and you still never get to .

many colors on twitter, I imagine very tempting, once you've built up that kind of person to actually take advantage of leverage IT and try to turn into something. We have a mutual friend who does this I mean, a from card, he's been basically anonymous, is entire career and like I know he lives in tennessee, have talked to him, I see her is voice, but like, I don't know who he is, how is on where or no one else knows who is.

But it's like raising money and running a real internet business that people depend on the killing people ever been like publicly unmasked. And maybe to some degree that means that people just don't care that much like the kind of like the mystery and I know maybe one out of like a hundred thousand people was really gonna the work. Try to dig up the information and try to find out who this person .

is yeah think IT depends if if there's some reason or motivation for why would be worth finding out who a person is right like this. A lot of reasons for why i'm masking that identity would be particularly fascinating to a large group. People i'm asking A J, I love AJ not that interest.

So the last time we spoke, I think you had just released like ghost three point to just like late two and nineteen 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 or a newsletter or things like that. Maybe a way to start here. I'm curious as goes as grown because be super easy to describe, right? IT was like a wordpress alternative.

It's a Better word press. You know it's for blogging now goes is like doing all these cool things. How do you manage to describe your company what you're doing when IT grows to have like five or ten things that it's great adds that I .

just want you definitely have to find new stories to tell that for sure. How I describe IT now, as I say goes, the best way to turn your audience into a business. And I think many, many great businesses start from an audience, even ones that are not predominated content best. But that's our kind of core now um that we think about like as you said, that evolved from publishing, but we got to replace where we ask what what problem does every publisher have unanimously. The answer is, how do I make a living from this? And so IT was a natural evolution from from once, the other, but very much now the 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 couple of decades now, IT has become the the heart and soul of ghosts, of the reason, the thing people are excited about and why they are signing up to, to try IT up.

Like on one hand, okay, you've got like this publishing software. And like part of ghosts, growth is just continuing to build up the number of people who are using goes to publish stuff online. And on the other hand, you have like this sort of new trend, this new problem um of like OK.

Well people now are convinced accurately that they can actually make a living online on the stuff that they published from their audiences. And that probably was less true, you know, ten years ago when you were first like getting started with us. So it's difficult to decide what direction do we go and do we go with like a shiny new thing that's definitely the future.

Or do you know we keep going with our brett and butter because like I have this the same problem with andy hackers or it's like, okay, any haka is a lot of things to a lot of people. IT started off being primarily focused on software engineers. You want to build sas companies nowadays.

There's a lot more ways to make money online and stay true to my core mission and keep IT simple. Do I pave IT, sort of you like a leaf loan in the wind? And if I do that, you know, how do I stop myself from pivoting you know, every year or two or member, maybe that's the right answer. And you're one of the few people I think you equally sort of expensive project or product .

yeah the the evolution of andy hagans equally has been awesome to to watch from the outside as well as a every slice one. When you've been gracious enough to IT to ask me to come and hang out on the inside, i've seen the audience first hand change and shift from, as you identify, that early kind of hacker sas group into our much more diverse, some wide aging group.

But I think you still have a common core of um our common core with people creating content on the internet who are passionate about that. I want to be able to do that and have uh a business that allows them to continue to do that. You have a similar core of creative people who are looking to to start a business on the internet t and find new and creative ways to do that using technology. And I think whether that sas or something else, the the core of doing something with technology on the internet to have an independent business rather than following the start roller cost to model is still a really, really strong call even if the the versions of that and the expressions of that evolve.

I think we running these companies have to make cloud decisions about what we believe the future is gonna like to some degree. Like you can survey your users and say, okay, what what are your biggest problems and they can tell you, I can tell you know, any hackers the bigger problems are like not having the confidence to get started, not having the time and the money to get started, not knowing what I idea to work on, not knowing how to grow their businesses. This is all of the pretty al problems.

But then we have to like make bets, like, for example, personally, like i'm not that really in the nfs, a lot of people are super and nfs and it's like they think it's the future. And just like I just don't I don't see IT, you know. And so it's like I don't spend a lot of time and anything people about and talking about and adding sections and the act is about IT.

And maybe ten years now, it's like i'm an idea and we missed the boat and there's some new you know hub on the internet for start up founders and created trying to make money. And it's like it's not me. Because sentient entities are IT, but that goes that I mean, it's kind of the same thing with you, right?

Like who knows if like the creator wave is like a blip on the radar five years now, everybody y'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 don't even exist today. Like anything can happen. And fears like things are moving so fast, it's risky to make these bets.

IT is, and I think it's pot and postle. It's the hot and soul of what that means to be an hacket sum extent is being forced into making these bets because whether funded startups move very quickly using capital, we can't do that and every bet goes has taken whether I was on rethinking our editor and moving something that was much more powerful on dynamic or judicial memories and subscriptions as A A different business model, we had to place that.

But so far ahead of the curve, even no js choosing that as text tag, right at the very beginning, we've had to place that. But so far ahead of everyone else, that there was absolutely no certainty that those bets were gonna pan out to be correct. And so we started with no, in two thousand thirteen, we started with A A kind of brand new dynamic semi block eda thousand fourteen d.

We started IT on membership and subscriptions in two thousand and sixteen 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 I was watching on him becoming mainstream. So we launched its editor around the same time, as wordpress shifted its editor, medium became wildly popular.

We launch your member ships and subscriptions, I think, a month before or after substate suddenly started taking off. So placing those bets really earlier, not being able to see the future, but kind of guessing what where you think it's gonna go is how you compete with funded startups as an city hack. And I believe that really, really strongly is you you don't have the advantage being able to move fast. So you have to have the advance antares of looking further ahead, trying to get there because you're going to move slow, it's going to take more time. But if you place good bet, 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, the theoretically ally, they have the exact same resources that, I mean, they could also be present. They could also look ahead and make the right back in addition to just moving quickly. So what's your framework for thinking about these big decisions that you want to make a ghost?

So what I think important is that to pursue a bet as an india cki versus to raise money against a bet as the start up a very different prospects in terms of potential upside, potential downside.

So whether you might say, I think memberships and substitutions 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 who place that bad other than yourself in the math time you willing to to spend on IT funded competitions or funded starts.

Typically, they have strings attached to the funding, right? They need to show their investors in their board that they are placing a reasonable that based on the market, which is probably going to provide a return on investment. So they buy nature can't look as far ahead in times of where they're onna use that capital where they're going to spend IT.

So it's just a different set of parameters to Operate with them. And I i've thought about this lot. I really don't think one is at a distinct advantage.

I think you you kind of coal less on the same point, whether you start early or you start later with lots of, lots of money to to get there faster. But if you're starting from a place of not having funding you, you have to be thinking further ahead. That's everything.

And then how do you win against that? That's a harder problem. But it's it's it's a lot of positioning.

I think I mean, every single one of our competitions that we've had over the years, and we've been compared at various points more or less to um wordpress than more medium nowadays, more subject, sometimes patron. Every single one of them has had between one hundred and thirty million. And what is wordpress rise? now? I think words raise one point one billion.

And we we started with a three hundred thousand dollar kicks out a campaign, you know, being put trap from from there ever since as a non profit and just growing up. And so we've been wildly outgunned a hundred percent of the time, but we've positioned ourselves differently to others by being in source, by being dealie ed, by being independent, by having rocks are let stories tell people, which is we're gonna around in ten years. We're gna be around in twenty years because the company can't be sold, they can't go anywhere. The technology can be shut down. And if you can position yourself with a compelling story in a way that is meaningful and competing in an area web, your funded counterparts can't, then I think you you have a fighting chance no matter the amount of funding that you're up against.

What's the story of ghost? I'm sitting down and like I could choose between all of these funded I could beyond word, press or patch on our medium or substantive, is IT that the french ates ghost from from being part of them? And the reason I ask, because I think there are lot of people listening who have companies that are going up against big competitors, and you've absolutely no idea what makes them special or makes them different.

a few different size to this. The the the fundamental one that we organized 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 really solve our code as open source. We structure the company where I can be bought ourselves. And then that becomes the story. That is an interesting one, because IT typically doesn't resonate with people initially. When you say, would desensitize open source on profit that like, okay, I don't understand why that would matter. And what tense happen is over a longer time span, say three to five years, people will maybe try ghost, maybe I didn't quite work for them and they'll go use some other competitive products.

Um let's say medium and then after around about the eighth or nights, pivot of medium where they want to rock out from absolutely everyone, shut down very sites, kick people off, change the design, a throne in revenue, taken out revenue, done a whole load of her in the things people then starts to remember the story that they heard a long time ago of ghost, which was always independent, always open source, always decentralize, and the meaning then has value to them. And that is a 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 in the short run, nobody values are.

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 art and competitive advantage is just being around while lots of other people start up and then subsequently shot again.

And the more directs, how do we compete against everyone else at the moment is we have three percent payment face. So another interesting benefit of choosing different structures and different things stops to us 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 a pen fits. Doesn't matter like where we already have this model. And so in short time sense, that's quite attractive to people because most other creative platform, especially the ones that are starting to get popular now, have what's often refer to as a graduation problem, which is it's very easy to get started. You can gain some success then as you start to grow and really rain lots of money.

And just as the platform starting to make money off you because your payment fees that your paying to them are meaningful, you look around, you go, hey, i've got leverage, i've got revenue and now I want a serious technology platform. I'm going to leave and i'm going to set up my own website. It's gona be something which has zero percent payment fees.

And i've graduated from the starter service to the main service to the the service that I now own and run. So a lot of the time that happens with platforms have fee spect in. And where do people end up very often on an open source dealie ed self hosting system, much like guest.

So how that applies to others is going to be very different depending on the market, depending on the other capacities in that market structure of the technology. But if you can find different ways to position yourself that is not the same as every other start out there, then you put yourself in a place where you can compete on different set of grounds. I think one of the biggest mistakes I see the makers make sometimes, and I include myself in this, because we've made this mistake a lot, is to try and compete with funding competitions on their times.

So for example, if if we want to compete with substance, and we started saying subject really good at P, R, we're gona do P, R. We're gonna trying to get news. We're going to try and get headlines.

We'd lose single time. Subset has whole lot of money raised. They have very high part investment investors who have P, R people that help them get all those ad placements.

I say I subset could like introduced a new button in their future, and they IT would be on the front page of of technical. Ch, that's the level of how good they are. P, R, if we decide trying to compete with anyone, P, R, we'd lose every single time.

I will be very, very, very foolish. But where we can win this on technology, on engineering, because they just don't have a patch honor on in that side of things. So the more we focus on our tech is Better, our engineering Better, our product is Better, our business model that is Better than the more people list to us talking about those things and focus on those things instead.

and. Those areas are much, much harder for substance to compete on, in no small part because of how quickly they they ve grown, is much easier to change technology products. When you have a hundred customers versus a thousand customers verses, i'm sure they must have over a million users at this point. Suddenly technical death becomes very, very chAllenging to solve. So trying to think of ways in which you can do something different to your competition, where your competition will have a more difficult time matching you, I think, is a really useful a mental model.

Yeah 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 is been able to pit and kind of screw everybody else. He was like dependent on their previous business model is staggering.

And they wouldn't able to do that if they didn't have a tone of money. They would have had to basically figure how to get, you know, one of their first, no one or two models working. They would have had to have committed to that.

And in a way, like in the combination of all of these other fund of competitors like needing to grow super quickly and needing to do these crazy pivots in order to like maintain their growth. Jack opposed against ghost, which has just been like slow, steady, patient, reliable and goes always been here. It's always going to be here and you're not going have to guess what goes about because you guys have been so consistent. Just like that of itself is like a huge differentiator between you and the sort of income ants.

You know, I just got a message today and my twitter inbox was something to, hey, I know you're busy, but like, i've got this idea I want to run by you and I am afraid to posted on ny acres because like somebody else could build IT and steal IT for me and then I look at like some of the people I i've talked to on the pocket, like have some one successful and I companies and you're all going up against these these huge comments. I mean, you've got, like you said, world press, sub stack, medium patron. These are all of hugely funded competitors.

I talk to android, asma on the podcast earlier this year. He is a websites to help you make websites like he's going up against like webbing and wix and square space and website and all of these other things that have been here forever and that he's still able to make in ten twenty thousand dollars a month. And there's all these other big arenas, form builder software, website builder software, blogging software, helping to be hiring sea, where I think there is room still and probably always will be room to solve the problem in a different way than the income is solving IT. And to, like, do IT yours have a different story and stand down in difference yourself.

That can be a frustrating message to here because and so you have some tangible experience that you can match that advice to IT can be so frustrating. The hex like how you know, how do I like that to? What I am doing is always, when I heard of these types of of stories and years come by, I couldn't figure out how how to make IT apply.

So it's IT can be a chance ge to translate IT into something direct. But I think to your point of someone you know being full of that idea being stolen, and I think about this a lot. Does you know this deal saying that ideas worth nothing, executions worth everything? I actually don't think that's right.

I think about this all the time um because on on one hand is absolutely right. Like a few, you can post any idea on the hackers IT doesn't matter if it's the greatest idea that has ever happens. No one's gone to steal IT. It's just not gonna 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 founder, will stagnate, will not become a success if IT is in in aid of a goal which does not inspire people, or in ative 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 everyone.

And there's a great point thereby mark zuker, 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 and marketing and business, in fundraising, in in everything. They screwed up non stop.

And the idea of twitter was a false that could not be held back because the execution was just enough to Carry critical mass of people wanted and enjoyed using IT so much that I just kept going. I think a lot of the time in my past ideas, why i've worked really, really hard on something i've thought to myself, the thing i've made us so good, it's so much Better than everything else. Like wise is not succeeding.

Wise are 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 its catch on.

And ghost was the first big change in that trajectory for me. I write a blog post about a half baked idea, and suddenly IT was on the front page of action use that were thirty thousand email dresses in my sign up form. And the story had had caught on. And that, combined with execution, is magic, if you can find that, uh, is magic, but one or the other without the the counterpart IT doesn't work. But you can lose, you can lose years of your time trying to force.

And I think the wasn't that ideas are worthless comes about because probably the common failure mode is people thinking that their ideas worth so much, and people who haven't like they haven't read that manifesto and seen that right at the top of hack news, they have no real proof. Their ideas a good one. And yet they still think IT is.

And then they are investing all this time and money and resources in the building, the perfect product. And 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 causes you have a perfect combination of like having hit on the right idea before you, a single line of code, like you knew that there is a lot of demand for what you are up to.

I with andy hackers, I had a kind of a similar situation where I didn't have any sort of manifest, but like I could see people engaging in the idea behind andy hackers on other websites and being super passionate about IT. So I didn't even have to validate the ad of my own. Like people are already doing IT.

And I think that if you take that and you 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 can probably convince you to make Better long term decisions, which then make IT easier to run your company for the long term. And that gives you the advantage that we were talking about earlier.

We're like people can rely and goes. They can count you being there, and you can learn these lessons over the years. You can catch these trends. You know you didn't have to start go to the exact perfect right moment in time to capture the creator economy trend or whatever in the news letter trend, right? You just been here forever and whatever trend comes about, you're gna 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 guess was a bad idea. I would joke I used to be contributed to the present.

We could, among the other people on the court team, you know who wants to, you had another blog platform, like everyone of us at some point, came up with the idea of, like ots seen, start over and really do IT right this time. And IT was a running joke. Who could possibly want another billion platform? There are already so many.

So I thought I was IT was a bad idea, but I was an idea I couldn't get out of my head. And so I write, I write that blog post about IT and the the market for one of a Better time. The audience educated me.

This is actually an idea that are resonated with a lot of people way more than I had expected IT or anticipate IT. So IT was a lesson in humility as much as anything that my read of, uh, what was a good or bad idea perhaps wasn't as good as I thought I was. But you're right, the the framework based on the structure in terms of decisions are get made as very different, being on profit and never being able to sell the company.

I like to say every decision is about creating 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 why i'm going to do this. And I hate IT, but you know, maybe one day i'll get acquired and then IT all be worth IT guarantee that outcomes not possible.

So then like I get three sales emails a week from or sales request emails a week from from company is saying, you know, we want to start enterprise blog and can we have a call and you can give us a demo. And Walker, what is IT called stupid? Enterprise companies are requisition team provision ing team.

One of those was you can walk everyone through IT and then send us A P, D, F. procurement. That's the department. Then you can spend about six months haggling over Price and then maybe we will sign up. I get those all the time and it's very, very simple, i'd say.

So I went themselves him and then I close the ticket because long term, um 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 if I spend my time signing up enterprise companies, i'm not going to be happier.

My salary is not gna change. The valuation of the company doesn't matter as is never get a sell doesn't make sense. So these decisions that can be very difficult when you're getting started and Sunny, a big company, they want to give you lots of money, become very easy.

And I ve been very grateful. To have that framework has goes has gone on over the years because it's allowed us to create the type of company that I 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 created a perfect thing in in terms of what you would want to work on for a long uh, period of time.

If I ever start a new company, going to have a list of these sort of constraints like these almost arbitrary sions I can make up front, that will force me to make Better decisions down the road. You know, one of them will probably be exactly you have.

Like, what if I can never sell this company? What am am I going to do if I have to do this for rest of my life and was hiring? And what if I have to actually be friends with the people that I hire, and they can just be the sort of work acai dance, but they have three people actually enjoy being around like that would change my hiring decisions.

What if I can't ever raise money and I can't live on the sort of borough time, like I have to fund this business myself? Like how will that change what i'm building and who i'm selling? IT to you, I think, is a lot these questions you can ask that forced you to probably make much healthier decisions compared to if the world is a waster in any decisions possible, we can go 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, I would encourage everyone to try out of trc constraints, whether it's in your daily schedule or in the way which you're going to go about. Idea like, I don't know, I going to use one job scrip file, one P, H, P.

File does IT almost does not matter what IT is imposed upon yourself an arbitrary constraints and watch how creativity suddenly flows from you in ways that you didn't know we're possible before because the human brain, as IT turns out, likes to get out of annoying opta constraints and find ways around find loopholes um in things and it's been a remarkable source of creativity for me to just try out constraints, make things hard to for yourself. I mean, a massive amount of ghost was born out of missing. I am no longer going to try and make a million dollar company.

I'm going to try make a company that goes out of its way to make a little money as possible, but to make a great products. So non profit structure, like it's never going to sell open source, will give away all of our intellectual property distributed before every office would just have all the team do whatever they want, live anywhere. That's very unc remarkable.

Now he was little more remarkable in two thousand and twelve. But those constraints are where so much of the creativity came from for building the products in the business later. And the good thing .

of our constraints is you can choose constraints that are like fun and positive for you. If you're just choosing arbitrary constraints, why not choose? You're gonna like I have constraint that I kind of started implementing earlier this youth and the act is where I said i'm not allowed to start anything at any act or it's not going to be super fun for me to work on.

IT has to be fun and that's just an arbitrary I can train. There's like there's no a law in the universe that the most fund stuff is going to be the most, you know, effective or successful for any actions. But as a arbitrary can train that I added.

And like a lot of decisions of flood from that, like for this pocket, like my entirety of the work out for this podcast is a couple hours of preparation with my podcast boss, ori, and then hoping on the call, like people like you and it's great. And like I don't do anything else with the podcast, I don't tittle things. I don't edit things.

I don't publish things that do zero of the stuff. I don't consider fun because of that can straight and like IT turns out that, that as side effects are actually beneficial, which is that I put more focus on my processions and they are more efficient and I can spend way more time doing other things that are important fun to me as well. And so I mean, if you're founded can say, okay, I have to do a company charge a lot per a lot of revenue producer because that's what I want to do or I have to talk to people because i'm social when I like talking to people.

IT has to be fun. IT has to be outdoors or IT has to be something that loves me, work with my hands and like you can have these constraints and still build a successful company no matter what set of constraints you have. Like there are examples of people have done IT. And I think with you um we were just talking to read this, I think a few months ago, you have his other arbitrary constrain. I much sure why you have IT IT might be like a side effective the factory or and on profit but you can't hire more than fifty people was IT at which point you you are constrained and you have to figure how you going to grow and become bigger, Better that hiring a single one person than fifty. So where is a contract come from?

I yeah I love that you put this up because it's um it's something I think more more about nowadays. So we are coming up on thanks. Twenty seven people, so are more than half way there and that the rate at which we're hiring is increasing.

So the the kind of fifty sixteen numbers very much on the horizon, it's within sight and the constraints comes from I have never worked at the 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 years. There's an a remarkable amount of refugees who where at startups they pass the kind of sixty, seventy person mark. Things stops ed being fun, middle management came in the founder, 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 have the exact same story at the same point. We said, okay, well, what was ford if we just don't grow bigger that we're just stick like not bigger than fifty ish, fifty, sixty something around that not going to like. So be really blige on about a fix number.

But around that point, what if we just put line, say, okay, no more. And what will that do? So first of all, the same as what I was talking about earlier, keeps cost as a company i'm happy to be stuck with.

I want to have a group of fifty six people where I know every single person well, not A A large group of strangers who are all just working to a common economic incentive, but A A team, 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 girls of the company? Once you have fifty, sixty people, you still have ambition.

What do you want? How do you fulfill whatever goals you have that, that kind of don't fit into the model of that size of company and the answers 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, uh, large deal zed to ecosystem.

So whereas many slashed, most companies will try to grow bigger and absorb smaller companies and kind of be the big blob consuming more and more of the to become the holy grail of what everyone wants to become, which is a monopoly that dominates the market. Kind of think about the opposite. How can we make ghost the products 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, uh, video and media that integrates tes with girls 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 precured process. Close those deals. If we can have our smaller team make a tight call that enables lots of businesses to exist around coasts 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.

Accepts 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 um have the final say in how everything should evolve. So as we kind of get closing list that size, I start thinking more and more about how can we decentralize features, how can we deal ze the architecture of products and how can we decentralize the market to be able to create opportunities for other businesses to exist with a ghost.

And that's one of the things i'm most excited about at the moment as we have this two sided ecosystem volver, where we have, on the one hand, creators that decided to use goes now to build subscription businesses and are already today making more money per year from ghosts and 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 dropping and there's a handful of other smaller sting companies are popping up for ghost. And the more of these that pop up and becomes successful, the more excited I am about what could be possible for the future of cost.

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 to me, my brother, and we have an engineered stripe. And beyond that, we have a budget tires from contractors and step to help out. But like we a very small court team. And so it's very similar constantia.

Well, how do we build this thing and get, like you are saying, like some of the benefits that big companies have, but not like the downside having to manage tony people and jump through a bunch er hobs are a bunch of paper and like all the things that just make IT not that fun anymore. To run really big company. And I think that that like forces some creativity on your part and it's for the best because the end I think you was a totally achievable goal like with andy hackers.

What that means is basically empowering community members and volunteers. We can have hundreds of meet ups around the world every month, but I don't have to lift a finger, even know what's happening at the meet ups because other people want to do this for their own sake. Sort of their incentives were aligned to do IT.

And I imagine that it's much more exciting prospect to me to enable hundreds, if not thousands of independent businesses that are threading ecosystem buses, create one enormous magnum monaro company that controls everything that they are, 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 brittles too OK. I was just reading a post by casey new noon. He was like a fame to journalist who went andy on substances year. And he was talking about how much less brittle IT fields where a bigger publication, just one month of you one quarters, like, you know, bad ad revenue, could cost reporters their jobs. Wherewith ham, he has so many subscribers that is so unrealistic for his business to tank, like so many tens of thousands of people would have to, like, simultaneous ly decide that they don't like him anymore for that to happen and like that just a place of relative comfort. And I think that's also true when you don't have everything under this model of the entity and said you have an ecosystem.

absolutely.

What's your advice? I was in the pocket of the same question. What's your advice for flagged any hackers now or or and middle twenty one creative economies in full swing.

It's no longer gifts of a buzz M, A buzz d, but like people are actually making living in publications on internet. And yet all the old stuff still works. People are still starting news assesses.

People are still making a killing in cyp to. People are still, you know, making new podcast successful and popular despite the fact of these, right? We're in this new world. I think we're just there is more ways to make money in the internet and make living in the internet than ever. What your advice for somebody who's just seen to this and they have no idea what they want to do and they are just getting started.

I'll give you two answers to this, a biased one and an unbias one and I believe both of the older equal amount of mary, the biased answer is I think the greater economy and the subscribe business model outside of software holds an believable amount of potential for the next uh, decade that's coming up and it's opening up the doors to people to be able to benefit from the subscription business model for occurring revenue who don't need to learn how to or ever have the ability to code because I 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 rested in IT myself in in right seeing that future become a reality. And I wouldn't be unless I thought there was this some real merit to IT. You're not seeing the explosion of things like ghosts and substance compete all the same time because there's nothing happening there. And unlike crypto, the value is extraordinary ily tangible.

It's creating businesses around audiences in a sibiu tic relationship with publishers that I hope will also eventually put that the trust back in janis m, when a journalist eventually so I call around to figuring out that publishing content to serve audiences rather than get them to click on ants is a much Better, uh, model for journalist and people as a whole. So I think that tons and tons of opportunities there and it's such a low risk, low costs business to try out. If you're just getting started, you're not sure where to go.

The other french benefit of IT is establishing an audience in growing in audience is the single highest leverage thing you can do for starting any other type of business down, down the line. There's a great quote in the strike book called the hygrometer handbook, which has stories of how lots of big companies grew very, very quickly. And I covered the exact quote.

But the sentiment of IT is about how most companies think that their advantage is in building products. And they product visionaries and they could create any product they wanted and sell IT into any market and be very, very good at IT book 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 coughed out of football 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 saw payments, and then later they had its strike. Attlebridge entrepreneurship pick, want to incorporate companies and then recurring billing and then capital. And 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 growing audience of people who are interesting what you do in 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 ever .

and Peters great that I mean very hugely with no madlib. This is a no mad to the ham for like the future and technology around that. And then he's just built product after product after product to the same audience yeah and like I mean, what mode OK I think makes millions of dollars a year and that just like job board that we launched the .

audience at single page before a creative of constraints. So I I would say the tones of occurring for paid newsletters, websites, causes all that can stuff. If you wanna have a good start with that, track out goes.

But yes, this is a very basic answer. My unbias answer, I think, as always to everyone, would be one, just start, stop fucking in reading articles about inspiration and how to succeed and the lean start up hamburger, just start making stuff. You'll learn faster.

You will go further. Even if everything you do flips and fails. You will progressed much more quickly by doing that.

And out, 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 um products they are around right now.

Subjects are great example. Actually respect them a lot for this. If you try to use subjects a day, the experience is dreadful.

IT is fucking awful. I got that product is bad. If you sign up for IT, there's button all over the place, half of the checks.

Xe don't make sense and there's like a thousand of them. But people are going nuts for subjects that has the minimum amount of execution for a very good idea presented very simply. So I would say try and build more stuff, more cRicky at a lower quality than you think you need to succeed. And if you have the right idea and you are able to create something that people buy into the story of, that is the best possible starting .

point you can have love in. John Ellen, thanks for come on the show. Can you let listeners know where they can go to learn more about what you ripped to you with ghost and what you ript to you in your personality .

as well with red diverge? Definitely you can find all my links, personnel letter and things that i'm doing personnel on Better at john alan and for ghost, check out ghost at dog. Ah that'll tell you everything the product does and how you can create a wonderful thriving content business within the greater economy yourself, which you can should do not .

self page right just.