John O'Nolan

150+ subscribers

Founder/CEO @ Ghost.org — Geographically restless. Publishing, open source, and independent business around the world.

Ghost

A collection of 2 posts

John O'Nolan

8 months ago

Ghost

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

John O'Nolan

9 months ago

Ghost

A decade after being rejected by YC

About 10 years ago I applied to Y Combinator with Ghost. At the time we were trying to get $120k in funding for 7% equity — but got rejected (twice). So instead we launched on Kickstarter and then bootstrapped. Today Ghost has earned over $25Million from customers for 0% equity, and all of Y Combinator's own blogs run on Ghost. Most of the time things don't work out quite the way you thought they would, but often they work out just fine.

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