How members got added to Ghost

I was digging through some old design files yesterday and came across two of the first ever sketches I made for the idea of memberships and subscriptions in Ghost, from way back at the very beginning of 2016.

These seem pretty obvious, now, but at the time nothing like this really existed. It's kind of amazing how close the sketches ended up being to what we actually built.

In 2016 Ghost was a nice, clean blogging platform that worked great, but it didn't do anything fundamentally valuable or useful compared to [all of the other platforms for writing on the internet out there].

We hypothesised that anonymous pageviews weren't particularly interesting, and that meaningful relationships with direct subscribers were. Blogs existed. Newsletters existed. What if the two combined? Ben Thompson was a big inspiration — what he was doing seemed like it was the future.

Now, why was I digging through old sketches? I was actually looking for another one that I made back in 2016 for an entirely different concept. One we're about to start working on this year. More on that later.