Let's say you're a writer who wants to publish your work to the web and eventually monetize it. These days you have plenty of options. You might open a Medium account and join the platform's partner program. Or maybe you launch a Substack newsletter. If you're really ambitious, you could throw together a Wordpress website and integrate it with a payment tool like Stripe.

Or you could just launch an account on Ghost, a publishing platform created a few years ago by a guy named John O'Nolan. Before founding Ghost, John was the deputy head of design at Wordpress, and though he was always a fan of the open source CMS, he thought he could create something a little bit better.

So John launched a Kickstarter campaign, and after raising tens of thousands of dollars, he developed Ghost. Today, it's used by some of the world's largest brands, and his hope now is that independent writers will use it to monetize their content. I spoke to John about the platform and why he thinks a writer should choose it over a competitor like Substack or Patreon.