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.