What's up everybody? This is Cortland from Indiehackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How do they get to where they are today? How do they make decisions, both of their companies and in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their business a stick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own profitable internet businesses. Today, I'm talking to John O'Nolan, the founder of Ghost. John, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me. It's nice to be here and to see you in person this time around.

Yeah, you're a real person.

I know, incredible. We're recording this in person at my apartment in San Francisco. What brings you to SF, John? Why are you here? Well, I was here to have a meeting at Stripe. and when I said that at immigration yesterday, the officer who was there, usually they

question me about like, why have you been to Egypt? Why have you traveled so much? And this time I got

a 10 minute grilling on when Stripe's IPO. Because I've heard it's going to be by the end of the

year. So my immigration officer was convinced that I knew something he didn't. I think he wanted

insider trading or something. Wow. Pretty wild. I was like, this is like something straight out of HBO. You know, like when he goes to the doctor and the doctor's pitching him his startup on Silicon Valley, felt exactly like that. I was like, this can't be real. Only in the Bay Area will the immigration officers grill you about tech IPOs. Yeah. It was almost too good to be true.

But yeah, no, I had a couple of meetings at Stripe, and that was fun. And so, yeah, good, nice, get a chance to meet you in person. Yeah. So you are, as I mentioned, the founder of Ghost. You've been on the podcast before, but that was two years ago. A lot has happened since then. You recently released Ghost 3.0. why don't you walk us through sort of a whirlwind tour of the early days of Ghost just so people can catch up if they haven't heard the story before?

Yeah. So the lightning recap, I used to be one of the second heads of design at WordPress on the open source product. And after WordPress started moving to be more of a generic website

builder, I set up Ghost as a non-profit open source publishing platform built with modern

technology, so Node.js and focused solely on publishing, not on any other use cases. And it started

out as a blog post, turned into a Kickstarter campaign, and then launched in 2013 with a sustainable business model.

So it's an open source product, but you can buy managed hosting directly from us.

And that's how we fund the non-profit organization that has done very well since then.

So our revenue today available on India hackers is 1.83 million a year, I think, and your recurring revenue.

I think last time I was on the show was 700,000 about?

Yeah, so you've more than doubled your revenue in the last two years, which, yeah, I imagine that's been a whirlwind journey.

Or has it been slow and steady and uneventful?

More slow and steady, I would say.

The trajectory of revenue growth

since the last time we talked has only changed once and not in a really big way, but it's been

very predictable throughout. There's been no major kind of crazy inflections or business points.

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