Great products

Intro

Ghost is an app that helps businesses of all kinds publish and leverage their content.

It can be used in many ways: from creating a newsletter (you can monitor subscriptions, open rate etc) to using it as a CMS as we are currently doing for our blog.

Ghost is very well designed and super easy to use: interactions to customize themes, add assets and navigate through sections are all super smooth and pleasant.

They’re a non-profit organization that started with a $350,000 Kickstarter campaign in 2013. Since then Ghost has been profitable every single year and now they're currently at $4.7M ARR

The Ghost team is composed by 30 fully-remote people around the world!

Vision

“Our mission is to create the best open-source tools for independent journalists and writers across the world and have a real impact on the future of online media”

Product

Flexible, but not too much

Great products are simple. After 5 minutes of using Ghost, you feel like you’ve used it for months.

For many products, this does not hold true when it comes to customizing themes or settings. Product owners often are tempted to make their tools hyper-customizable and flexible thinking that users would appreciate it.

However, this happens at the cost of ease of use. This is kind of a paradox because the typical customer of Ghost does not have the knowledge (or the time) to build a blog/newsletter in-house so it’s paying to have something which is good enough and simple to use.

Ghost’s settings are all very intuitive and easy to tweak: from changing the design to add a new section in the menu.

Not to mention the great guide on how to set up Google Analytics with Ghost: every step is very well documented and there’re screenshots for each of them.

Structure

It’s clear that at Ghost they know that there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. For this reason there’s a clear sidebar on the left with only a few options makes the navigation across the product intuitive for all.

There are a couple of unconventional details though that are noteworthy:

These features improve the user journey making it seamless.

Easily manage your content

Almost everyone at June writes articles on our blog about various different topics. As time goes by, we update articles with the latest details to make sure they’re always up to date.

Finding the right article among all the ones we’ve published is painful. Ghost’s filtering feature in the Posts section is super effective to find what you’re looking for.

If you have many pieces of content to manage, then you definitely need this feature

To make things even smoother there’s the widely adopted  ⌘K shortcut if you need to jump quickly to a specific article.

Other details

Almost every great product has amazing resources for its users. Ghost is no exception. You can find everything you would ever need in their Docs page.

Switching to another tool is normally painful and great teams know that. Ghost has an entire dedicated section for migrating your content from other platforms.

These guides are clear and well documented.

Same goes for the Content API that we personally followed thoroughly. In case you don’t find an anwer to a question there’s a pretty responding community that could help you!

How much does it cost?

Ghost has what we call a “fair pricing”. It’s proportional to the amount of members you have.

There are 4 plans depending on the add-ons your need:

Currently we are on the Creator plan which is $31 per month.

Here you can find all the details!