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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Matt track: John O'Nolan,
welcome to the WP minute
John Track: Hi, thanks for having me.
Matt track: founder and CEO at ghost.
We're going to dive right into it.
There's lots of stuff happening,
of course, in the WordPress world,
but I'm put you on the hot seat.
I literally just told John in the
green room, I wasn't going to put him
on the hot seat, but we're going to
put them on the hot seat, about ghost.
You're the founder, of course,
ghost, you created ghost.
I was a, I hate to say it.
I was a customer of ghost.
I'm kind of backtracking my
choices as of late, but, a
fantastic publishing platform.
When I went from WordPress to ghost
to run a particular newsletter that
I have called the podcast setup,
I was like, man, this is great.
And the one thing that pulled me back.
Into WordPress, which is ironic
to say was gravity forms.
I'm now an employee full disclosure.
I'm an employee at gravity forms,
but at the time I wasn't, and I was
like, I just need some automation
form features from gravity forms.
And I just need when people sign
up to do an interview, I need
it to do things on the site.
And that's what brought
me back to WordPress.
But I had a fantastic time.
using ghost.
I thought it was great.
Promise not.
This is not just a full on ad for
ghost, but how do you wrestle with
like looking at WordPress and the
ecosystem that it has developed?
This is a big question that the
ecosystem that it has developed with
third party add ons like, like gravity
forms, like the theme ecosystem,
like so many other integrations.
How do you wrestle with that as
a, an open source CMS founder?
John Track: Yeah, great question.
and thank you for the kind words.
I was sure that the one thing that
pulled you back was going to be custom
fields, but, but here we are forms.
yeah, the blessing in the curse of
WordPress in my mind has always been
the power and the extensibility of the
platform and its ecosystem and all the
different things you can do with it.
On the one hand, amazing.
On the other hand comes with some
downsides, comes with complexity of
integration, comes with security issues.
Sometimes update servers that you may or
may not have access to all those things.
and I think different platforms
have different answers depending on.
Should have different answers
depending on what they're trying to do.
WordPress is, what I would
call a generalized CMS.
You can kind of decide what you want to
build with it and it can become that.
It can morph into an e commerce platform
or a real estate directory listing
or a blog or a business website.
And the extensibility allows you to
fulfill those different use cases.
So it's absolutely critical that you
kind of have this really deep set of,
capabilities that plugins can hook into.
What we do with Ghostus is in
many ways kind of the opposite.
it, we focused in on a single set of
use cases, which is publishing and
publishing Professionally, effectively.
And so we try and take all of the
things for those sets of workflows and
just build them natively into core.
So the way we kind of think
about extensibility is
it's just quite different.
If there's something that everyone's
asking for, it kind of should be in core.
And if there's a longer tail set
of things people are trying to do.
Then usually we try and do that via
an integration with a product that
lives outside of core, usually by API.
or in some cases, it's just really
indicative that you're trying to do
something that the product wasn't
designed for, and there might be better
capability or better other options out
there that have the capabilities you need.
Matt track: Yeah, lots of folks,
of course, now evaluating their
WordPress futures and, lots of
developers and designers who might
be looking at other platforms.
What is the best way that you
would want this kind of talent to
onboard into the ghost ecosystem?
Wordpress land, we have the make blogs,
we have the slack if you're not banned,
we have these developer, these developer
guidelines that, you know, help encourage
you how to build blocks and plugins.
Is that same kind of educational
and onboarding structure available
to, for folks coming from the
WordPress world or like, Hey,
I'm looking for new opportunity.
How can I do it here?
John Track: Yeah, it is.
It's not nearly as extensive, you know,
the scale of the, of the WordPress
ecosystem means you can find almost
anything on any topic, tutorial, guide,
video, podcast, whatever you can think of.
we don't have quite the breadth
of content, but we do have
a pretty reasonable depth.
So if you have never heard of
Ghostbrawler, you have, and you've,
But you haven't tried it, you know,
our website's a good place to start.
We have documentation, we have
tutorials, we have examples.
probably the best way to try it
out is simply to kick the tires.
you can sign up on ghost.
org for a free trial, no obligation.
We will not be automatically
charged at the end of it.
And, have a fully managed
instance spun up working and get
a sense of, of how things work.
Have a look at the theme layer, have
a look at the integrations layer.
ghost theme labs.
Modeled after WordPress.
So if you are a WordPress theme developer
familiar with, you know, all of the
hooks and functions and data outputs
that you would normally use there, it's
going to feel fairly familiar, there's a
couple of concepts, which are different.
But the syntax is not a million
miles away from what you're
most likely already used to.
Matt track: Is the, now I'm not a
developer, but is the stack traditional
HTML, CSS, PHP with a dash of JavaScript?
Is it heavy JavaScript like
WordPress is moving to?
What should one know for coding
languages getting into this?
John Track: It's heavy javascript,
but for most people you would
never have to touch that.
So the back end of ghost
is written in node.
js And the front end uses the
templating language called handlebars.
js Handlebars.
js ostensibly looks a lot like the
kind of php functions you would use in
a wordpress theme layer So if you're
comfortable as a theme developer in
WordPress, you would have a very easy
time adapting to the theme layer in Ghost.
It's all familiar concepts.
if you wanted to do integrations or, kind
of more powerful things with Ghost, then
you're kind of looking at interacting
with an API and you do that with
whatever you're most comfortable with.
That could be PHP, it could be
JavaScript, anything you like.
But most people don't
need to know what Node.
js is unless they're trying to
self host, and then you kind of
have to run it and install things.
But for most developers,
pretty straightforward.
Matt track: that ghost is a very
opinionated, well, these are my words.
You could refine it, , but you're alluding
to the fact that Ghost is very opinionated
on the feature set that it has.
When I was using it, I was like, yeah,
man, this is, this is exactly what I need
until I needed those integrations in that
automation that that Gravity forms has.
But aside from that, I was like writing
newsletters and blog posts combined.
Fantastic.
showing me the data and the information
that is important to that business,
which was email subscribers,
revenue, you know, I had a small
like, you know, donation slash
sponsorship thing going on with that.
and it was clean.
There was nothing distracting me.
from the work I needed to get done
when I logged into my go site versus my
WordPress site where I'm like, Oh damn,
there's another banner that's popping up.
you know, there's a, an update
notification yelling at me like, God,
didn't I just update all these plugins?
Right.
And I've been doing this
now for nearly 20 years.
Like I should be used to it by now,
but it was still sort of like this
drain on my energy every time I log in.
and that was, fantastic.
So how do you balance, Hmm.
This is a tough one.
How do you balance.
What customers want and what let's
say the ghost community wants and can
you address what the ghost community
looks like because we say WordPress
community it means a lot to us us in
the WordPress world It means you know
developers designers giving back to
this ecosystem helping people and a lot
of us the reason why we're struggling
with this recent incident is that
we all felt like we've been building
WordPress now for nearly 20 years.
And we always felt like we
had a say in the direction.
There's what the customers wanted
and there's what we wanted or want.
And that's a, that's a
tough line to balance.
So how do you approach like what
your end users want and what the
community wants and what does that
look like from your perspective?
John Track: it's a great question
and I'm, I'm very familiar with
the, you know, the nuances and the
challenges of the WordPress community.
I was on the WordPress core team,
what about 14 years ago now?
So I was a pretty active contributor,
spoke a lot of WordCamps, did a
lot of make blog posts, there's
a lot of history there and, I
think it's always a balancing act.
we try to approach it.
As much as possible by listening.
I think the, the job of, the core team as
we see it is to listen to as many inputs
as possible and then make good decisions
about which to, which requests and
things to follow, and which to discard.
And sometimes that looks
like, features, which are.
The most aligned with the product and
the core audience, the core target
users that we're trying to attract.
sometimes it's the things we're most
excited about, but all of the time, it's
trying to make sure that the platform
stays true to what it says it is.
that is something that has always
been kind of deeply important to me.
And, yeah, so it's, it's
really a mix of inputs.
There's not like a clean answer,
but it, it always starts with, with
listening to what people are saying and
taking into account all the different
perspectives, all the different
ways in which people are using it.
Matt track: For many years I think the
Guiding light's not the right phrase,
North Star maybe and even that's too nice,
but there was always this, this feeling
of WordPress must dominate the web, right?
So back in, in your time, it was probably
10, 15, 20 percent of the internet.
Now, look at some different numbers
where 40, between 40 and 48 percent
of the modern web, whatever that
number is, there was always like
this momentum to, to dominate.
What is it?
Mean to you and ghosts?
Like, what's your position on like
impacting the web, impacting the open web?
What, what, what are your thoughts on, of
course, like the pie of, of the internet.
How much of the slice
are you trying to get?
Oh,
John Track: I'm kind of, DHH post this
week was, was fairly good on this topic.
I, Where he said, you know, the,
the, the scale of value that Rails
has created vastly outstrips that,
which he has personally captured.
And that's a good thing.
That's what open source should be about.
I agree with that.
I would almost take it even further, and
say that we are attempting to capture the
smallest possible slice of the market to
sustain our operations and nothing else.
so Ghost is a, a not for
profit organization, single.
Nonprofit foundation.
There's no other companies, you know,
with venture funding or other motivations.
it's just one nonprofit foundation and our
goal, with lots of goals, but one of them
is to never grow to more than 50 people
in headcount around, around 50 people
might not be exactly that number, but
around, around that mark and the point.
In my eyes or how I think about the
future is not to try and grow the biggest
company possible, or to try and capture
as much value of the web as possible.
And certainly not to try and capture a
percentage of, the web's total market
share, but to grow an ecosystem, which
a core team, in the structure of a
nonprofit foundation is able to support.
And in my mind, that looks like.
Lots of different companies doing
well, not one giant company, you know,
making the majority of the money and
controlling how everything works, but
really more of a chaotic, some in some
ways, chaotic, decentralized ecosystem.
I think of it as, you know, like a city,
you might have lots of shops, lots of
houses, lots of different businesses.
The.
The goal of leading a good city is to
create infrastructure that can allow a
diverse set of people to thrive within it.
not to control everything and to own
everything and to buy up everything and
to, turn it into some dystopian nightmare.
So we're trying to really do the
biggest possible thing with the
smallest possible team and make it work.
enough revenue to sustain,
to make what we do possible.
But, but not more than
that in, in business terms.
And, usually when I say this,
people get very confused.
Why not?
Why don't you want more?
and the answer to that, I mean,
has been underscored quite a
lot in the last few weeks is the
web, not exclusive to WordPress.
The web has been driven by a lot of
greed and a lot of very wealthy people.
And I don't think.
That we've had the best, that
we can have from the web and
from humanity more broadly.
From having power be concentrated in,
single platforms or single individuals.
I think, a long tail of small businesses,
small platforms, small websites,
that's what I want to see more of.
And so in many ways, I'm just with
Ghost, we're trying to make more
of what we want to see more of.
Matt track: Is the first, so is the
number 50 a way to sort of what I'll
say is sort of stop gap that like
corporate sort of scale where things
can become unruly and out of control.
but let me backtrack.
First question is how many
people are you at now?
Goals 50.
Where are you at now?
John Track: We're mid thirties now.
Matt track: Mid 30s.
So is that number to stopgap?
What could happen beyond 50 because
I know I've been labeled a bit of a
mad apologist only because I'm trying
to Deconstruct what is happening?
And but at the same time like I
could not imagine running a 1, 700
person Organization like that, with,
with the, with the deep level of
control that he still runs it with.
How could you, how could you do that?
I can understand that task alone is
stressful and could lead to some real
wacky decisions, outbursts and comments.
Is that 50 to stopgap, that
growth and that unruliness that
could happen in an organization?
John Track: Yes and no.
It's definitely not easy to run a
company of any size and it definitely
doesn't get easier as you get bigger.
that being said, there's quite a lot of
people who are doing it very well for
every person who's, perhaps not doing
such a good job of it and it's not.
Something we have no
reference material for, right?
1, 700 people dwarfs in comparison
to the NVIDIA or the hundreds
of thousands at Microsoft.
There are playbooks that
are good advice out there.
There's a lot of hard problems you
have to solve along the way, but there
are also a lot of easy things that
you can not step in along the way.
And I think the things we've seen
within the WordPress community in
the last three weeks have not been
representative of the hard problems
of running a 1700 person company.
They have been some of the one on
one basics of things you don't do,
whether you are a freelancer, a one
person company or a two person company.
and that's, that's the thing that
I've found a bit disappointing, but
the stop gap that you were kind of
alluring to in our context is less
about, I think companies get on by
definition, get unruly at scale.
And, that's something I.
I'm worried about it's more,
it doesn't seem like fun to me.
My idea of a good time is not
having eight layers of management
and, not knowing anyone's name.
My idea of fun is honestly, hearkens
back to my WordPress contribution
days where I would show up on IRC.
I would chat shit with a bunch
of the other contributors and we
would make cool stuff together.
And at the end of the day or the month or
whatever it was, we would release stuff
that I, sitting on a laptop in a pair of
2 shorts on a beach in the Philippines,
had written with no status, no money,
no clout, and it would get released
to hundreds of millions of people.
That's my idea of a good time, having a
tight knit team of people doing really
cool stuff at a scale that doesn't make
sense just because of the amazingness of
open source and how far and wide it goes.
So I simply don't want to run
a company more than 50 people,
because I think that's the point
at which you start to lose that.
And we have a lot of team members
who've come from, startups
that grew past that point.
And they all kind of have the
same story, which is like, it
was great at the beginning.
It's really fun.
We were doing all this cool stuff.
Amen.
Around 60, 70, 100 people,
it started to break down.
New leads of management were
acquired, the priorities changed,
it didn't feel the same anymore.
It just doesn't sound like fun to me.
So there's a selfish goal in there
of, you know, with Ghost being a non
profit, I don't stand to sell it one
day or, Make a shitload of money off it.
So it has to be something I enjoy.
It has to be something that I'm
fully invested in that feels like
something I could do for a long time.
Cause if it's just a slog, for the
sake of scale, there's nothing to it.
So keeping it small, keeping it focused
is a creative constraint we've chosen.
And what's fun about
choosing constraints is.
invariably you have to try
and get around them, right?
You've got this constraint.
What are we going to do with it?
We've only got 50 people.
Well, that changes what's
possible with the product.
It changes with what's possible
of what portion of the market you
serve, what type of market that is.
It changes all kinds of things that
then, there's an amazing amount of
creativity that comes from those
and trying to figure them out.
so I'm, I'm a huge fan of, of
creative constraints of any kind.
And this is just one of us.
Matt track: Yeah.
Can you explain or illustrate
how your, non profit, compares
to, let's say this Yeah.
Yeah.
Tangled web of, the, the WordPress
foundation and wordpress.
org and wordpress.
com and automatic.
Like we all thought we
kind of knew how it worked.
And I think many of us knew like 85
percent of it over the last few years.
And this whole situation kind of like
brought to light like this 15 percent
that was like, where did that come from?
How does your non profit work?
What happens if, what's the
bus factor for John O'Nolan?
If there's no John O'Nolan, what happens
to Ghost and the, the non profit side
of the house illustrate how that works
is a lot of us are kind of worried
about our own plumbing in WordPress.
John Track: a lot of the way we've
structured things was, inadvertently
inspired by automatic and WP engine,
believe it or not, 12 years ago.
so being in the WordPress, kind of
core team and seeing how the product
was made, I had, direct exposure to
kind of all of these issues, perhaps
earlier than other people and the.
Tension and the kind of, conflicting
motivations and priorities of all
these different organizations within
WordPress, I always found, difficult.
you cannot have a venture backed arm
on the one hand, a nonprofit foundation
on the other and a dot org website on
the third or controlled by the same
person, even though they have conflicting
priorities and expect everything to be
smooth sailing, it was always going to be
a matter of when, not if this happened,
The amusing thing is that all these
conflicts, were what inspired a lot of
ideas for Ghost of how not to do that.
I was very bought into the idea
of democratizing publishing when
I was working on WordPress and
that still means a lot to me.
And the conflicts of interest around
kind of all the positioning that
goes on behind the scenes, was not
what I was excited about at all.
So a lot of the ideas for Ghost
were based on what would an open
source product that's trying to
just democratize publishing look
like if it lived up to its ideals.
Now, I don't know if we've succeeded in
that, but the angle we came up with was an
attempt at trying to answer that question.
So Ghost is a single nonprofit
foundation and that nonprofit foundation
sells a managed hosting service,
which we modeled after WP Engine.
It seemed like WP Engine
had a great business model.
You had the full power of WordPress, but
you didn't have to worry about servers.
Whereas by comparison, as
you'll remember, WordPress.
com was not used by anyone who
knew anything about WordPress.
These days you can do themes and
plugins, but for a very long time you
had no option to run themes or plugins.
So in my mind, I wanted to have the
simplicity of a nonprofit organization
to steward the open source project.
The business model of WP Engine to
fund that open source project and the
transparency and integrity of what an
open source project should be, which is
to have no outside influences or ulterior
motives that come whether you want them or
not, the second you take venture capital.
And.
So far so good.
You know, we're 11, 11, 12 years in now.
we are at seven and a half million
dollars a year in revenue and we were
profitable from the very first year.
There were enough people that
kind of believed in that model.
Although there were many more who didn't
quite understand what was the point?
Why do you need this
weird nonprofit model?
And, if anything, I think the last
few weeks have, I've drawn attention
to why it can be a good idea.
Matt track: Is there a board of,
directors on the foundation, or how does
that sort of oversight, work in Ghost?
Ha, ha,
John Track: Yeah, you're right.
I skipped the bus factor.
That was part of your question.
So, in a non profit foundation,
you have a board of trustees.
And at the moment, those two trustees
are myself, my co founder, Hannah.
And for the first 10 years up
until now of Ghost, I think that's
been roughly the right model.
Getting something going,
getting off the ground.
You really don't need decision
by consensus or much oversight.
You just need to prove that there's
a market for the thing you're doing.
And that requires just
simply moving quickly.
one of the things I see often is, you
know, people coming out with a big
manifesto and a big governance structure
before they've built a product, which
is the wrong way around of doing things.
Cause people aren't buying
your governance structure.
They're buying your products, but
when, why people stick around,
Often when something gets popular
or large is if it does have a good
governance structure, which allows
it to persist without inadvertently
decimating itself at some point.
And so as Ghost gets bigger, my
intention, and I'm going to write a
bit more about this soon, is to have,
the board of trustees grow to have
independently appointed, people that we
have selected, but also to have, board
seats that are elected by the community.
And I think that's going to.
It's going to be interesting
figuring out, what are the different
constituencies within that community?
How long should a board seat work?
But equally, there's some great
reference material out there, you know?
Rails has a foundation that
seems to work pretty well.
Drupal has a foundation, with,
with elected board seats that
seems to work pretty well.
There are all kinds of organizations
outside of software development and direct
open source that have, collaborative
board seats that oversee the larger
direction of a nonprofit foundation,
and that's, that's really That's exactly
where, I want, I want to stand up.
The buffs factor of me
should eventually be zero.
I do not want to be a
benevolent dictator for life.
I honestly, I think BDFL stuff
is the dumbest idea alive.
it was coined, I don't know if you
know this already, you probably do.
It was coined by the creator of Python
who said it as a throwaway line, as a
joke, that he was a benevolent dictator
for life, not as a serious thing.
And then for some reason.
A whole bunch of people latched onto
it and what bothers me about benevolent
dictator for life Is that the word
benevolent is doing way too much work in
that sentence If you just said dictator
for life in any other context, we would
universally agree that that's a bad
idea and when you have a A mission of
democratizing publishing that it just
doesn't feel like it makes sense So
no my my intent I currently have a bus
factor of 50 percent of the foundation.
I would like to reduce that to zero I plan
to not be in charge of, of Ghost for Life.
I plan to very much not be even
in control of Ghost for Life.
I don't, at the very least, I
don't own any of the assets.
I don't own anything to
do with it personally.
Every single thing is
owned by the foundation.
So in that sense, the bus factory
has already reduced the domain,
the trademarks, all those things.
those are already not mine.
I have no financial or
legal claim to them.
Matt track: In of, you know, it's some
of the edge cases of amazing product
companies, and I'm not trying to align,
you know, Mullenweg with Steve Jobs
by any stretch of the imagination,
but we've seen amazing product
companies led by one decision maker.
Right.
Maybe it is the BDFL for life in some
instances, like an Apple, like a Microsoft
where the like, like Elon with with
let's say either a Tesla or SpaceX, like
pick your pick your poison on that one.
I feel like there always needs to
be like this grand visionary and one
person who is leading that project.
Real cutting edge decision making in
an organization in the WordPress world.
it, it's always felt like, Oh,
we all have some choice, right?
Don't we, don't we have some,
some choice in this direction?
And it's seemingly getting more
obvious that, you know, all this,
all roads lead back to Matt, right.
And, and, and that decision
making, how do you balance your
grand vision for the platform.
For your platform, Ghost, and how
are decisions made in, in your world?
Are, are you the, the leading decision
maker, innovator, and like, you're setting
the, the, the five to ten year roadmap,
and, and sure, people can have their sort
of say in it, but largely you're 90, 95
percent of the visionary behind Ghost?
John Track: I think.
One of the cultural moments, that we're in
at the moment is, is celebrating founders
and visionaries, people doing things
in business to an almost insane degree
to the point where they, you know, cult
leader founder, it's not that different.
And we've probably gone a
little bit too far on that.
I do think it is very helpful for getting.
new ideas started, new products
made to have someone who is
deranged enough to believe they can
change the world or whatever the
correct version of that quote is.
And I do think great products by
and large are made, by individuals,
certainly not by committees.
think that the staying power of
a company or, or an organization.
Has to, at some point transcend one
individual and, you know, to pick up on a
couple of the examples you mentioned that
Apple continue to thrive after Steve Jobs.
Now we can argue about whether or
not they still make good products
and whether there's the right
person calling product shots there.
And I would tend to say
the answer to that is no.
But the organization has outlasted
because it was able to transcend.
It was able to evolve after the
founder was no longer around.
Microsoft's, another great example,
because we have, we have three axes to it.
You have Bill Gates who got
it going, had the big vision.
You have Steve Ballmer who by all
accounts made Microsoft flounder,
but had the organization become very
profitable, which is kind of what
Tim Cook's doing now, and now we have
Satya Nadella who's come in and okay.
We now have big visionary
ideas coming out of Microsoft.
We have for a few years now, Microsoft
is doing some of the most impressive
hardware, software, investment, and
acquisitions of any large tech company.
And it is a visionary individual
with big ideas, making decisions,
but it's not the founder.
So to the extent that I think
you, you need one person.
making big shots in
order to do big things.
I think that's true.
I think I agree with that.
Does it have to be one person for life
or, the original founder of the company?
I don't think so.
in the context of ghosts,
that's currently me.
Yes, I am that person.
I make those decisions.
I think I do an okay job.
Although some would look at the size
of ghosts as compared to WordPress
and say, I've not done a good
job and that's okay, but I don't
intend for it to be me forever.
I also don't intend for it
to someday be a committee.
I think you need one
leader with clear ideas.
I think the key difference that.
I really hope WordPress ends up at,
and certainly where I want us to end up
at, is if you're going to democratize
publishing, then that person should
be democratically elected somehow.
There should be some ability for
the broader community to decide
who that leader is, and then trust
them to make good decisions and
vote whether or not they are.
without that, It is just a dictatorship,
not a dictatorship in the sexy good way.
If there is one of those, just a textbook
dictatorship and history shows that,
they usually all end the same way.
Matt track: sustainability.
One of the things that has come
up with this whole WordPress
versus WP Engine thing.
Some folks are like, Oh, I didn't know
you needed the money, Matt and and and co.
Why?
Why have you not just asked?
Right?
Why have you not just asked?
For donations.
I'm on the ghost, ghost.
org slash pricing page, just looking
at the pricing plans as a backdrop to
revenue and funding and stuff like this.
It starts at 11 bucks a month
for 500 subscribers, 500 of your
own subscribers to your email
list or members as you call them.
11 31 63 to 49.
This is monthly pricing and
then there's yearly discount.
Folks might say, well, If there's
never a chance for outside funding,
or maybe there is, I don't know,
I'll let you highlight that.
why not ask for a donation?
you know, hey, Ghost is open source.
we also need to survive and maybe hosting
isn't going to carry us all the way.
What are your thoughts on like
that long term sustainability that
goes outside of the pricing page?
Hmm.
John Track: Yeah.
it's kind of easy, by, by having
these things live in one organization.
we have the, the simplest
thing in the world.
We can say, if you want to contribute to
ghost, you feel aligned with the project.
You would like it to succeed.
Use our hosting, our hosting pays for
the open source developers who work on
the core products and improve it for you.
So by simply using ghost, you
are contributing to ghost.
If you never write a single pull
request, but you use our hosting,
you're directly funding the nonprofit
foundation that makes this possible.
And that's not a coincidence.
the idea of this business model
was exactly that was to make it
so that the users of the products
are the people who are investing
in the future of the product.
We have tried having like a donation
button or mentioning it on the site.
I think we found much the same, thing as
the WordPress foundation has found, which
is you don't get very many donations.
people, for the most part,
don't donate to things like tech
companies and tech products.
It just doesn't, that's
not a thing that happens.
And I had in my head that, when Go
started, I was like, Oh, maybe You know,
Google will give us a bunch of money.
Like they give Mozilla, these
grand ideas of philanthropy
that hasn't panned out either.
So making the hosting model work, making
sure that we have enough margins to run
the business has been super important.
but it also hasn't been very complicated.
I think when I think about what
could be other ways that we would
make, the organization, you more
financially successful or to kind
of have other revenue streams.
There's a lot of options, but they
all kind of hinge on incentives.
something that I think has been missing
in the WordPress space is why should
anyone contribute 5 percent back?
What are they getting in return?
Because if it's just a kind of give me 5
percent or I'll go nuclear, it's just not
a very good incentive, but there's lots of
other projects that have done this better.
And we're not one of them because
we haven't tried this yet.
But if you look at Laravel, you know,
they have a sponsors section and for,
I think it's thousands of dollars per
month, you can, sponsor the Laravel.
community, the open source project, and
you will get a prominent partners page
on the website listed as an official
partner, recognizing what you do,
marketing your services if required.
So it seems like the price
point would be pretty high if
WordPress did something similar.
It seems like if there was something
you got in return for financially
contributing to the WordPress project,
Then you're selling a product.
but if you're just saying, give us
money and we're not giving you anything
back, yeah, that's a harder sell.
It's a harder sell, for really anyone,
but particularly for a software product
that you can't see, you know, you have
to come up with something, I think.
Matt track: It spurred, that spurred
something that is, is highly debated
in the WordPress space is where do you
draw the line between contributions
to WordPress and just like profiting
off a product and just to frame that.
There's just a lot of people
who have plugins and themes.
And services that they sell and they
say, well, the byproduct of me selling
this product means that people are
interested in sticking around wordpress.
Let's call it a page builder.
For instance, you might say,
I built this page builder.
It's actually helping
people use wordpress.
I'm getting paid, let's say
200 bucks a year for it.
Therefore, I'm contributing to WordPress.
Where do you stand on that?
I see that.
I'll frame it, and I'll give
you a second to think about it.
I think of it as, well, you're
contributing to, let's say, the
greater ecosystem of WordPress, right?
Users and other businesses kind of
benefit from you building this product.
But you're not contributing
to open source WordPress.
Like, you're not contributing to the core
of WordPress, which impacts WordPress.
All millions of people who use
WordPress, you're contributing to the
ecosystem, which helps maybe, let's
say, a hundred thousand people in
the ecosystem use WordPress better.
That's the way I see it.
Where do you draw the line between,
I'm contributing by making a
product, or I'm contributing by
committing lines of open source code?
John Track: Yeah, I think the, the
litmus test that I would use, and I'm
not suggesting everyone should use
this is, would WordPress exist today
or be as large as it is today, if you
took away all of the non official,
Themes and plugins, if, if those just
went away and the only themes and
plugins available were automatics,
would, would WordPress be around?
Would it be as large?
If the answer to that is no.
And I think it's up to everyone
to hypothesize for themselves.
If the answer to that is no, then it
follows that the people who have created.
Those themes and plugins have been
in part responsible for the growth
and the success of WordPress.
And if that's true, then they have
contributed in my mind, they've
contributed a lot, regardless of
whether or not they make money
from the things they've worked on.
You should be allowed to make
a business that no one should
forbid you from doing that.
so those, those contributions I
think are completely valid and it's
not an impossible thing to measure.
It's yes, it's a hard thing to
measure, but you know, again,
Drupal, Does this pretty well.
They have a really clear framework
for how contributions are measured
and what things are included.
It's self reported, but there's oversight.
There's a clear decision making
framework around what things
are and are not recognized.
And they've created incentives around,
what it means to be a contributor and
how you're recognized as, you know, being
a maker or a takers as Dries put it.
So.
There's ways to do it, but I think
every participant in an ecosystem
is contributing to that ecosystem.
Is there another definition of, of
contribution, which is purely about
core and evolving the core platform?
Sure.
but you know what, I'm not sure.
I'm not sure if that should
be entirely volunteer.
Based all the time.
I remember when I, you know, I was
never paid to contribute to WordPress.
And I remember it was almost a dirty
word to consider like, being paid to
contribute to open source, almost like
it should be purely altruistic and we
should all just collaborate because
then the thing gets better and we all
benefit from it and that's a lovely idea.
But in the meantime, The rest of the
web is moving forward without us.
And as Morten has pointed out on more
than one occasion, there's a lot of people
contributing meaningfully to WordPress who
are struggling to put food on their table.
and the idea of bug bounties or paying
open source contributors is kind of, Ooh.
No, we can't talk about that, but
this is, this should be everyone
volunteering and working together.
And I think maybe this is just
a, maybe a controversial opinion.
I think maybe we're at the end of the
road for that ideology of open source.
I think maybe open source projects
need to generate revenue and they
need to pay their contributors.
And in doing so create an
incentive for people to contribute.
I don't know what that looks like.
I don't even know if that's right,
but that's kind of where I'm leaning.
after.
Two decades of doing this,
Matt track: John O'Nolan, it's ghost.
org, Independent Technology
for Modern Publishing.
I might come back.
All right, listen, I
John Track: please do.
Matt track: come back to Ghost.
you know, I, WordPress, is as much
criticism as Gutenberg gets, from like
a page builder perspective, writing in
WordPress, publishing posts in WordPress.
Is a pretty good experience.
and Gutenberg does elevate
that in my opinion.
And ghost is right there with it.
I've been doing a video where
I'm evaluating other platforms
for just the writing experience.
Ghost is fantastic.
when I first started writing on it,
I was like, this is, this is great.
you know, plenty of
integrations, check it out.
Don't, don't just listen to me
about my bias to gravity forms.
There are a ton of integrations
there, in, in the platform.
And again, if you're doing a newsletter
and especially monetizing a the dashboard,
the, the data that it surfaces for
your, publishing business is great.
But, I am plagued, you know, I've
been addicted to the power user like
page building experience in WordPress.
And that's, that's the part that
is also like tying me to WordPress.
Like, I just need to, I just need
to Can I add another column here?
Can I make category pages?
Can I do this in a browser?
Cause I don't know a lick of
code for any of this stuff.
it's a powerful drug and it does have
me hooked, but ghost is fantastic.
And check out the themes
that are available.
because maybe it'll make,
make your life easier.
it did.
It does.
It does.
For me, it did for me.
And then.
Yeah, I got hooked on that
automations thing that I needed.
Ghost.
org.
Check it out, John.
Fantastic conversation.
Thanks for hanging out today.
John Track: Thank you for having me.
You know, there's, there's a lot
of great platforms out there and
you don't have to pick just one.
Just cause you use one doesn't mean
you have to be against the other.
That's I'll just leave you
with that parting thought.
Use different tools for different jobs
and enjoy them all and compare and
contrast them, get inspiration from them.
one of the great initiatives Drupal had,
I feel like I've mentioned Drupal last
day was, core Getting off the island.
And, I think it was in 2012, Dries
encouraged everyone to simply go out
into the world and look at other open
source projects, look at other products,
see what you could learn from them.
And so, you know, I don't want anyone to
come and use Ghost and leave WordPress.
But I would love everyone who uses
WordPress to try Ghost and see what they
think and, tell us where we could improve.
there's, it's a good thing that
we have a diversity of platforms.
It should not be.
large proportion of the web
all on the exact same thing.
Let's have lots of different options.
Matt track: Custom fields
coming to ghost soon.
John Track: You know, I tweeted that kind
of as a joke from the WordPress account.
I mean, from the,
Matt track: it now.
John Track: from the core ghost account.
And, yeah, the response
was pretty overwhelming.
So let's, let's see if
we can do anything there.
Matt track: look, look,
look for, look to ghost.
org for custom post types and
custom fields coming soon.
All right, everybody.
Thanks for listening to today's episode.
The wpminute.
com the wpminute.
com slash subscribe to stay connected.
We'll see you in the next episode.