Ghost.org: where the money went

[raindog308]

Interesting: http://blog.ghost.org/year-2/

Not a fan of Ghost myself, but interesting break down.  The Ghost.org domain was bought for $33K.

 

[Neo]

Neat.

 

[jarland]

I'm not a fan of what it's built on, despite the popularity of node.js it just feels like a passing trend to me, not the long term standard that something like PHP is for web app development.


Yet, I'm a big fan of Ghost. This is quite interesting to see how they spent their money. Props to them for the insight.

 

[al3xt]

jar, i though your blog used to run Ghost platform previously for like a few weeks if i am not mistaken before you convert to wordpress?

Personally, i like Ghost for it's simplicity when they first initially rolled out, i was all-hyped and even used them myself, but since i'm too lazy to blog, i abandoned my blog later on...

with the ghost breakdown on how they spent those money, they are being very transparent and kudos to them. 

 

[sv01]

personally I don't like Ghost because it's not easy to install and maintenance. (as easy as PHP/wordpress on shared environment)

wasting too much money just for domain out there soooo many extention.

 

[drmike]

They sure like spending money.  Too much rapid monthly churn.

 

[jarland]

jar, i though your blog used to run Ghost platform previously for like a few weeks if i am not mistaken before you convert to wordpress?

Personally, i like Ghost for it's simplicity when they first initially rolled out, i was all-hyped and even used them myself, but since i'm too lazy to blog, i abandoned my blog later on...

with the ghost breakdown on how they spent those money, they are being very transparent and kudos to them. 

I did for a bit. Will likely consider it again in the future. I'm a big fan of Ghost, but less so of node.js in general.

 

[Francisco]

They sure like spending money.  Too much rapid monthly churn.

Honestly the fact they have money in hand is still a really good thing. Dell's aren't cheap, you pay a high premium for the fast repair contracts as well as Dell's firmware lockin's they do on their PERC cards.

Developers aren't cheap either.

You should check out some of the gaming kickstarters, they're nothing more than huge scams 95% of the time. Here's a huge one for $500k that went tits up.

Honestly, good on them!

Francisco

 

[joepie91]

I'm not a fan of what it's built on, despite the popularity of node.js it just feels like a passing trend to me, not the long term standard that something like PHP is for web app development.


Yet, I'm a big fan of Ghost. This is quite interesting to see how they spent their money. Props to them for the insight.

Having moved over to Node.js (after trying to move to Python as main language, and it not working out), it's probably the healthiest ecosystem I've run across. Semantic versioning almost across the board, very high average code quality, people are not afraid to refactor large amounts of code once it starts getting messy, a large and well-modularized package ecosystem, no package version conflicts due to project-local dependencies, high-level (often informally standardized) constructs like streams, great documentation for both core and third-party code, an active and actually helpful community... the Node.js ecosystem gets almost everything right.

Node.js is still relatively young, but it's definitely at a point where it's mature enough to run in production for an extended amount of time. The biggest problems that Node.js has right now are the poor error reporting in npm, and the lack of more advanced performance profiling tools (beyond the CPU profiling and heap dump tools that you also see in Chrome's developer tools). Both of those (and most other things I mentioned) are worse in PHP, so there's that.

At this point, I would without a doubt recommend Node.js over PHP for practically everything. Something that Node.js isn't a good choice for is CPU-intensive things, but at that point you shouldn't be using PHP either, and realistically almost every web-based application is going to be I/O-bound.

 

[fixidixi]

it's not easy to install and maintenance.

put it in a docker instance and have a good laugh over it?

 

[Licensecart]

I love Ghost Softaculous saved me.

 

[KMyers]

They sure like spending money.  Too much rapid monthly churn.

I have to agree here. I understand the desire to build a proper infrastructure but I see no reason for those hardware investments when they could launch on a reputable/scalable provider and eventually grow into a dedicated infrastructure. 

 

[raindog308]

The Ghost kickstarter video was mostly about "we're going to build this awesome blogging software".  But their real goal was to launch their hosting business.  Not that there is anything wrong with that, but they should have been clearer that most of the money they raised would be going to start a business, not write code.

Which is always the trick with kickstarters for virtual projects...why do you need cash to write code?  A lot of the ones I've seen are "this is my hobby and I'd like to quit my day job to work on it full time".

Developers aren't cheap either.

Apparently they are.  They list $18,000 as monthly salaries for four people.  If you assume that there's an additional 30% in taxes/benefits paid on top of whatever they get as actual salary (and that's being cheap), then those people are making $3460 a month (+30% = $4500, which is 1/4 of $18,000).  That's $41K a year each.

Hopefully they either live in third world economies or got some stock and a cot in the back 

 

[Licensecart]

Apparently they are.  They list $18,000 as monthly salaries for four people.  If you assume that there's an additional 30% in taxes/benefits paid on top of whatever they get as actual salary (and that's being cheap), then those people are making $3460 a month (+30% = $4500, which is 1/4 of $18,000).  That's $41K a year each.

Hopefully they either live in third world economies or got some stock and a cot in the back 

Haha I think they'll have another job

 

[drmike]

I have to agree here. I understand the desire to build a proper infrastructure but I see no reason for those hardware investments when they could launch on a reputable/scalable provider and eventually grow into a dedicated infrastructure. 

Servers aren't assets in such a company. Not like when it fails they are going to rent them to dedicated customers....  Deep devaluation as soon as they take delivery.  Reason why cash structures are commonly used for gear - leasing or similar long term software wallet punches stretched over multiple years.

Apparently they are.  They list $18,000 as monthly salaries for four people.  If you assume that there's an additional 30% in taxes/benefits paid on top of whatever they get as actual salary (and that's being cheap), then those people are making $3460 a month (+30% = $4500, which is 1/4 of $18,000).  That's $41K a year each.

Hopefully they either live in third world economies or got some stock and a cot in the back 

Cost of an employee long has been to write $100k on the books you need to cover per year - for professional folks.  Salary or hourly compensation is just a fraction of the total cost.

$34-41k a year is nothing to scoff at.  It's more than most people on the planet make.  It puts you way up in the top 10% or higher of all annual earners on the planet.  Do the math, $3460 / 20 working days (at best) = $173 a day.

$173 / 8 hour day (my foot people working at home are dedicating an actual 8) = $21.62 an hour.

Most people in such arrangements are lucky to actually commit 4 working hours a day and that would put compensation at north of $43.24 per hour.

Either way, these folks are being paid to work remotely on some scheduled deliverables.  It's a slackfestival.

I saw no office or corporate costs on their summary spending.

Indeed what I saw were costs for starting a hosting company.

If people can't live on $3460 a month and have to live on a cot or in third world, I don't want to live in your country or locality.  $3460 a month exceeds per capita income in many places in the US for HOUSEHOLD income.  

But I digress, the numbers and spending aren't something I'd fund.  Ratios of wrong things are too high.

 

[drmike]

As is becoming more and more common these days, Ghost is a fully distributed team. We have no office, no headquarters, and no fixed working hours. Our registered business address is a virtual office in central London. Nobody works there. Instead: We're all over the world.