Ghost Challenges WordPress
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Sam Parr shares the story of Ghost.org, a WordPress competitor that's growing into a potentially massive business.
"Ghost.org is basically WordPress meets Substack. It's a WordPress competitor that offers features like accepting money for paywall articles. Instead of taking 10% of revenue like Substack, they just charge fixed monthly tiers - $10, $30, $80, or $200.
The interesting part is the founder launched it as a nonprofit, which I think is stupid, but it was good for PR. They're making $3.5 million a year and use a lot of free labor from contributors. If you go to ghost.org/about, they reveal all their revenue publicly.
I'm an investor in Convertkit, which does about $30 million in recurring revenue now and is worth maybe $200-300 million based on public comps. Ghost's numbers are very similar to what Convertkit was 4 years ago when they started. I predict this could become a multi-hundred million dollar company, and you can watch them build it in public.
The founder had this great quote when someone asked for advice. He said 'My single biggest piece of advice would probably be to stop looking for so much advice and shut the fuck up and go build something.'"
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.