Podcast appearances and mentions of john o nolan

John O'Nolan is the developer, founder and CEO at Ghost which he has grown to a $2.7m/year business. He has become a digital nomad in recent years and has been working remotely whilst travelling the world for well over a decade. John shares the lessons he’s learnt over the past decade, from setting up Ghost to successfully living the nomad life to why we should optimise for happiness rather than revenue.Sponsored by BrilliantThis episode is kindly supported by Brilliant, the best way to learn maths, science, and computer science online. Brilliant focuses on helping you learn how to think, rather than just memorising methods and facts. Sign up at https://brilliant.org/notoverthinking — the first 100 people get 20% off an annual subscription.Leave us a ReviewIf you enjoy listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave us a review on iTunes / Apple Podcasts. Here's a link that works even if you're not on an iPhone :) Send us an Audio MessageWe really want to include more listener comments and questions in our episodes. If you've got any thoughts on this episode, or if you've got a conundrum or question you'd like us to discuss, send an audio file / voice note to hi@notoverthinking.com. For any non-audio comments, drop us a tweet or DM on Twitter - https://twitter.com/noverthinking

TinySeed es la primera aceleradora remota diseñada para bootstrappers y fundadores de SaaS. Sus responsables son Rob Walling y Einar Vollset, dos fundadores en serie que vieron un hueco en la habilidad de las startups independientes para levantar financiamiento sin recurrir a inversores institucionales. Hablamos del potencial de Tinyseed como fondo y aceleradora de este grupo de fundadores de SaaS y discutimos también sobre lo que persiguen las startups independientes que buscan no tener que recurrir a inversionistas institucionales y tienen como meta ser productos saludables y negocios rentables con ingresos probados.Gracias por escucharnos y compartir.Estos son los enlaces a los temas de los que hemos hablado:Conoce más aquí de TinySeed, la primera aceleradora diseñada para Bootstrappers: https://tinyseed.com/MicroConf publicó su colección completa de charlas sobre lanzamiento y crecimiento de startups independientes que no dependen de financiamiento externo. Oro puro: https://www.youtube.com/microconfSigue a Rob en Twitter: https://twitter.com/robwallingEinar Vollset: https://twitter.com/einarvollsetStartups del portafolio de Tinyseed en el batch de 2020: https://tinyseed.com/latest/2020-tinyseed-batchBootstrapper's Handbook: MAKE - https://makebook.ioMatt Mullenweg de WordPress: https://rework.fm/open-source-and-power-with-matt-mullenweg/¿Qué es Y Combinator? https://medium.com/@santisiri/qué-es-y-combinator-5afb5c502365Turning Side Projects into Profitable Startups (Pieter Levels): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6reLWfFNer0Tyler Tringas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tringastyler/Micro-SaaS: https://tylertringas.com/micro-saas/Earnest Capital: https://earnestcapital.comShared Earnings Agreement: https://earnestcapital.com/shared-earnings-agreement/Gatsby: https://www.gatsbyjs.orgHilo sobre los inicios de Ghost cuando el término "bootstrap" no era cool, sino todo lo contrario: https://twitter.com/johnonolan/status/1233024423206113281?s=21Canal de YouTube de John O'Nolan: https://www.youtube.com/user/jmonolan/videosInteresante conversación entre Rob Walling y Justin Jackson, cofundador de Transistor.fm: https://youtu.be/0w09SUQwR-cPieter Levels: https://levels.io/¿Por qué Rob Walling invierte en bootstrappers con Tinyseed? https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/082-rob-walling-of-drip-and-tinyseed¿Qué necesita tu empresa para conseguir inversionistas? https://youtu.be/EDZZRLEgaKYStartups for the Rest of Us (casi 500 episodios): https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/Customer.io: https://customer.ioPlatzi: https://platzi.comBuffer: https://buffer.com500 Startups (Latam): https://latam.500.co/latam/Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.comTechstars: https://www.techstars.comCryptoKitties: https://www.cryptokitties.coLibro Recomendado: Small Giants: Companies that Choose to Be Great instead of Big: https://www.amazon.es/Small-Giants-Companies-Choose-Instead/dp/0141031492/Síguenos en Twitter:Danny Prol: https://twitter.com/DannyProl/Claudio Cossio: https://twitter.com/ccossioEstamos en todas estas plataformas:Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/saas-product-chat/id1435000409ListenNotes: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/saas-product-chat-daniel-prol-y-claudio-CABZRIjGVdP/Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/36KIhM0DM7nwRLuZ1fVQy3Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS8zN3N0Mzg2dg%3D%3D&hl=esBreaker: https://www.breaker.audio/saas-product-chatWeb: https://saasproductchat.com/

Let’s say you’re a writer who wants to publish your work to the web and eventually monetize it. These days you have plenty of options. You might open a Medium account and join the platform’s partner program. Or maybe you launch a Substack newsletter. If you’re really ambitious, you could throw together a Wordpress website and integrate it with a payment tool like Stripe. Or you could just launch an account on Ghost, a publishing platform created a few years ago by a guy named John O’Nolan. Before founding Ghost, John was the deputy head of design at Wordpress, and though he was always a fan of the open source CMS, he thought he could create something a little bit better. So John launched a Kickstarter campaign, and after raising tens of thousands of dollars, he developed Ghost. Today, it’s used by some of the world’s largest brands, and his hope now is that independent writers will use it to monetize their content. I spoke to John about the platform and why he thinks a writer should choose it over a competitor like Substack or Patreon.

When John O'Nolan (@JohnONolan) set out to create Ghost, he made an unintuitive decision for a mission-driven founder: to use his skillset to tackle the *obvious* thing to work on, rather than chasing the most *interesting* thing to work on. But 8 years later, and perhaps as a direct result of that decision, Ghost finds itself in one of the most interesting places of any indie business I've had on the show: reinventing online publishing in the the midst of a crisis for journalism, and making close to $2M/year while doing it.Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/139-john-onolan-of-ghost

John O'Nolan is the founder of Ghost - a profitable, not-for-profit business that gives away their code for free. How? On the one side is Ghost the open-source publishing software. On the other is the same platform run as a premium hosted SaaS business. We rap about remote working, pricing, competition and building a future platform to help journalists monetize their craft. Links and transcription:https://onepagelove.com/podcast-002

Today, on The Early-Stage Founder Show, I'm talking with John O'Nolan, the co-founder of Ghost, a fully open source, hackable platform for building and running modern online publications. Ghost was founded in 2013 after a very successful Kickstarter campaign, and today it has been installed over 1 million times and the company has an annual run rate of over $760,000 at the time of this recording.  Ghost is also structured as a non-profit foundation because from the beginning John and his team have wanted to remain true to its users, no shareholders. This means that the company can never be bought or sold, and all revenue is reinvested into the product and community. In our chat, we cover everything from how John managed to get 100,000 signups within the first 24 hours of his campaign to the whirlwind that came after the campaign ended. Where we really dive in, though, is how Ghost has established and maintained a strong culture as the team grows and why that is so important to their success.  If you want to grow without losing sight of your values, even if those values are motivated by profit, then this is the episode for you.

John O'Nolan explains how he used his industry experience to come up with a simple idea, built a landing page that converted 30,000 email subscribers, and raised $300,000 on Kickstarter. Brought to you by SparkPost.

From blog post, to Kickstarter, to sustainable SaaS business: We spoke to globe trotter founder John O’Nolan to understand what’s behind his mission for open source blogging platform Ghost.

A discussion with John O'Nolan, founder of Ghost

For this episode of Secrets for Scaling, we spoke with John O’Nolan, the founder of Ghost. Ghost is a fully open source, hackable platform for building and running an online publication. The Ghost story is unique to most S4S episodes in that it’s not backed by venture capital, or even bootstrapped. Ghost is a nonprofit organization, which launched from a Kickstarter campaign that raised over £200,000 (8x its goal of £25k) in 2013. Today, they see $720,000 ARR (annual recurring revenue) for their managed hosted service with 10 full-time employees, in addition to hundreds of part-time open-source contributors and volunteers. They grew from 10 million to 100 million requests for people reading online publications on the Ghost platform in two years, indicating success for their customers as well.

https://baremetrics.com/blog/self-serve-cancellations-saved-our-business There may be no topic in the world of business that spurs such impassioned responses than self-serve versus manual cancellation of a subscription. Let’s just say the word “evil” gets tossed around a lot. There’s a lot that gets overlooked in the conversation about this, so I want to walk through the different sides of the arguments for/against and try to keep things as rational as possible. I sincerely want to have a constructive conversation about this topic as I believe there are in fact scenarios and reasons when removing self-serve cancellation makes sense for a business. So, we’ll talk through when it makes sense, how to do it in a way that is as customer-friendly as possible as well as how not to do it. I’ll also address some of the common concerns people have with removing self-serve cancellation. Note: This is a topic people feel incredibly passionate about. The one thing I ask is that you at least entertain the idea that the world isn’t black and white and that most businesses (especially small startups) aren’t inherently evil. Everybody’s winging it. One startups experience with removing self-serve cancellation Back in February 2015, we were having some serious issues with churn. It had been creeping up from an already-less-than-stellar 6% to an unsustainable 13%. If prior months’ trend were any indication, in a matter of months we’d be hemorrhaging customers at a rate that would have put us out of business. Something needed to change. We were trying all sorts of methods of getting feedback, from including a “required” open text area for feedback when cancelling, to requesting phone calls, and everything in between. Our one and only goal was to figure out why people were cancelling. But none of the feedback we were getting was actually actionable. Those open text areas would just result in either people slamming their hands on their keyboards at random or at best writing “cancel. bye.” The emails and phone calls we were trying to schedule generally fell on deaf ears. No matter what we tried, we just weren’t getting enough actionable feedback to fix anything. So, we decided to take a more drastic measure. We removed the ability to cancel directly in the app. You’d need to message us if you wanted to close your account. We certainly had some reservations about this. No one loves an extra step to cancel a service. But we were committed to handling cancellations requests as fast as possible while being as genuinely useful as possible (which I’ll talk about in a moment). The results were fantastic. Not only was the feedback actionable, but we were actually able to save about 15% of cancellations! People would write in saying they wanted to cancel because we lacked certain functionality, but in many cases we either had a feature they needed or were about to release it. For a solid year, the feedback from manual cancellations continued to be quite actionable and we could count on one hand the number of people who responded negatively to the process. We cut our churn in half during this period thanks directly to the feedback we received. And more importantly, this literally saved Baremetrics. But as our churn decreased and the major holes were plugged, we found the feedback less and less useful. The reasons for cancelling were boiling down more to things we had no control over (going out of business, changing business models, acquisitions, etc). After nearly 2 years of manually processing every cancellation, we reimplemented self-serve cancellation. How to do manual cancellations in a way that doesn’t bring out the pitchforks The reason our manual cancellation process worked for as long as it did is that we were committed to doing it in a timely and helpful fashion. When I say that someone was required to contact us to cancel, most people instantly think of some terrible experience they’ve had with their cable provider. Sitting on the phone for hours, getting transferred to a dozen different sales reps, being offered increasingly larger discounts to stick around. Nothing could be further from reality with our process. The key to doing manual cancellations correctly comes down to two things. Make it unbelievably easy to get in touch. We had a whole pile different ways to get in touch nearly instantly. You could live chat, send in an email, send an in-app message, tweet at us or yes, if you wanted, you could call us. Respond quickly. They’ve made the move to get in touch, now you need to reply as fast as humanly possible. Many times we’d respond within seconds or minutes, and almost always within a few hours (even during the evening). After someone would write in asking to cancel, we’d respond with something to the effect of… Hey Sally, happy to take care of that for you! Before we do that, would you mind letting me know why you’re canceling? Would love to learn how we could have served you better. Most of the time, we’d get great feedback about exactly what was going on and why Baremetrics wasn’t a good fit for them any more. We’d then promptly cancel their account (and many times refund them) and wish them well. What you definitely should not do is argue with the person to try and convince them to stay around. You should try to be as genuinely helpful as possible throughout the process. You want to understand why they’re cancelling and then act accordingly. This is why we were able to save some 15% of cancellations because we found that those customers didn’t want to cancel, we had just done a bad job of surfacing functionality within the app. So when we identified what was going on, it was actually more helpful to show them they didn’t need to cancel than it was to just go ahead and process without asking any questions. When to try out manual cancellations So when does it make sense for your business to test out manual cancellations? It certainly isn’t for everyone and I don’t believe it’s a great long term solution, but it can be a really effective tool. If you’re churn rate is double-digits and you aren’t sure of the exact reasons why, then trying out manual cancellations for a period of time is likely worth it for you. Churn is ultimately the result of your product not solving the problem the customer has. If you have double-digit churn that’s increasing and no clear path to reduce it, you’ll soon have an existential crisis on your hands. Manual cancellations can make a huge difference in your ability to grow (or to even continue existing as a business). John O’Nolan of Ghost said it well… Do A+ thing & go out of business Do B- thing & survive “Founder” means making this decision 100x per week. 1 user’s poor cancellation UX can fuel positive UX changes for 100,000 new/existing users to have a better experience. You should keep doing manual cancellations only as long as the feedback is actionable and you’ve pinpointed what needs to be done to fix your churn problem. Common objections to requiring a customer to contact you to cancel I believe I’ve covered most of the reasons why doing manual cancellations can be really beneficial to your business, but let’s tackle the two most common objections. “It’s a dark pattern” I’ve heard this one so many times, so let’s be clear: “I don’t like this” does not mean it’s a “dark pattern”. A dark pattern is “a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things.” Manual cancellations aren’t tricking anyone. They aren’t preventing anyone from cancelling their account. Are they the most ideal UX? No. Building a business is constantly making the “A+ and die/B- and survive“ decision. “It’s not customer friendly” Partially agreed. There’s more to it, though. Yes, being able to click a single button and be done is the easiest thing for the customer, but remember the scenario I mentioned above about missing features? Many times (15% of the time in our case) a user wanted to keep using Baremetrics but thought we were missing a feature they needed. Manual cancellations surfaced that in a way that “instant, self-serve cancellations” never would have. The feedback from those cancellations not only let us help those customers, but it helped us as a business improve the product in a way that future customers wouldn’t have those issues. Arguably that makes the practice “friendly” for many customers. Again, temporary less-than-ideal user experience for a few in exchange for long-term positive improvements for many. Business is a balancing act At the end of the day, you will frequently have to make tough decisions to stay in business. That doesn’t make for great marketing copy, but neither does “we’re shutting down because we couldn’t figure out how to make the product better”. The most dangerous thing you can do in business is assume that there’s only one way to do it, that there’s a formula for success, that what worked for Company A will also work for your company. None of those are true. Businesses are unique, living, breathing, ever-changing organisms. If you sit idly by assuming things will just magically improve, your business will die. Some decisions will result in unhappy customers, but no decisions will result in more unhappy customers than the one to shut the business down. Find the balance of doing what’s the “most best” for both the business and the customer. The two go hand-in-hand. Some days the scales will tip more towards one over the other and vice versa. But as long as you work on simultaneously improving both, you’ll be just fine.

This week I chat with John O’Nolan, Founder of Ghost, a publishing platform for professional bloggers. John’s got a really interesting origin story for Ghost (it was a crowdfunded on Kickstarter). Ghost is a startup, but operates as a non-profit incorporated in Singapore with their entire team spread across the globe. In this episode we talk Kickstarter, building open-source software, running a non-profit software company and much more. Enjoy!

Show Notes We discuss the problems that face major nation-states trying to respond to the massive refugee crisis in Europe. We also look at the complex relationship between nations on topics like this in a “global world” (nice, Chris) and suggest that Americans both invest actively in making things better and chill out a bit insofar as we don’t live in Europe. Links “One in, one out”: Turkey and EU agree outline of ‘one in, one out’ deal over Syria refugee crisis (The Guardian) “Central American Families Fear Deportation As Raids Begin” (NPR) “The Shame of America’s Family Detention Camps” (The New York Times Magazine) Safe cities in Syria: Why Syrian ‘Safe Zones’ Could Be Dangerous for Civilians and U.S. Policy (TIME) Stephen’s Biblical metaphors: “Take the beam out of your own eye…” Casting stones Previously on the Show 1.12: Political Appinations – in which we talked (among other things) about the value of more local politics 4.06: Kickstarting a Hyperlocal Super-Farm – in which we talked about local governance in the context of the 4.07: A Muscle-Flexing Flyby – in which we talked about Russia 4.09: A Ghost in Singapore – in which John O’Nolan exhorted people to be charitable in their assessments of businesses Music “Come Down” by Water District. Used by permission. “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Do you hear that? It’s the sound of there not being any sweet remixes yet. Someday. Someday. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Andrew Fallows Jeremy W. Sherman Jeremy Cherfas If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

John O'Nolan on Ghost, Singapore, international commerce, and giving the benefit of the doubt Show Notes We invite Ghost cofounder John O’Nolan on the show to talk about Ghost’s reincorporation in Singapore, what that means for them as a non-profit, and how we should think about these kinds of moves. We talk about everything from the specific details of Ghost’s move to the ethics of business tourism, and John basically hammers on themes we’ve been talking about all season. It’s fantastic. Links “Ghost is moving to Singapore—and saying goodbye to the UK” (John O’Nolan at the Ghost blog) Stripe Stripe Atlas VAT VAT-MOSS Net neutrality in the US FBI demanding iPhone unlocking under a law from the 1700s “Singapore” – Freedom House Report “Censorship in Singapore” (Wikipedia) “Internet Censorship in Singapore” “Media Censorship in Singapore” “Human Rights in Singapore” “Singapore Professor Denied Tenure, Sparks Academic Freedom Debate” (Wall Street Journal) Music “A Better Life” from Silent Moon by Supersmall. Used by permission. “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. If you ever do a remix of this track, we’ll probably feature it on the show. (Seriously.) Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Andrew Fallows Jeremy W. Sherman Jeremy Cherfas If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

This is the fourteenth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with John O'Nolan(on Twitter @ JohnONolan), the co-founder of Ghost about building new products, launching crowdfunding campaigns, and the importance of transparency with open source companies. John is an interactive designer specializing in digital publishing. He was formally the Deputy Head of The WordPress UI Group, where he helped to design and develop the WordPress user interface - and spoke at conferences all over the world about designing WordPress. He also designed and built blogs for people like Microsoft, Nokia, Virgin Atlantic, easyJet, Ubisoft and many others.

  John talks about how he tested the idea for Ghost with a simple blog post that went viral and how he managed to pull off a kickstarter campaign that landed him almost £200K in startup funding. The post Episode #6 – John O’Nolan from Ghost appeared first on WP Elevation.

Andrew and Adam talk with John O’Nolan about his open source blogging platform Ghost written in JavaScript (Node.js), and how he and his team are working hard to create this beautifully designed platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing.

Andrew and Adam talk with John O’Nolan about his open source blogging platform Ghost written in JavaScript (Node.js), and how he and his team are working hard to create this beautifully designed platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing.