John O'Nolan (@JohnONolan) / X

John O'Nolan

4,860 posts

John O'Nolan

@JohnONolan

Founder/CEO @Ghost — Geographically restless. Making an RSS reader for some reason @AlcoveNews

Remote

Joined March 2008

Pinned
John O'Nolan
@JohnONolan
Mar 4
Today @Ghost crossed $10M ARR, as a bootstrapped non-profit foundation building open source software. Indie publisher revenue earned with Ghost now ~$130M, and accelerating. The world of technology is shifting rapidly, and so is the world of media, creators and journalism. It's
59K
John O'Nolan
@JohnONolan
Apr 27, 2025
This helped a lot
12M
John O'Nolan
@JohnONolan
Jul 4, 2015
Every. Single. Year.
John O'Nolan
@JohnONolan
Jun 30, 2020
The complete enterprise software sales playbook, a comprehensive guide to the expected process when a big co wants to buy your app: [A thread 👇] Email 1: Hello, I have not a single clue what your product does, and I have not read your website - do you have some sort of PDF?
John O'Nolan
@JohnONolan
Jul 2, 2025
If you want 50% off chatgpt plus, just click cancel
250K
John O'Nolan
@JohnONolan
Oct 22, 2025
VPS people love to flex when AWS goes down, but they always overlook the bigger picture When AWS is down, everything is, so nobody is angry with you. The entire internet blames Amazon and you're off the hook When your VPS is down, nothing else is, so all customer focus is on
152K
John O'Nolan
@JohnONolan
Dec 12, 2022
Some personal news: I’m thrilled (and admittedly, somewhat surprised) to announce that as of Friday, @substack is now officially powered by @ghost! Keep reading for an exclusive behind the scenes look at the engineering around the launch of THE TWITTER FILES PT2: 🧵
John O'Nolan
@JohnONolan
Jul 9, 2025
I find that Claude Code planning mode is only useful for really small tasks - for larger tasks what's working better for me: Ask Claude to make a plan in a markdown file -- then promptly take that Claude out back and shoot it (ctrl+c) Spin up a new Claude and tell it: "a
187K
John O'Nolan
@JohnONolan
Jul 17, 2020
We just passed $200k MRR for @Ghost and growing faster than at any other point since we started. The 'one weird trick' was showing up every day for 7+ years, even when the graph was totally flat :) Currently searching for 5 new team members! careers.ghost.org 👈🤗
John O'Nolan
@JohnONolan
Sep 27, 2024
12 years ago when I announced @Ghost, I got the most criticism for this line of my original blog post: "No corporate arm of the law. Ghost would be free as in Mozilla, not as in Automattic ... Every decision made would be about improving the software, not the bottom line."
166K
John O'Nolan
@JohnONolan
Jul 26, 2018
In the last 6 months traffic to Ghost(Pro) sites has more than doubled to well over 200million requests per month across ~10k sites. SysAdmins: 1 Support staff: 1 VC: $0 Code: Open Source Don’t let anyone try to convince you that you can’t do big things with limited resources.
John O'Nolan
@JohnONolan
Sep 16, 2024
We recently passed $7M ARR with @Ghost — No growth hacks, no funding, no sales. Just steady iteration and improvement on what we do, over a long period of time. It's not a startup speed-run, it's a different game altogether.
191K
John O'Nolan
@JohnONolan
Apr 19, 2018
We were also rejected, twice. So raised $350k on Kickstarter for 0% equity (vs YC $120k for 7%) Since then have gone on to make $3.2million revenue from customers for 0% equity (vs Series A ~$1m for 20%) 5yrs later: Profitable & 100% control of own destiny 👍🏼 no regrets
John O'Nolan
@JohnONolan
Apr 2, 2018
After 4 years of running a (11,000 member) public Slack community for @TryGhost — today we’ve decided to shut the whole thing down for good. I’ve got a few interesting observations to share from the experience, and what we’re moving to now instead. And so beginneth the thread: