MBA1853 Extended Interview: John O’Nolan – Building a Wildly Successful Yet Balanced Business

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Hey oh.

Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show Business Insights delivered on the daily every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is a very special and extended interview, a new format we've been experimenting with recently on the show. Today's conversation is with John o'. Nolan. Earlier in John's career he was the deputy of design over at WordPress and now he's the founder and runs Ghost.org which has quickly become WordPress's biggest competitor. A platform I've been talking about a lot recently because I believe it's the number one go to blogging platform for content creators. But in today's conversation with John, we really pull back the curtain. We get into John's beautiful mind and understand why he started Ghost. What are some of the important questions he asked himself so he can decide what kind of business he wants to build, what kind of work he wants to do, and how he wants to live his life. If you've ever wondered how can you build a highly successful business but still have an enjoyable lifestyle, then you're going.

To absolutely love today's episode.

Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I'm so excited to share with you this conversation with John o' Nolan because it's one of the best chats I've had in a long time period with anybody and I'm so happy that I recorded it so I could share it with you. I met John back in 2019. We were both invited to A conference, the running remote conference in Bali. And we quickly became fast friends. Full transparency. I was just very interested in getting to know John because he was so interested, interesting as a person. He possessed qualities and honestly, a life that I really admired. He runs a fully remote team that runs Ghost. They're pretty slim, very efficient and are growing at a really nice pace. They're so, so successful, in my opinion because they built an incredible product, a really solid product, which is half of all the work you need to do in running a business. Well known brands use Ghosts like Tinder, DigitalOcean, Unsplash Square, Airtable, the Stanford Review. I can go on and on and on because I'm so proud of John. He's done such a great job with his company. But today's conversation is not so much about that. It's about how he did it all. But more importantly, how did he come up with the idea that he wanted to do this, that this is the path he should take. How to run a business in a highly competitive space and how not to lose all your hair in the process. How to still enjoy life. You're going to absolutely love this conversation. So without further ado, I'm going to share with you that conversation. But I'll be back to wrap up today's episode a little bit later on. But for now, enjoy the chat with John o'. Nolan.

So good to have you, John o'. Nolan. It's been a while. Last time we spoke or saw each other in person was 2019, is that correct?

Yeah, I think last time I saw most people I know was 2019. But yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

As I mentioned earlier, John, you started Ghost pretty much on your own at the start and then grew your team slowly. You have a very interesting business model. You're a not for profit. You are also totally remote. And there's a couple things we're going to go into about your business and how you run your business and how you got to where you are today. But before all that, I want to talk a little bit about you as a person because it's funny because I remember we spent a few days, we met each other at a conference. We were fortunate enough to be invited to speak at a conference in Bali. And I was just loving every moment of hanging out with you. I just felt like we became fast friends and all our conversations were just friendly and just as if we don't know anything about business. Like it was just. That's what I love about it. And then, and Now I'm like, I have all these business questions, but I'm glad that's how our relationship started, because it was. It was just a natural kind of progression.

So my first kind of the best conversations, it was great.

I mean, we were making jokes, and it was just a lot of fun. So the thing that struck me the most about you, John, is that I felt like out of all the entrepreneurs I know, and I know a lot, and I met a lot and worked with a lot, you're somebody that strikes me as somebody that really values balance. I feel like you're very balanced in life. Like, you love your business and you love your work, but it's not everything to you. Like, you have a life and you have a relationship, and you value culture and you value hobbies. And, like, I just felt like this guy is probably more balanced than most. Probably I'm a little envious and would love to tap into that. So I want to learn a little bit more about that. I want to know, like, is that intentional? Did you actually say, okay, I want to build a business around the way I want to live? Or did you say, you know, did you work yourself to the bone and say, oh, no, this is stupid. I'm going to start being more balanced? I'd love to hear more about that.

It's interesting that you. You chose that particular word of balance, because after a lot of years of me kind of talking about the way in which I think about business and the things that I really value, balance is kind of the word that I had landed on and really come to hold as my kind of ideal and truth in life. And up until only very recently, I don't think I'd really settled on that word, but it's fine. Funny that you've picked up on it without really any sort of prompt. It's kind of funny, but I mean, to answer your question, for me, it's very much intentional, and it's probably the thing I spend the most time thinking about over and above business growth or revenue growth or product growth or customers. It's balance and how to achieve any number of those things at the same time as their opposites.

I really find that interesting that you talked about, like, it's more than just your habits. It's the way you see life. It's kind of almost the meaning of your life. You know, like, I don't want to get too woo or too spiritual here, or why not? Who cares? But the point is that. The point is, I think we get bombarded with so many pieces of advice, so many quotes, so many books, and sometimes we don't actually summarize it. We sometimes you don't say, like, what does this all mean for me? And I like the fact that you are reflective about that. Do you take time to reflect in your busy schedule?

I do. And I think this kind of all started for me with a lot of reflection in going down this path. Before Ghost, probably like many of your listeners, I was young entrepreneur with big dreams. I wanted, you know, I wanted to make it. I wanted to make lots of money. I wanted to do something successful. I had big ideas about what that might look like. But I always found myself wondering. And whenever I traveled, I found myself wondering more and more, where does it all lead? Like, what are the eventual conclusions? And when you. I call that game what's next? And it's a game I think everyone's played. You know, you imagine having huge business or winning the lottery or, you know, some, some windfall of lots and lots of money, and you go, what next? And in the beginning, that game is really fun. You imagine, you know, buying a Ferrari, quitting a job, traveling the world, fulfilling all kinds of life's ambitions, and then it gets a little harder. You know, maybe you start a business, give charity, learn language, and then the longer you keep playing that game, it gets harder and harder. Like once you've bought all the houses and the Apple products and the seen all the movies and done all the frivolous things, you know, you've done your kind of grand theft daughter equivalent life, I know I could spend my way through all those kind of dreams. And two, three years, what's next? Then? You know what? Then you wake up on a Saturday morning, it's sunny outside, you have no obligations, there's nothing you have to do. What do you choose to do? What's next then? And that game bugged me for years. And my reflection took the form of thinking through that game endlessly and being very frustrated with not coming up with an answer to it. And eventually one day I found myself sitting on a beach in the Philippines watching some new friends I'd made who are kite surfing in front of me. I had a laptop on my knees and I was writing some open source software. At the time, I was contributing to WordPress as the Deputy head of design. And the answer hit me like a ton of bricks. My what next at the end of the rainbow was I would be doing this. I would be traveling, making friends with people, kite surfing, working on open source code that I enjoyed. And at the time I was making maybe $20,000 a year. And while that's, you know, by no means the. An amount that you could retire on and live forever on, it really changed my perspective on what I needed to achieve my ultimate end goal. Because if my ultimate end goal was once you're bored of the, the Ferrari, what you want to do is sit on a beach in board shorts, watch kite surfers and write some code for free and open source projects. The requirement to get from point A to point B, if you cut out the middle, seemed like an incredible shortcut. And so the journey of ghosts began with a reflection of what if you don't need that middle part? What if you don't need mass amount of wealth to reach your ultimate end goal? If you just play out your end goal far enough to a logical conclusion where it's gone beyond money anyway and everything else started from that point. And I've, I've kind of tried to hold that as my, my North Star throughout. And it's, it's so far it's taken me to interesting places and I guess has become the thing that I care about the most now.

I love that. I love that because you, you lived out, you know, Bray Brand calls it. You played the tape like you played through the tape, you've seen the show before, let's go. And you kind of played it out and said, okay, well what's. And you saved yourself a whole bunch of years. This is a small question, but I think it's quite important for people that are listening and I want to know the answer to this. When you played the tape, when you went through that whole scenario in your head and you said, what next? What next? What next? You got to the conclusion, you're like, you know what? This is what I love to do. I should just do this and be content with that. What makes you say, you know what? That's a sound idea. I'm right, I'm going to do that. And not question yourself and say, who am I to say this is stupid? What are we talking about? Like, you know, like, no one does this. Like, most people will not trust their own advice. What makes you trust your own advice?

I don't know if I know the answer to that, but at the time I was already doing it. I think that helped a lot. I had. It was a moment of realization that I was already confronted with. It was in front of me. And that made it a lot easier to shift my perspective of what crazy huge idea do I need to come up with to achieve a different Life to a new question. And the new question was the start of everything for me. And the new question was, what small, silly idea that I've thrown aside up until now could I pursue that would allow me to continue to do what I'm doing right now, easily for decades, not just a few years. And the new question took me on a new journey. Whereas the old question, this big question of like, what huge idea do I need to be successful? Had led me nowhere but dead ends. And so I don't know if it was trust in myself or just a better new question to follow that I haven't not yet found the end of that helps with that.

Have you always asked yourself questions? Or like, you know, try to come up with better questions to ask yourself?

To some extent, because this is a kind of a tangent. But I have what's called aphantasia. So I'm fascinated by this.

By the way I'm fascinated by this. I remember when you told me this, it blew my mind and I was borderline worried I was being offensive because I was asking so many questions. But go ahead, please explain.

So for people who don't know, affrontation means I have no visual or auditory concept of imagination. So when I close my eyes and think of anything at all, really, all I see is black and all I hear is nothing. Now, apparently the rest of the world calls this meditation. For me, that's my day to day existence. And it has advantages and it has drawbacks. Um, it's. It's a lot harder to be stressed if your mind is perpetually clear. Um, obviously it's also a lot harder to do creative things like compose songs in your head or come up with beautiful artwork or designs in your head and then turn them into reality. Um, so imaginations are spectrum. Some people have what's called hyper fantasia, which is kind of like being able to project holograms and base reality and experience the world in a totally different way. If you remember Michael Scoville from Prison Break, yes. That was like an example of hyperphantasia. And aphantasia is the opposite. Most people are somewhere in the middle, somewhere along that spectrum. But so when you say, do you ask yourself questions a lot? I do, but the way in which I think about problems or challenges is in a very abstract way. So I don't hear a voice in my head asking myself literal questions. But what I do do is process lots and lots of data. A good metaphor for aphantasia that I've heard used before is it's like having a computer with three CPUs and no monitor. So you have a command line, you know, you have all the power. It's all right there. But there's no mouse, there's no desktop. You know, it's just raw power to churn through data and maybe find interesting patterns in it that you wouldn't otherwise notice if you were limited to what's on a monitor. So in that sense, yeah, I ask myself questions all the time, and I'm kind of processing ideas all the time. But it's perhaps not in the same way people might traditionally ask themselves questions. Obviously, it's very hard for me to imagine. No, it's the other side of this.

No.

But this is a common thread, I hear, in a lot of exceptional people that are successful in a lot of different things in life. And it's not.

It could be different.

Like, for example, a lot of people ask me, omar, you often don't worry about what people think, and you'll take a stand and you'll take risks and you will try things and you'll fall on your face and you're not worried about it. Where does that come from? And I was just like. And I had to really think about it. And it's just because growing up in the US as a minority, my parents were Egyptian. They're Egyptian. They migrated to America somewhere around 11, 12. Realize not everybody's gonna like me. I'm different. I'm weird. You know, like, I got a weird last name. People go on Disney World for vacation. I'm going to Egypt, and they're laughing at me because I'm whatever. They think there's camels and there's no cars. So at some point, I accepted the fact that not everybody's gonna like me from a young age. And it just was ingrained in me. So I think I kind of used that challenge in my life to my advantage. And I feel like you have done the same because you just by habit have become a problem solver. And that's what software is. You're solving problems constantly. And what I find fascinating is I highly recommend people to go to ghost.org which is John's software company. It's a beautifully designed software. To be at the helm of that company and not be able to even envision what that looks like if I close that monitor and you can't see what the dashboard looks like in your head. Like, that's incredible. That's incredible to me. And it's because you've built that muscle of I don't know if Problem solving.

Is the word for it, but basically.

You'Re trying to figure things out because you're trying to work around a certain situation. Does that sound correct?

Yeah, for sure. Of course. One of the great and typical iron nurses. I'm. I can't see things or hear things in any way, shape or form. So my two biggest passions in life are user interface design and music. And I pursue them non stop in work and outside of work, but with great frustration because my creative process is. I have a single creative process which is trial and error. And that is not the most fun creative process. I cannot conceive of anything in advance. So I have to try things, then see if they make sense or if I like them in the context of having already done it and decide whether or not to change it. There's no conceiving of it before creating it. And that's very, very difficult and very. I annoy myself in the process of trying to design anything, make any art, make any music, but a lot of trial and error, I guess.

Yeah, but I think we have that in common. Like, I'm a trial and error guy. Like, I'm like Nicole, my business partner and my wife. She's the kind of person, like, you know, for example, if, for she. If she was going to start a podcast, for example, she would spend a month researching it, figuring out, looking at the competition, understand what's the sound, what are we going to do, how are we going to tweak the music? All this, I would just put out episode one in one weekend, you know, like, I would just figure it out. Do I like this? Okay, maybe not. Let's tweak this changes. And it's funny because the way I approach things sounds crazy to her.

Like, why would you do that?

Like, you have all this time you can chip. And the way she does it, I'm like, what? But I can definitely relate to the. I just feel like it's faster for me just to put it out and then tweak it. You don't have a choice. But in some ways, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of people that I've, you know, read said, you know, it's good to fail fast and just, you know, get it going.

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You got something going a few years back with ghost@ghost.org Please correct me if I'm wrong. You know, you came from the world of WordPress, very much involved in, in the publishing content game, I have to say. First of all, like, I started my first online business in 2001. This is prior to WordPress was even prevalent. Like, you know, so when WordPress came, it was like a godsend. I was like, what in the world?

This is so easy to use.

And you know, like, with my minimal development skills, I can make a lot of things happen. You decided to build something better, right? Because I believe it's better. Recently on an episode I just published, you know, I can no longer recommend WordPress as the best. And I'm not saying this because you're here. It's just unfortunately kind of morphed into something that is too much. It's just too big now and it's just not too clunky. It's not what it needs to be for most people. So why did you decide and think that you could build something better than WordPress?

So this kind of picks up from the last part of the story where I at the point at which I started thinking about what small idea that I've thrown aside in the past as not being worthy enough of achieving mass success could I pursue that would allow me to continue the life I'm currently leading, which I'm quite enjoying. The idea that had been stuck in my head for at least two years that I had discarded over and over again because it was a silly idea, was what if you reimagined WordPress because having worked on the WordPress core team and seen it grow from very small CMS into quite very popular blogging platform, then into pretty large content management system, I kind of seen it undergo this transition from being a tool for a specific purpose, which was writing and creation online to a generic website builder that was for absolutely anything and absolutely everyone. But all of my interests and all of my client work I was doing as a web designer was all around publishing, all around writing, all around blogging. And I had always or for a very long time I thought about what if you rethought WordPress made a new open source content management that was true to the original ideals of WordPress, of free open software that does one thing really incredibly well and that's serve creators online. And I'd turn that idea aside because who wants yet another blogging platform, you know? And that was true in 2012 as much as it is now. But that idea was still in my head. And lo and behold, the same year I published an idea as a blog post about ghosts and how I would reimagine WordPress. Medium launched very popular platform called Subtle was around at the time. And there was this suddenly this mini renaissance of all kinds of new blogging platforms and lots of interest for people who maybe would consider yet another blogging platform. So that was, that was the start. That was the origin, was accepting an idea that I'd previously thrown away as not being good enough and thinking through how to make it work. If you change the ambition from I need this to be a million dollar business and make me really, really successful to I don't need this to be a million dollar business, I need this to be a $20,000 business. I figured I could make almost anything a $20,000 business, you know, and suddenly the idea didn't seem so silly anymore. You know, you wouldn't need it to be the next Twitter or the next Facebook. You just need it to serve a smaller group of people who really want that one thing. And that freeing myself of the constraints of huge ambition allowed me much, much more creativity in thinking about what might be possible. And so that was, that was the beginning. That was the seed of trying to rethink WordPress and do something similar, but different.

So what year did you put Ghost on Kickstarter and launch Ghost?

Beginning of 2013. So it was one blog post I put out into the world. I said, here's my idea, thinking it will probably flop, no one will be interested. And then at least I would have written about the idea. And I could stop thinking about it 30,000 email subscribers later because I had a little box at the bottom that said this doesn't exist, but if you want it to, leave your email and I'll let you know if I ever build it, 30,000 email addresses later I decided to make a prototype and put it on Kickstarter. That took about six months or so. And then the initial goal of the Kickstarter campaign was just to raise $30,000 to get it going just as a small project. Completely true to all of the things I've said so far. What happens in actual fact was we ended up raising $300,000. It's the second. Was at the time the second most funded open source software project of all time on Kickstarter. And then Microsoft came in with a pretty generous, we don't really want anything in return sponsorship of another $50,000 on the end of that. So it quickly went from, and this has kind of been consistent through every step of the journey since then is every time I've sort of shrank my ambitions and gone, you know what? I'm not going to shoot for the moon. I'm going to shoot for just a thing that I is smaller, that I really care about. It has blown up into something much bigger than I thought it would be. And this was the first and second iteration of that happening.

So I want to talk about that a little bit because we're going to talk about what Ghost is today because it's very different than what it was when you launched. And I mean by very different, like you're really not competing with purpose anymore. Like you're a total different market. Um, yeah. And you, at some point, I'm guessing you decided to kind of go into that market and pivot and kind of say, I don't want to use pivot, but just say, you know what, we need to niche down and differentiate for, for various reasons. But I want to first talk about what did that MVP look like? Because I know a lot of people are listening when they think about starting a business, you know, they think about McDonald's and Walmart like, no, like, you know, sell some hamburgers at the flea market, you know. So what did your MVP look like so that we can see the contrast, you know, eight years later?

Yes, I think this is really important. The MVP we brought, Kickstarter, I don't know if you could even call it that. We had a. We had a few things working. We had like the very, very basics of an editor kind of that you could demo. So I made some screencasts that were part of the Kickstarter video and a bunch of mock ups, obviously, which were mostly Photoshop. I would say maybe 30% of the product was working and it is a total of, I don't know, maybe 50 files worth. Of code, of which a lot of that was other people's code because dependencies. But to kind of illustrate how much was not there, there's a point in the demo video where I kind of dragged and drop an image, ostensibly uploading it to the product, but it didn't work. You know, like if you drag an image onto a browser window that doesn't support uploading and the icon just zooms back to the desktop. It did that and I screen recorded it and I just cut out the part where it zoomed back to the desktop and then skip to the next part with. With an image placed in the editor.

It's going to do it.

It's going to do. It looks like an instant image upload. And a lot of the animations and things that were kind of just popping in in the demo video, which is screenshots. So it was, I guess what some people call a smoke test. It was kind of half there. There were bits and pieces working, but a lot of it was faked, for a better word. Yeah, it wasn't the important stuff, you know, I mean, it wasn't. It wasn't like, there's no way we could build this products and we're pretending we can. It was, we can build this products and we've built the most important parts like, and then we're going to fake the rest to make it kind of look good. Because what I didn't want to do was spend two years building a prototype, taking it to Kickstarter, losing the momentum, only to discover $3,000 flop. That would be two years of my life gone. I wanted to get out the door quickly, validate. Is there enough interest in this? It's all very well getting people to say, oh, that's a great blog post, awesome idea, but would they say, that's a great idea and I'm going to give you money for it? That's a very, very different question. So I wanted to just make it happen fast, see if the idea was real and then if it was, then, you know, then we could go back and do it properly. Then we could go back and, you know, really build it and cut the deal with the cut corners.

Right.

Which we did.

Yeah. And when you first started, what Ghost did was basically, you can publish blog posts, right? Yeah. So that's. That was a promise, right?

Yeah.

Okay. So I want to highlight that because some people don't think that's sexy enough. People think that, oh, I need everything my competition does and more even to launch. You know, like at that point, you did Far less than Squarespace and WordPress and all these other, you know, competitors. So why did people sign up if it did less?

I think if you have a market where the. And there's many of these, where the leading alternative, or the leading player, for want of a better word, is almost universally exhausting people by how complex it is, you can do almost nothing as an alternative. And it will still be a fresh air for people because they're just so tired of how confusing and how complex the other thing is. So our strongest, most vocal early adopters, they just wanted to publish a blog post. They didn't want to deal with all of the plugins and the security risks and the slow performance. So even just solving that one thing, even without all of the other features which were important that we did introduce later, that was already meaningful to them to the extent that they would want to use the products. The second part that I think helped was we had a story to go with the product that was thought through. It wasn't just, here's this thing. It's nice to use, it's better, definitely use it. With the potential risk that we would shut down and disappear in a few years, we had figured out a business model. We said to people like, here's how we're going to make this work. It's going to be open source, so no one can take it away from you. We're going to be financially sustainable, so we're going to continue to invest and improve over time. And here's the model that we're going to use, which was open source, nonprofit, and had a very strong philosophy of how we were going to build the products. And I think that engendered a lot of confidence in early adopters. A, that we were going to stick with it, and B, that the ideas were going to be seen through in a way that seemed like they would support them, the end user, not just grow a company as big as possible and then screw over everyone in the end. Which, you know, how many times have we seen that tabular to Yahoo and onwards.

Yeah.

So those things in combination, I think made a big difference to why people still were interested in just that one basic, basic, basic feature.

These are. This is not a question. This is just a couple comments that I'm getting from it. One, you're obviously a good communicator. Just our conversation right now, you could tell. But if you read any of your copy, any of the emails that you send, any of the, you know, even the first Kickstarter, if you go back and search that I believe a lot of the success you've had is just being able to communicate your idea. And a lot of people don't undervalue the skill of communication and just being able to communicate your ideas. So this is a great reminder for me. And then the second thing that I love about what you just shared is.

That.

It'S easy for you to, to downplay your own thing. Don't you're not buying your product. Don't use your own opinion. Let other people tell you, Let other people tell you if they want it or not. I often feel like I'm too close to the grain, you know, and you never know what's going to happen. You never know what people need. It's hard for us as human beings to imagine like a large amount of people, like millions of people and the different needs of. We only probably know 50 people. And that's your frame of reference. So this is just two comments kind of wanted to put in there. So let's Fast forward now eight years later. You just released Ghost version 4 a few months ago. This is a totally different thing compared to what you just talked about. Ghost right now is basically a platform you can run a business on. You can run any kind of content business on Ghost. You can earn money, you can sell products, you can sell memberships. Like now you're in a different ball game. How did that happen in terms of like now? Now I'm competing with, you know, sometimes ConvertKit and sometimes you're going to be con, you know, competing with a squarespace. You're going to be competing with some course platforms, maybe sometimes, you know, kind of thing. How did that happen and why did you decide to now say, hey, you know what, I'm going to go into even more red ocean and crowded market and competitive space.

We started out with a goal to make the simplest, easiest, nicest online publishing experience and felt like we achieved that within a couple of years. And we had the products that did, you know, the one thing really well and people liked it for that. But around the same time we solved that problem. Medium solved that problem really well and was completely free. Obviously didn't have as many of the open source and be able to completely brand it however you want, benefits. But it solved that problem really well and LinkedIn started its, you know, kind of blog network. Tumblr was still kind of at peak then there was a lot of other products that kind of solved the same thing around the same time. And as we kind of looking around going, okay, well, it feels like as on the Whole that's solved for everyone now, what else is there? What other problems are people having that our products can address in a way that is meaningfully different to what else is out there? And as we kind of looked around and listened to our users and our audience, the thing that came back again and again and again was business model. And even in this is about two years after we launched, around 2015, even then advertising on independent sites was on the decline because this is when Facebook was in full boom. Like all ad dollars were basically moving to Facebook and or YouTube. And people were struggling more and more to make money from advertising, which I don't think is a coincidence for why Clickbait really took off around that era because the remaining publishers are more and more desperate to get those clicks, to get the declining ad rates, to get more and more views. All those things kind of aligned. And so we started looking at business models. How do you, how do you have a business model for an independent publisher or creator where they can sustain what they're doing, continue to do it and not be reliant on these ad dollars which are, which are just disappearing and harder and harder to get? And there was a couple of really early examples of publishers who are using the SaaS, the software as a service business model of subscriptions in a really effective way. And the biggest by far was Ben Thompson at Stratechary. And Ben does analysis of the whole tech industry as a weekly newsletter. Well, a daily newsletter, weekly, it's free. And then if you want it every day, there's a paid version. And he was doing very well. And we ourselves by this point had built a recurring subscription business which allowed us really stable fantastic economics where we knew exactly how much money we made this month, we knew exactly how much money we would make the next month. We could track our growth on a chart. And it was. You could like Clockwork predicts how much money you would make 12 months from now, 24 months from now, 36 months from now. The cash flow is completely stable. So you could plan your hires around it. And it seemed like this business model is really great and people are getting pretty used to subscriptions. Spotify is getting pretty big. Apple TV is kind of upcoming. It's not quite there, but there's rumors about it. What if this was more accessible to everyone? And at the time this was not a crowded market at all. In 2015, talking about memberships was like, there are three WordPress plugins and one horrible old software products that is trying to do this and that doesn't seem like there's much of a market for it. But we started exploring what memberships inside the products could look like. And if you connected a publisher directly to an audience and you created a one to one relationship with our advertisers, where the publisher would have to continue to create meaningful content to keep their audience around because the audience is the customer and if you don't please the customer, then the customer leaves. That seemed like way better dynamics than clickbait and outrage and get as many views as possible just in order to stay in business. So we kind of started way back in 2015 thinking about memberships, paid subscriptions, but with a small team at. It took us many years to realize the ambition of exploring such a big new feature. Obviously going from publishing blog posts to managing a subscription business as you identified, pretty big shift in where we started and where we're going to. But it at the same time felt like a natural evolution that stayed true to our original audience, but expanded it into solving the real problem they had, which was how do I do this for a living? Not just how do I do this for fun? And that felt exciting to us. So yeah, it took us about three years to get the first kind of beta version of that going. And that's partially because it's hard to build, partially because we had a really small team that already had tons of work to keep the existing thing going. And just this year we kind of brought all of that out beta and launched it formally in a way that's accessible to absolutely anyone. So now people can use Ghost to publish online, but also sell premium access to the content that they're publishing, whether that's writing or a newsletter, or courses or lessons or podcasts. In fact, the SaaS, the subscription business model that the software industry and the tech industry has had so much success with for so much time, it's now available to absolutely everyone. And the biggest difference in what we do compared to what things like Patreon do, is we've stayed true to the open source model. And that means you own the technology. And that's so, so significant when you're running a business on the Internet, because if you are building your entire business on some technology that you don't own and you don't control, it can and frequently does get changed underneath you, either because they make some changes to the rules, or they make some changes to their business model, or they make some changes to selling the company to someone else. If you don't own the technology you're building a business on, you're always at the behest of someone else. And there's a huge, huge risk factor to that. So all the technology we build is still free, it's still open source. That means you own the intellectual property. If we shut down, if we disappear as a company, you still have the software. You can run it on a Raspberry PI, you can run it on any host in the world. And that longevity, that future facing, we're creating a piece of technology that will stand the test of time and be around and be accessible to everyone with or without us as a company behind it is a really significant part of why people now use Ghost.

I like the fact they point that out because that's a hard thing to communicate to the masses. You know, like that's a hard selling point because some people are just like man, I just need to make a buck, you know, like, you know, like I don't want to sound crude but some people are just focused on their work and focused on their content. This concept, like I don't even know this thing is real or it's going to really make me any money yet. And you're talking about being acquired, maybe your company's going to acquired or whatever if I don't use open source. But it's actually, I think it's pretty interesting that you chose this model where you know, for those who don't know, you know, Ghost's software, the code is open source. If you wanted to you can take, download the code and upload it on any server you have or any, any server in the world and run Ghost. You're, you make money through a managed, a managed solution where if you don't want to do that, you don't want to deal with that and you, and you want some support and you want some, you know, with the installation but also just with running it month to month you have a managed solution which is very inexpensive for them to go monthly or annually to run Ghosts just like any other kind of SaaS or any kind of like subscription based kind of software. So I really love that. But I need to talk about the other side of your business which the fact that it's a non for profit.

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Just for context guys. For those who are listening, John spent the last eight years building this business. Spent a lot of time, a lot of effort, probably sacrificed a whole bunch of stuff he doesn't want to say in public. You know, whether it's emotions, whether it's tears, whether it's money, whether it's relationships, whatever it is, I don't know. But I can relate because I know I did. Yeah, exactly. When John decides to retire or dies, he gets nothing. Why did you choose to do that?

So if we go back to the thesis of if you want to keep doing what you're doing and you decide to take on the smaller idea, the one you cast aside previously because you think you can have success with that, you and you no longer need it to be a multi million dollar business in order to achieve your goals. Because your goals have shifted or mine had the parameters for what structure you need the business to follow and what rules you have to play by to achieve your goals become very different. And so when my ambition shifted from I want to build a million dollar business to I want to build a business that can pay me a reasonable salary for forever that I enjoy working on, there's kind of this niggling question that entered my mind around then of, well, okay, what if you try actively not to build a million dollar business? What if you completely subvert the formulas that everyone else uses in an effort to build a million dollar business and you do your very very best not to build a million dollar business, you try actively to prevent the creation of an enormous business because you've decided that, that you neither need nor want one. What do you do then? Like how, how do you play that out?

How do you, you just cut off the pretext like you're just like, there is no way I can be a billionaire.

Yes, you've removed that possibility entirely. And then you start following that to its logical conclusion. What happens? And I, as I started kind of thinking through this new version of the what's Next game, a whole lot of interesting potential answers started falling out of it. So if you structured the company as a non profit, it could never be bought or sold, which means you could never become a billionaire because no one could ever offer you a billion dollars for it. So you cut that off, great. But then what decisions do you make as a result of never being able to sell the company? Well, over the lifetime of a company, and particularly if you work on one for a decade or more, there's a lot of decisions you make along the way. And one of the traps entrepreneurs can fall into is in justifying the means for the ends. So yet another late night over and over and over again. Because you know, one day you just punched me in the stomach, by the way.

You just punched me in the stomach right now with those words.

One day it's going to be worth it, right? There's this, there's this going to be this payday, this imaginary payday. And in reality, the payday almost never comes. But even for those, when it does come, it's a huge, enormous trade off you're making. And the decisions aren't necessarily good because of it. I've seen companies and friends, companies make huge product decisions because they thought this big company might want to acquire us. If we have this feature that is complementary to this other thing they do, and we need to hire this amount of people really fast because that's going to attract the next round of investors and then that's going to next round of investors is going to give us a big valuation and then that's how we're going to sell. And so all of this reasoning is around this potential one day selling the company completely shifts the day to day operation of the company in significant and insignificant and conscious and unconscious ways at every single level. But if you cut that off completely, what happens? Well, you get this weird purity of in every decision. Is this going to be something that will allow me to work on the business for a long time and still like it? And is it other customers going to like it? And what other considerations are there? Well, there kind of aren't any because there's no justifications, there's no potential payday at the end of the tunnel. There's no means or ends that need justifying. So you end up kind of making every decision based on creating this company that you're stuck with. And so what you do is you make a company that you're kind of happy to be stuck with because that's the only company you're ever going to have. And as I started imagining how this might play out, potentially hypothetically, because I never heard of anyone trying to do things in this way, it just started seeming more and more and more attractive to me. And then I Liked the purity of, well, if it's a non profit, no one can question your motives. No one can say, oh well, you only did that because you're trying to X, Y and Z. You know, you could say, no, I'm a non profit. Like I'm making the best possible thing I can. You can't question my motives. It's clear I don't own a single share in Ghost. I do not own any part of the company and nor does anyone else. I'm a trustee. I can direct the company like a shareholder can in terms of the, the power to make decisions. But I, I don't own any part of it. There's no capital. And see, my motives are pretty, are pretty transparent and I like that. It's, it fit with open source, which is also open and transparent. It fit with journalism which when journalism works, it's founded on integrity and principles of openness and transparency and honesty. And when it doesn't work is exactly when those things have disappeared. So it felt like these, these pillars just made sense. And at various points over the years I've been offered tens of millions of dollars to change my mind and do some sort of seed investment or some sort of series A. And the structure of the company has allowed me to say, you know, no matter how weak I am as a human being, I have my past self has precluded my future weakness from being able to change my, my, my mission and my morals on this. And at various points, hindsight 20 20, every single time I've been so, so grateful that I've not been able to change the course. Being completely locked into the course that we set early, early on has been such a gift. It has come with many, many other challenges. Of course I don't want to paint this as like a really easy road, the opposite. But, but it has been in every way the correct one for us.

I mean, two things. First of all, this makes total sense now that I know who you are. Like, you're not somebody who is in love with accumulating assets. You know what I'm saying? By nature, you like to enjoy the moment and enjoy the good things in life and you're not really worried about, I need to, I need to buy a few houses or I need to, you know, make my mark on this earth. You know, a lot of people have this mindset. You know, in Australia, being a homeowner is like, you got to be crazy if you don't want to be a homeowner kind of thing. Like, even though it makes zero sense like to buy real estate in Sydney right now. But that's the first thing. It's very much in line with who you are. The second thing is that this, the decision you made from the start. That one big decision simplifies all decisions in the future. Like the all. And I can just speak from my own experience with webinar Ninja for the last seven years. Any huge mistake, I can list them on one hand. Like big mistakes that cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars. Right? These are all mistakes. I can always link it back to a decision I made based on something that I don't have control over. Like, maybe in the future this will help me, blah, blah. And I've always regretted it. And, you know, I'm learning this the hard way. The last big decision I made, like that, that cost me big time, you know, really hurt to the point where just like, it made me stop and think, like, why am I doing this to myself? Why don't I just focus on what I can control, you know? And if in a funny way, this all happened during the pandemic, and that's really been my motto during lockdown and all this kind of stuff is just like, got to focus on what you can control, and you can't focus on what may or may not happen in the future. You just don't know. You don't know what's going to happen. That's what we all learned in 2020 and beyond. The other thing I want to just touch on or ask you about is your life. You live a very, I would say, flexible life, meaning that you don't have a resident, right? You know, you don't, like, live somewhere for most of the year. You're pretty flexible and you're, you're, you, you move around a bit. How has that been with the pandemic? And how do you. How do you choose where you go next? And how do you choose what you want to do and how long to stay?

This was another parameter that really fed into the type of business I wanted to create and the type of business I wanted to be stuck with. Because I had grown up, my parents traveled a lot, and so I was kind of carted all over the world. And sort of, as a result, I carried on doing that later in life. Believe it or not, even in 2011, the word digital nomad was uncool and cliched like when I started doing it. So if you think it's tired now, um, I can't even tell you. But I had always enjoyed moving around because growing up in so many different places. Nowhere felt like home. So home for me has always kind of been on the road to some extent and I've lived three to six months at a time in various places everywhere. And I, I wanted to continue doing that. I didn't want to change that. I didn't want to start a company which would then require me to have an office somewhere and go, I don't know, live in London or San Francisco or something. That wasn't appealing. Uh, so we were full remote from, from the very beginning. Now in 2021, that is not a remarkable or interesting things to talk about. In fact, we've just started removing some of the. From our hiring page, our careers page. We started removing some of the hey, we're a remote company language because everyone's a remote company now. Like that's no longer a differentiator. But it was new and different then and the most of the startup mantra, you know, follow this playbook was move to San Francisco, do a seed round, go to yc, open an office. I didn't want to do any of that. So I want to carry on traveling and do again what I had already been doing. I wanted to maintain what I had already been doing. And at the time I was kite boarding a lot. And most of my travel decisions were driven by which country has the best windy season, where I can go and do lots of kite boarding. Funnily enough, I lived in Egypt for three and a half years doing that in a little town called Elguna on the Red Sea. Beautiful place to be.

Yeah.

Close to regatta. And that's it. A lot of early years of ghosts were built from there. Kiteboarding when it was windy and coding non stop.

Dixie, Sid, Dixie. I'm sure you heard that a lot.

Oh yeah. And funnily enough, nowadays, I mean, to go back to your original question about how did the pandemic affect. We got kind of lucky. We decided, my wife and I decided to spend a year in Thailand and got long, long term visas. Normally we do just kind of three to six months based on whatever the easiest visa is and then leave to make sure we're not overstaying our welcome in any capacity. But we decided to stay in Thailand a little bit longer and got long term visas. Genuinely. Two weeks before COVID kicked in, we had a year long visa and we'd signed a year long lease on a like a really nice house in Thailand and for the first time in for me in 10 years, had established like a little base of stability that came right as we needed It. And it was. There was no skill in that decision. You know what I mean? It was one of the most fortunate pieces of timing of my life, probably because in any other year, the tiny Airbnbs that I normally kind of frequent that are fine for a few weeks or months at a time would have been really, really horrible to be locked down in. But we. We got very lucky having a stable base, and now we just started traveling. And again, a little bit, we're vaccinated. Wherever it's open, we can kind of move to, I mean, Grenada right now, which is the southernmost island in the Caribbean. And traveling by wind again. At the moment, I'm living on a sailboat. And so the wind once more, is the seasonal guide for where to go next. And the format, which is the backdrop for all of the work, which I still enjoy doing just as much as back when I started out.

That's lovely. I just love that. I want to wrap up with one question here. What was. If you look back on the last eight years of Building Ghost, what was the most challenging moment that you can recall in that journey? And what was the most joyful moment?

It's been so many challenging moments. I think the single most challenging pattern that recurred and was a constant theme in the last eight years that podcasts or stories rather like this do a poor job of illustrating is that it's always very easy. There's an old quote from a Steve Jobs commencement speech. It's always very easy to connect the dots in hindsight and to make sense of the steps that have already been taken. But at every single stage, every single one of those stepping stones that we've talked about in the last hour, I didn't feel like I knew what I was doing. I didn't feel like there was a clear path from the step that had just been taken to the one that was coming next. And there was so much uncertainty about whether or not it would work, whether or not anyone would care whether or not the people using our product really liked it or do they not like it. We're not really getting that much feedback. Do we know who our audience is? Is it too technical? There's a lot of bugs. Do we fix the bugs? Do we work on the new features? What's the highest value thing we could do? Uncertainty in its many, many forms has been a universally consistent challenge throughout the journey. And I think it never goes away. It just changes form as. As you progress through different stages of a business. But I guess what I'm saying is, if you feel like, you have no idea what you're doing. And you listen to podcasts like this, and it sounds like people do know what they're doing. They don't. It's just that the stories only sound good when you talk about eventually the parts that finally did make sense, because otherwise it would be an hour of people just saying, we have no idea what we're doing. But that's the reality. So that's the biggest challenge. The most joyful moments, I think, by far, have been the team retreats. And it's difficult to quantify without reaching for cliches, but the people you choose to share the journey with are the ones who will make it the best or the worst thing you ever do. And another part of my kind of way of looking at business and trying to achieve balance and building a business that you want to be stuck with is a complete unwillingness to work with people who I don't love. And as a result, the team at Ghost is a group of humans who are not just unbelievably talented at what they do, but I love hanging out with every single one of them. And it's been almost two years since we've had a retreat, but the retreats, when we get together and hang out, it's like. It's like being around best friends you've had your whole life, and you also respect every single one of them because you know how good they are, what they do, and those are the moments you remember, which is weird. It's never the. The product launch for me. It's never the product launches. It's never the. The press articles. The press articles. The ones I don't. I remember the least. It's. It's the moments you share with the people who are on the journey with you. And so I. I can't. That's what I value the most by far, of. Of everything. And the. The moments that brought me the most joy, I think consistently have been those rightfully so, man.

Rightfully so. And I. I agree with that. Like, and our last retrieve is 2019.

Yeah.

And that was just such a wonderful moment just to be around the people that work so hard for the thing that you decided to start. You decided should exist in the world. And they all kind of just said, all right, let's do it. Like, you know, why not? Like, that sounds like a good idea. And it's a sacrifice for them to travel and to spend a week with you and all that kind of stuff, and just to see them have fun and see them be recognized. You feel a sense of like, almost like a papa bear, like, you know, somehow these guys like me enough to keep working, you know, and it just feels good. It feels good to know that you're able to kind of bring people together. And it also feels good that you're able to kind of, you know, build those relationships with people that, you know, maybe don't. You don't see eye to eye on every single thing in the world, but you do have a common vision for what you're trying to build.

So.

So that's super special. John, thank you so much for spending some time with us today. This is one of my favorite conversations of the year, and I hope that many people who are listening today re listen, take some notes, because this is hours and years and time and effort condensed into one hour. Just kind of giving it to you on a silver platter. So thanks, John, again. I really appreciate it.

It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

What did I tell you? What did I tell you about this conversation? Absolute gold. I want to thank John for his time, but I also want to thank you for listening to this conversation, for investing the time to get a fresh perspective on things, to start asking yourself some important questions, maybe even go through that. What next exercise to figure out what would you do and enjoy doing every single day. One of the things that we didn't get into in the conversation that I want to highlight is the concept of patience. John's been running his business for eight years now. We talked about how simple his MVP was and how far he's come since then. Take this and get some perspective. Really think about. It's going to take me a few years to get some momentum. It's going to take me a few years to make the money I'm looking for. It's going to take me another few years to be a household name and have big brands use my product. Having the patience to build the right product for you, for your business and your lifestyle is well worth it. So be patient, be persistent, and above all, serve your customers. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love this format, if you want to hear more extended interviews, extended chats, we would like to do more of them, maybe do them a little bit more frequently, maybe once every two weeks or so. But we want to hear from you. Leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast app and let us know what you think of this episode and if you want to hear more like it. And while you're at it, don't forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. John Nolan is yet another example of somebody who has some challenge in their life. He literally killed you. Can't picture things in his head and yet he was a deputy head of design over at WordPress. He's built an incredible, visually beautiful platform online. He's carved out a life that makes him happy. We are all going to be faced with some limitation, with some challenge with something that's not a question. The question is, are you going to overcome that? Are you going to understand that you just have to figure out a way through it or even use it to your advantage. This doesn't define John o', Nolan, but it's something that I picked up on that I really found inspiring. Because you will be challenged in business and how you react to that challenge is really going to define what will happen next.

Your level of success, your level of.

Happiness, how you interpret that situation will dictate a lot. So I hope that inspired you as well. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then.

Take care.

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