WordPress Alternative Making $6 Million a Year

Ghost is a publishing platform for independent writers and creators to monetize their work, founded by John O’Nolan in 2013.

As of this writing, Ghost’s annual recurring revenue is over $6 million 💰

This is remarkable considering John started Ghost as an open-source project with the intention of creating a platform focused solely on publishing, not profits.

🚀 Apparently John launched Ghost after years of seeing WordPress evolve from a simple blogging platform into the gigantic content management system that it is now.

From 2009 to 2011, he was actually the deputy head of the WordPress UI Group. He then resigned and started Ghost, wanting to bring the focus back to publishing content.

After some initial mockups, John’s proposal for Ghost went viral on Hacker News and he raised 8x his Kickstarter goal of £25,000 to fund initial development 🤑

What’s unique about Ghost is its structure as a non-profit foundation. They make money by offering hosting services. That pays the bills and ensures the team stays focused on the mission.

In John’s words…

We are not just making this because we want to sell it, we are making this because it needs to exist.

In Jan 2022, John tweeted…

This time last year — we set a goal to have revenue generated by @Ghost for others, exceed our own. Now, 12 months later, we’ve hit that goal and gone even further. 📈

Today, Ghost revenue: $4,200,000 ARR

Creator revenue, generated using Ghost: $10,200,000 ARR

Ghost competes by offering a clear value proposition: 100% open source, decentralized, and 0% payment fees. No lock-in.

John reported back in February 👇

2023 update — publisher revenue on Ghost growing exponentially faster than platform revenue. Now over $25M ARR.

It’s a pretty great time to start an independent subscription business to fund creative work

John plans to keep the team small and enable an ecosystem of independent businesses around Ghost.

His advice to other founders….

If you feel like you have no idea what you’re doing, well, welcome to the club. None of us have any idea what the fuck we’re doing, and anyone who says otherwise is lying. All of us are just guessing, experimenting, trying things. Not a single one of us was ever “sure” or “ready” or “confident” at any point. 

At a certain point you just have to jump.

📝 He also writes in the comments of that article…

Harry Potter was rejected by 12 different publishers, I started at least 7 failed projects before Ghost, Pieter Levels only made NomadList because his last project earned $0.00 so he decided to start 12 new projects, of which most of them failed.

The difference between success and failure is often whether you learn something and get up to try again, or just say “fuck this shit” and give up.

You aren’t a beautiful unique snowflake that gets a free pass on failure. Don’t look at the world around you and assume that everyone else has it easy. We all have problems. We all have failures. We’re all struggling.

Nobody ever said it was going to be easy.