Ghost: $411k Annual Revenue with a team of 6
A lot of hate for ghost here but I'm a paying subscriber and love it. Building a custom theme is really easy (found it much more pleasant than WP) and they give you enough hooks in to the core engine to largely achieve whatever design you need.
The interface and post editor is a piece of cake to use. The only bit that I think still needs work is the separate account management interface - lots of room to improve the UX.
I will be honest. I use ghost as my blogging platform for about a year, and in comparison to wordpress... it just doesn't hold up. Everything from stuff as big as upgrading, mid range as plugins, and even simple things like spell check were overlooked (at least in the version I have). It kind of reminds me of the Pepsi Vs. Coke test. Went to it for that initial appeal of simplicity.. and now am very dissatisfied due to how much its lacking.
This is from April 2015. Latest figures are here:
That seems rather disappointing considering the amount of hype the project got with the kickstarter, and then launch, etc.
I've played around with an install and ran a blog on it for a bit, and was never too impressed. The functionality and features all seem simplistic (Which isn't a bad thing in itself), but made me wonder why I had to download what felt like hundreds of packages with npm when I installed it.
Even with all of the features they promised in the kickstarter that have now been cut, I never quite understood why they needed so much funding to create the project.
I hope they are able to do better in the future, if only to have a good alternative to WordPress, and to maybe deliver on things that they have shelved.
Edit: Looks like ghost has 38 direct dependencies in NPM, of which many have their own dependencies, etc.
$411K annual revenue with a team of 6? $68.5K per employee? And that's revenue, not income?
Don't quit your day job.
Regardless of whether you feel these numbers are "impressive" or not, this kind of financial transparency is amazing and exceedingly rare. Kudos to the team, I personally use Ghost for my blog and love it.
( Also the quoted number is from April here is the latest https://ghost.baremetrics.com )
Very interesting looking at their live stats: https://ghost.baremetrics.com/
I noticed they had 654 failed charges, and over 4,133 customers, that's 15.8%. That's around $6,200 of revenue they failed to collect first time each month - basically, a whole person's salary.
Ghost was one of the most disingenuous kickstarters I've ever seen: the features that got people excited got cut pretty much right away, showing that the team was never serious about it. The blog itself came to light with some heinous overlooked areas in the user management, stuff that nobody has any right to get wrong in this day and age.
My personal opinion after being a user for a while is that we need less of this kind of projects (a LOT less) and more quality software.
That is pretty awesome, if they can keep it lean and treble their subscriber base they could likely become operationally cash flow positive. I built a blog using their stuff, after getting to know Handlebars is was pretty straight forward, and I really like that in 'production' mode it is essentially a static page (so easy to serve lots of variable bandwidth with nginx). Haven't deployed it yet though because, well it got to be 90% done and then ... ooh shiny!
This seems like a good case for keeping your team size small. Those sort of numbers split two ways instead of six would turn this into a huge win. Hopefully they'll keep ramping upwards and find ways to avoid adding any more headcount to dip into the pie.
This also seems like a great market to have jumped on, and I'm kicking myself for not having done so. Blogger used to offer essentially this same product: Easy editing tools with FTP export so you could host raw HTML cheaply instead of having to deal with keeping a LAMP box alive to run Wordpress. But they killed it off and left a huge hole in the market that sat vacant for years before these guys stepped in to fill it.
Nice work.
I think it's fair to point out they are a Not for Profit Organization: https://ghost.org/about/contact/
They don't seem to be making a lot, considering all the hype surrounding Ghost for the last year or more.
I am using Ghost (self hosted) for my blog and find it brilliant but I think the ecosystem needs more time to develop and sustain itself. So the jury is still out I guess...
$411k isn't impressive and it isn't sad either. To me that sounds about right for a team of 6 just getting started. I'm sure that won't support the salaries those people could get in the valley.
For my use case -- a simple blog -- Ghost felt a better fit. Wordpress has so much stuff visually in the beginning that I felt I didn't need. Ghost on the other hand hides that away, and then when I started tweaking I was beginning to realize there's a lot more it than meets the eye. I guess I need that initial simplicity.
I love the platform and always asked myself how they were making money, because it isn't me (I combined it with Jeckyll and upload it as HTML).
I'm struggling to think of why a startup would want to do this? What's it achieve?
What was this blog platform which was html only ? I remember seeing one some time ago, but I don't remember which it was. It was a very clean, simplistic way of posting things online, I wonder if it's ghost after all.
This post is from back in April (2015).
has someone made a php clone yet?
Are you a paying customer or paid evangelist coz I'm sorry this reads like an advertorial to me?
Meh. My consulting company has a $1MM revenue with a team of 4.
Over promise and under deliver. Apparently that's the motto of the folks at Ghost.
I'm really disappointed at the progress of this project that I thought would take on WP in 1 or 2 years time since launch but we're heading to year no 3 and they still at 0.6 milestone with no stable and production-ready WP caliber version in sight.
Shame that it had to be like this. I was really looking forward to abandoning ugly and frustrating PHP to JS/Node and bringing new life to blogging platforms but shame.
I couldn't give a rats ass about revenue. What's the profit?
Why would you blogged about your startup constantly increasing revenue? I see the only reason.