Idea
Ghost: open-source Substack that doesn't take a revenue cut
Shaan frames Ghost as an open-source Substack alternative: instead of taking 10% of your revenue like Substack, Ghost charges a flat ~$10/month, which can save heavy creators thousands of dollars a month.
“It's this low cost instead of, let's say, Substack, they take 10% of all your revenue. Ghost just says, hey, pay us $10 a month and we're happy. And so they don't take— they don't take a percentage of your revenue. So for a lot of people, that could be thousands of dollars a month. That you're saving if you use Ghost.”
Steal thisUndercut a percentage-take incumbent with a flat monthly fee that saves your biggest users the most money.
Prediction
Miss
Ghost could become a multi-hundred-million-dollar company
Sam goes on record predicting Ghost -- an open-source WordPress/Substack competitor doing $3.5M/year as a nonprofit -- could become a multi-hundred-million-dollar business, comparing its trajectory to ConvertKit four years earlier.
“And so my prediction, and I want to go on record by saying this, is A, I think this is awesome. And B, I actually think that this could be a multi-hundred million dollar company in the making. And you could watch this guy build it in public.”
Fact
Open startups: companies that publish their revenue in real time
Shaan describes 'open startups'—companies like Buffer, Ghost, ConvertKit and Gumroad that publicly reveal metrics (revenue, growth, sometimes salaries) in real time. An aggregator site, openstartuplist.com, compiles them.
“there's this whole group of people, they call them open startups. If you Google like open startups, I think there's a website that compiles all of them and they're startups or companies that reveal their revenue in real time. You could see their burn or not.”