Building an Open Source Company for Long-Term Sustainability with John O'Nolan

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with John O’Nolan, the co-founder of ghost.org. Before further ado, John is going to be one of speakers at Open Source Founders Summit 2025, so if you’d like a chance to dive deeper into any of the subjects we talked about on the podcast with him, in person, you should join us in May.

There’s a lot of interesting tidbits to pull out from this conversation. First of all, I think it’s interesting that Ghost came about because Wordpress was moving away from its roots as a pure publishing tool and becoming a website builder. John, who was very involved in the Wordpress community at the time, wondered what it would look like if Wordpress went back to its roots and focused on publishing and only publishing. It’s a lesson for founders that sometimes focusing on the small niches left behind as incumbents expand can be huge opportunity. —> It’s worth noting that we recorded this podcast last fall when the drama between Wordpress and WPEngine was exceptionally hot.

Ghost is organized as a non-profit, and John also talked about why he made that decision from the beginning. It came down to wanting to make a good salary at a company he had started, but without the goal of becoming fabulously wealthy as a result.

We also talked about whether or not a venture-backed company can be ‘responsible’ with respect to their community; and what types of companies tend to be able to manage the tensions between the community needs and the fiduciary duty that you have if you take outside funding.

We also talked about the difference in the market between the product and the project, how Ghost manages to expand in spite of not having a dedicated marketing team.

We also talked about the difference between building a sustainable business and building a business that gets hockey stick very quickly as well as some of the tension between technology decisions and business decisions.

If you want to talk more about these issues — and want to talk directly with John — you should come to Open Source Founders Summit May 19th and 20th, 2025. Get your tickets here.