John O'Nolan

Only realised after posting:

Time from $9M→$10M ARR was 14 weeks

Which is especially wild when you consider the first $1M ARR took 5 years 😅

Amazing. Thanks for being there from the very start <3

quite literally wouldn't be here without you

Ghost We're hiring! Ghost is a proud non-profit organisation building open source technology for fiercely independent, professional publishers.

Btw - we're hiring! Fully remote team, looking for AI-pilled ambitious people who love open source.

- Product manager
- Staff product engineer
- Engineering manager
- Senior platform engineer

careers.ghost.org

The world of technology is shifting rapidly, and so is the world of media, creators and journalism. It's hard to keep up with, and even harder to predict.

My strong belief, though, is that open software you own and control is going to be even more important in the future than it is now.

Today @ghost.org crossed $10M ARR, as a bootstrapped non-profit foundation building open source software.

Indie publisher revenue earned with Ghost now ~$130M, and accelerating.

Enjoyed this framing 🙏

We've all heard "SaaS is dead" enough times.

Recently I read multiple people developing something more specific: Nicolas Bustamante from the software side, Ben Thompson from the hardware side, @johnonolan.bsky.social about open source.

Different starting points. Same direction.

it was pretty wild - even wilder that they later tried to play it off as "misunderstanding"

This week Cloudflare shamelessly cloned and released the product of one of their primary competitors.

I'm beginning to wonder - if AI can rewrite software from scratch, without using any of the original code, do software licenses actually mean anything anymore?

john.onolan.org/open-source-...

Goin' live with the Laravel team here in a couple mins 🔊

$PHP

would love to see video about this :)

I've seen some of what Aaron's working on here, and it's so far ahead of anything I've managed to figure out for myself.

(I told him to price this 10x higher but he refused listen to me, so it's your lucky day.)

it's so much calmer 🧘‍♂️

Alcove - A peaceful RSS Reader A quiet place to see what's new

one thing I didn't expect while building alcove.news is the unbridled joy of removing newsletters from my email inbox

feels *so* much better having communication/reading in two different places

(you can follow @alcove.blog.alcove.news.ap.brid.gy if you want updates on progress)

so far they're claiming nothing has changed and it's all imaginary

Back on GPT 5.2 Max fulltime now, Claude 4.5 has been nerfed so hard it's actually unusable this week

all of the above

because it's what I feel like using - you don't have to use it if you don't want to

I'm making an RSS reader Why am I making an RSS reader? I don't know. There are a thousand RSS readers out there already, and they all read RSS feeds, but none of them work the way I'd like them to. So I'm making my own. It'...

I've decided to pursue a very bad idea and see where it goes.

I'm making an RSS reader.

john.onolan.org/making-an-rs...

Our first billboard! Live from Stripe City

bfcm.stripe.com

it's an open source platform, used by people on the open web, built on top of open standards -- if you think that's "platform lock in" then I don't know what to tell you

our job is to promote Ghost, if you want to make an agnostic directory for indie websites on the internet, you should!

Is this being recorded? Would love to see

If you're curious about the build of Ghost Explore — and some of the details of my ... *checks notes* ... 1,256 commits on this project over the past few months

The @laravelphp.bsky.social team just published a nice lil piece about Ghost + Laravel Cloud:
laravel.com/blog/14m-req...

Stoked to share some of the details behind a project I've been working on for a long time, in partnership with
@ahrefs.bsky.social — and built on top of @laravelphp.bsky.social

Spent YEARS wanting this to exist, so I finally just built it.

you open a link in [some app] - it loads an in-app browser, you login, receive magic link - that link can't be opened in the in-app browser, so you can't sign in there

other: PWA doesn't work (same reason)

other: people have a locked down device for work, can only receive email on other device

I recommend including both a code and a login link right from the start - you will discover (as we did) many edge issues with login links, particularly on mobile / in-app browsers

Screenshot of a color palette tool showing a palette called Lightning Bug with color sliders, LAB values, color grid, and palette type controls like complementary and triadic, in some old school neumorphic gray buttons style

Okay, this is fun, and brings me back to some neumorphism nostalgia: a fun color palette generator, that lets you play with different color spaces, and build different palettes type

colorpalette.pro/?color=lab%2...

Cheers 🎉 we should catch up again soon!

Thanks Dann!