The Magic Pages Podcast

Austin Burdine started contributing to Ghost more than ten years ago, back when contributor chat still ran on IRC. Frustrated by how many manual steps self-hosting took, Austin built Ghost CLI and maintained it for a decade. In June 2026 Austin joined the Ghost Foundation's new platform team – and one of the first projects was deprecating Ghost CLI in favour of the official Docker setup. "The longest interview process at Ghost," as the team joked.

Jannis and Austin get into what the platform team actually does, why a 20 MB memory increase matters when you run tens of thousands of sites, and how an idea on the forum turns into a feature. They talk about technical debt in a Node.js code base from 2014, why scoped API keys are harder than they look, how to write a pull request that gets reviewed (open an issue first), and the flood of AI-assisted security reports. Austin also shares where Ghost 7.0 is heading: more extensibility, a public roadmap again, and one-click admin updates for self-hosters.

Jannis: Hi, and welcome to the Magic Pages Podcast, the podcast where we sit down with the people building, hosting, and publishing on Ghost. I'm Jannis, the founder and developer behind Magic Pages, and today I'm here with Austin, one of the platform engineers of the Ghost Foundation. Austin, it's an incredible honor to have you on the podcast. Hello.

Austin: Hi, happy to be here.

Jannis: Well, Austin, for those who don't regularly stalk GitHub, can you quickly tell us a little bit about what you do and how you ended up at Ghost?

Austin: Yeah, so my history with Ghost is fairly lengthy. We joked last week at our team week that I had the longest interview process at Ghost because I started working as an open source contributor for them over 10 years ago when Ghost was still fairly new, when contributor chat was on IRC before it moved to Slack. I started primarily just doing front end and back end contributions based on what issues were available for people to work on. Over time, I noticed that the sort of self-hosting instructions for Ghost were a bit complicated. There was multiple steps involved. None of it was automatic, really easy to mess up. And I was like, what? We could just build a CLI that sort of automates all this, and Ghost CLI was born.

And I worked on that off and on for the last decade and joined Ghost three months ago, roughly, to be on the platform team and take charge of the self-hosting setup and putting some effort into that from a core perspective where it just hadn't been prioritized historically. Funnily enough, one of my first projects is deprecating Ghost CLI. So I joined to kill the thing that I made, but it's been great finally getting to work for Ghost. Finally, all the planets aligned and I was able to make it work.

Jannis: That is quite a lengthy interview process. Yeah. I'm curious, how did self-hosting Ghost work before the Ghost CLI? So I discovered Ghost in 2018 for the first time. And back then, there was already a Ghost CLI, of course. And I thought that was always there, but that was.

Austin: Apparently not the case then. Yeah. Pre 1.0, it was very much a, oh, here we published a zip file to... I don't remember if it was GitHub or some other hosting, like file hosting, where you would download the zip file, unzip it, do the whole NPM install. You had to do all of the database configuration and Nginx or Apache configuration yourself. And then you'd have to maintain some sort of setup. I think Forever was the popular tool at the time.

And then PM2 replaced that, but actually managed the restarting of Ghost and making sure it kept running when you exited your shell session. So it was very much a do-it-yourself sort of thing. Ghost 1.0 is when we launched the CLI. So much more streamlined.

Jannis: Yeah, absolutely. We were like three minutes into the recording and I'm already here with things I never thought about before. I always assumed there was always a Ghost CLI. Well, obviously somebody had to create it at some point. And I would say the entire Ghost community is very thankful to you for that.

Austin: Yeah. I mean, it's impressive that it's still maintained. The amount of usage that it has. Even with Docker being sort of recommended, it's still. Used quite a bit. I'm glad that people found a lot of use out of it.

Jannis: Yeah. How does the move to Docker make you feel? Is that kind of like a bit of a sour side as well, or are you all in for that?

Austin: It's bittersweet in the sense that building Ghost CLI and then having to kill it, there's that aspect of things. But having worked with Docker fairly extensively at the last couple of jobs I've had, it's the right decision, especially with a lot of the additional complexities of ActivityPub and analytics and stuff like that. Ghost CLI just doesn't work anymore for the common hosting model. And there are tons of hosting platforms these days which let you host Docker. It's a little more complicated to do VPS and managing all that. So ultimately it's the right call.

Jannis: Yeah. For a self-host specifically, it takes the complexity away from, I need to get an entire server to, I need somewhere where I can host Docker. And there are, as you said, so many places that let you just do that. So yeah, I'm also excited to see where that goes. Magic pages has always been on Docker, but in the very early days we built our Docker image with the Ghost CLI inside. The official Docker image still does that,

Austin: At least the current v6 version. There's a next variant that removes that. But yeah, that's how it worked in the Docker image for a while.

Jannis: Yeah. And that's the cool thing about software usually. Someone I know always says software is soft and that's kind of those little steps to get to a point where you evolve further and you see what's out there as well. So how does it now work on the other side? You now work within the Ghost Foundation. How does that compare to working as an open source contributor for Ghost or for the project of Ghost?

Austin: It does make me a lot more aware of some of the considerations that aren't necessarily public just because some of it can't be. There's various infrastructure hosting considerations with Ghost Pro, some of which because I'd worked on one of the team weeks 10 years ago on some of the Ghost Pro hosting code just because I was there. And so some of it was still familiar, but a lot of things that it does that sort of inform how Ghost has to be built. And a lot of those do make sense to transfer to self-hosting as well.

But at the same time, it means that certain things which might seem like they're easy to implement in theory become a lot more difficult when you scale. Ghost Pro has, we're in the tens of thousands of sites hosted there and an increase of say 20 megabytes of memory usage times 10, 20,000 sites is a lot.

Jannis: I can attest to that. Just hosting 1,500 sites, an increase in 10 to 20 megabytes is definitely.

Austin: Something you feel as an- Especially these days with memory prices being what they are. Yeah, it's fairly significant. And it's one of those things where looking at the forum and the ideas is, oh yeah, all of these are great. And these are not things that we don't want to do. It's more just how do we prioritize them, especially with such a small team. And it's not all engineers at Ghost. We have our support team and we have the folks that build all the design. There's a fair amount of people who do things that aren't actively working on the Ghost code base. And so it's a huge question of prioritization.

Jannis: Can you give us a little bit of an insight how that happens? So let's say there's an idea in the Ghost forum that somebody posts and what does it take for somebody to pick that up at the Ghost Foundation and say, hey, we want to build that. Is there a decision-making process or in engineering at the Ghost Foundation, how do you decide how those things get together?

Austin: I think it probably differs per team, but I think in a large part, we have to factor it in the case of is this going to be a useful feature for 90% of people? And the percentage may vary slightly, but it's a question of does this make sense to be added to Ghost Core? Are there ways that if we add this, it increases the maintainability burden? WordPress has this extensibility contract that's fairly expansive, but it means that it is a lot harder to make changes going forward without breaking things. And so, especially for things like replacing or making it possible to replace the mail provider for something other than Mailgun, there's a fair amount of considerations there, especially when it comes to things like analytics where Mailgun lets you do polling of their events API, but not a whole lot of other mail providers do that.

And so Ghost's integration right now is built on that polling. There are web hooks that most support, but Ghost's hosting considerations mean that web hooks get a lot more complicated, especially for some of our bigger sites that have hundreds of thousands of members. That's a significant amount of traffic just from web hooks that we have to figure out how to handle. And so it's one of those that seems simple in theory, but then when you start to dig into the side effects of that change, it gets a lot more complicated. And I think oftentimes we draw from the ideas board, but a lot of these are things that we've also considered internally and are planning to do at some point.

But yeah, it all. Depends on what other things are going on. And I think the other thing that affects a lot of this is Ghost's code base was written for a very early version of Node. And the way you would write a Node.js code base in 2026 is very different than you would write one in 2014. And to some extent, we're just paying that cost. There's a lot of stuff in Ghost that made sense at the time, but in retrospect is now technical debt that we have to address. And some of these ideas it's like, okay, great. It would be nice to be able to do this, but in order to make that feasible, we have to go and address a lot of these underlying concerns so that it's easier to add and maintain these new sorts of features going forward. And that's probably the biggest blocker to a lot of these these days.

Jannis: Do you have a rough idea how much time you spend on technical debt versus let's say working on new features in that sense?

Austin: It depends because the cost of the technical debt is probably spread fairly evenly across the different teams. I think it's probably less these days now that we've started to establish a roadmap for refactoring and replacing some of the more antiquated parts of the code base with more modern alternatives. And so determining what is technical debt versus features also gets a little tricky because there might be a case where solving some of that technical debt sort of adds the ability to implement this feature or does implement this feature just by the nature of doing it. But.

I mean, it's probably a bit skewed in terms of technical debt. Like right now, Steve, my counterpart on the platform team is working on removing Ember.js from our admin code base because we've been stuck on a five plus year old version of Ember and that dramatically affects what we can build on the admin side. So yeah, it differs per team, but I think we're hopefully getting to a point where that ratio starts to switch from more tech debt focused and more into building new features that are useful.

Jannis: I mean, we're now already fairly deep into your work at Ghost, at the Ghost Foundation. You also mentioned Steve now. Are you two now basically the two platform engineers that the Ghost Foundation has?

Austin: Yeah. Yeah. We essentially make up the platform team. Hannah is working with us pretty heavily as well, but day to day, yeah, we're the two folks. And we kind of have segmented roles. We work together, but Steve's focus primarily is the contributor lifecycle. So can somebody clone the Ghost repo, make a change, make a PR and have that make sense? And then I'm the second stage of that, which is once a PR is merged, owning the lifecycle of that to a publishable, buildable, deployable Docker image or other aspects of things that self-hosters or our own internal hosting can run. And so that's kind of how that fits.

Jannis: So to just give it a spin in my own words, because I think that platform engineering can mean different things at different companies, but would it be fair to describe it in a way that the two of you work on making Ghost work for people that are not necessarily at the Ghost Foundation?

Austin: Yeah. I think that's our platform team's roadmap. And I think this past week we were discussing a lot about the particulars of our roadmap. And I think that's still reinforced. We've also found that internally too, there are folks that aren't working on the Ghost code base regularly, and they run into some of the same problems that external contributors run into. We're working on improving that. And hopefully some of that bleeds into the open source contributors as well.

Jannis: Can you share some of those things that people run into, like that happens internally, but also externally? What's some of the things that are similar there?

Austin: I think the broadest one that we've had a problem for a while is people making a pull request and it just sitting and not getting reviewed or merged or feedback for a long time. And I think some of that is just because we haven't been focusing on it as much as we should, and that's what we're trying to correct. But the other part is especially more with open source contributors where it's like, oh, this is a new feature and we haven't really discussed how that should be implemented. And so trying to figure out how to come back to a large PR, and some of this feeds into AI built PRs, which is a whole other complexity where it's like, oh, this might make sense, but the way that this contributor has gone about implementing it isn't the correct way.

That takes more time to communicate that in a way that's not like, hey, we don't want this. It's more, hey, we need to discuss how. It makes sense to implement this before someone goes off and spends a bunch of time on it. And so it's this unfortunate feedback loop that makes it less likely that somebody will contribute when there's no guarantee that it'll get merged. And so that's definitely something we're working on improving.

Jannis: Yeah. I mean, I can just attest to that from my own experience. So one of the reasons why you're on this podcast as far as. I have put together is because the episode I had with a couple of weeks ago was also shared within the Ghost Foundation, right?

Austin: Yeah.

Jannis: And the one thing that we pointed out in there was that for us, it's sometimes a bit hard to figure out what we can or should contribute to the Ghost core. And what we always see is exactly that, that there is so much noise that has to be dealt with that sometimes things get lost, which. I think is very natural in a big open source project like Ghost. Are there ways for, let's say, new open source contributors that are not more than me who obviously also have a commercial interest in contributing to the Ghost core to make their PRs in a way or to create them in a way that is easily reviewable for you guys?

Austin: I think Steve probably has a better answer on this than I do, working more closely with it. But for things that are like new feature additions, one of the easiest things is maybe opening up an issue beforehand, just because if it's something that is, oh, we're planning on doing it this way or something to that effect, it can be discussed before somebody goes and spends a ton of time. Having contributed to open source before joining this, it can be pretty demoralizing is probably the right term to spend hours on something and then have it go, no, this isn't the right way to do this.

And then kind of just be left going, okay, I'm going to have to spend a bunch more time reworking it. One of the things that we are working on is getting our sort of standards in the code base documented a little bit better. So not just for humans, but for AI coding agents to be able to look at it and say, this is how you do this particular thing, like adding a new service or adding a new dependency. This is the correct way to do that. And so one, we don't have to spend as much time. On the review side thinking about, does this follow the right patterns? And two, just so that it's easier for somebody to build something new without having to worry about the minutia of, am I using semi-colons correctly or some of the things that ultimately don't really matter as long as everybody agrees on the same way to do it.

So yeah, issues are probably the biggest thing. And yeah, other than that, Steve probably has some better ideas and this is something that we're working on improving.

Jannis: Yeah. I can kind of see from a contributor's side, which is putting on my contributor's hat, I can kind of see why people don't start issues, especially in these days where it is so easy to just say, hey, Claude, please do this. But if you come back to the foundation of open source work, it is literally the foundation of how open source projects work, that you raise an issue, a problem, a feature that you want to see and it is discussed. Yeah. So that's, I think, a very valid point.

Austin: Yeah. And it's been difficult too, because like you mentioned with Claude and all of the other AI agents, the type of open source contribution has changed quite a bit. Like back when I first started contributing, it was a genuine, this hasn't fully gone away, but it was a genuine community of everybody sort of working on different pieces of the thing. And these days there's quite a bit less of that and quite a bit more transactional like contributions where somebody is like, hey, there's this one thing that I need. I'm going to go point Claude at it and open this PR. And that's not to say that there isn't a community because the forum is definitely very active.

And like you and Murat and Cathy have been very helpful in that respect, but by and large, there's a lot fewer repeat contributions from a large group of people. And so it changes the interaction a bit.

Jannis: That's fair. I think the issue we sometimes see is that we don't know where to address that sometimes. So if we take the, let's say new feature stuff again, let me just take a very concrete, recent example. I haven't discussed it with Murat, but I'm just going to take it now. He has recently released on Synaps Media scoped API keys, for example, where I don't know the technical implementation. I assume that he just gates them in front of Ghost somewhere and just says, hey, if this API key gets through, then it's only allowed to do that and that. The topic of scoped API keys and everything has been discussed at the Ghost forum as well for like forever.

And he openly said that he has implemented that on the hosting site because he doesn't know whether it's worth it as a PR. And I think this is where it would help contributors to just have a way of understanding what the process is. Issues as you raised already is I think a great point that you've pointed us at as well to just say, hey, like. I have an actual, you know, not just an idea that I just put in a Ghost forum, but I'd say it would be cool to be able to do this and that, but to actually have that discussion somewhere where the code is.

I think what sometimes, at least historically, I think it's getting a lot better now again, like in the last year or so, but historically what has been the issue a little bit for our side. And. I mean, back then you were also, you know, just an open source contributor. The issue was a bit communication to, you know, understand does that actually get heard? Is there like feedback on that? And this is how I think we kind of drifted in a way that feature work is the Ghost foundation and then bug fixes or like smaller things that can be added is like stuff for open source contributors, which we can easily do if we see it.

Austin: Yeah. Yeah. And I think the scoped API keys specifically as an example is one of those where it runs into two different things. One of them is, as I mentioned before, just technical debt where the permissions model in Ghost. Has sat pretty much unchanged, at least since I started working on it, which was funny to come back and start working on the Ghost code base and go, Oh, that code looks familiar.

But so there's a fair amount of work of that, of like making sure that any sort of feature like scoped API keys, isn't just more duct tape on top of a system that isn't built for like API keys. Realistically, the permissions model as it exists today was built for humans. And so we need some way to retrofit that. And I think the other portion of things is that we haven't been very good historically at sharing our roadmap publicly. And that's partially, I think, because historically we would commit to something.

And then if we found something that prevented that from occurring or some urgent thing came up, then we would have to sort of walk that back. And that led to some issues. And I think that's why we've also stopped really communicating specific dates about things, because then you miss those dates inevitably and people get frustrated. But I think we're starting to get to a point now where, especially like platform team things, we can start to share some of the roadmap that we have. When I shared a few weeks ago that we were deprecating Ghost CLI and going to make Ghost Docker the sort of official thing, it's kind of the first step of that. And I imagine once we have the Ghost 7.0 roadmap a little bit more finalized, we'll probably start to share that as well.

So that it's a little easier for folks to see, Oh, there are these things that are in progress. It's not just, Oh, immediately something's available. These are things we're planning to do. And so for stuff like Scoped API Keys, just hold off for a couple of months and then maybe some of the internal stuff will get redone such that it's now much easier to implement on top of it.

Jannis: And I think I've been in or actively active in the Ghost community for nearly four years now. So I still consider myself fairly fresh compared to you, for example. But you also have to attest to the fact that the communication on things like this has improved a lot. And a lot of that goes to you and Steve. Steve has worked within the Ghost Foundation on that a little bit longer now, but since you also joined him, I just feel like we're kind of on a rocket ship and we're just blasting through those things. So I also just want to take the time to thank both of you for that work because it is visible to contributors outside of the Ghost Foundation as well.

Austin: It's good to hear. That's sort of why the platform team was founded to begin with and it's good that it's starting to work. Yeah. And on that note also,

Jannis: Just a big thanks to John as well, to John O'Nolan, the founder and CEO of Ghost, because as far as. I remember, that was one of the direct consequences of feedback that he received from different open source contributors that he said at some point last year, we need something like this.

Austin: Yeah. I mean, especially with all the security, I mean, that was the big thing was security stuff and Docker image and all that, but yeah. Yeah. So, you know, in all open source.

Jannis: Communities that I know, people like to complain a lot, but I also see a lot of movement in the right direction. And I think we need to embrace that a little bit, see how the next couple of months develop, but I think we're on a really good path with where we're heading as a Ghost community.

Austin: Yeah. And I think our true goal for like Ghost 7.0 is to make it a, not necessarily changing things too dramatically, but making it reshifting things towards more extensibility and more ability for open source contributors to build extensions in Ghost and make the whole open source feedback loop a lot better.

Jannis: We already spoke about that a little bit before we started recording, but I can only repeat what I said back then. I'm really excited to see where you are going to take this. So yeah, very excited for Ghost 7. Yeah. You also mentioned before AI contributions and security specifically. I mean, the two of us, we are very much embedded in that. You from a maintainer side, me from the perspective that. I obviously want to make sure that the Ghost versions that we're running on Magic Pages can hold up to security standards, but can you tell people that might not be that involved a little bit about how AI has changed that and how open source projects are affected by that?

Austin: Yeah. I think we've gotten a little bit on top of things, thankfully, but for a long time, it's just like, there's just so many more things that people find, which is good overall, but it's now meaning that. I have to take, like Steve and I both have to take time away from the new things we're going to do to make sure that we fix all of these security issues. And some are more severe than others.

Jannis: So security issues that people find with AI, report with AI?

Austin: Some of them are for sure generated with AI. And some of them are, at least I don't know that I spend too much time trying to figure out if something's AI generated or not. Some are very clearly that way. We got a bunch that were like specific DNS record things with some of the Ghost domains. And they're just like, no, that's something clearly stated in our security policy is something we don't treat as a vulnerability.

So some of them, it's very clearly just even either AI or some automated scan that just found a bunch of stuff. But there are some that are genuine, oh, we got to actually fix this. And that also runs into the tech debt things. Some of the considerations are just it's an old code base. And there are certain things where we have to spend a lot more time fixing it, or at least reworking certain parts of the code base to not run into these sorts of things as frequently.

Because oftentimes a security fix, you'll just patch one thing and then another thing will come up in a similar part of the code base. It's definitely been a lot, but I think we're starting to get on top of things, which is good.

Jannis: At least what I see from other open source projects, from some of the things I do beside Magic Pages as well, there are two main issues with AI in that. And one is I think that everybody now has access to tools that can break software. And that might not even be something expensive like Claude or a Codex subscription or something. But if. I have a GPU in my computer that I use for gaming, I can download an open weights model. And. I have technically a tool in my hands that can break most software by now. And the other thing that I imagine is probably the sheer amount of reports that you get now that will probably just be a bit overwhelming. Yeah.

Austin: Yeah. I think as we've patched some of the common causes of things, it's gotten less, thankfully. But yeah, I can't imagine what, I mean, seeing some of the stuff from the guy that maintains curl, just seeing the amount of stuff that he gets, it's just insane. I'm fortunate that we're not in that realm where it's used so much more and gets so many more eyes on it. But yeah, it's good that most of those have come through the proper security disclosure process. And it's not like we're seeing active exploits, at least not that I've heard.

So at least it does seem like even for people that generate AI reports, it seems like it's coming from a good place, at least. It's like we want to make open source software more secure, whether it's coming from a place of, oh, I want to be credited on this one thing or not, it ultimately is helpful.

Jannis: Absolutely. I think the only exploit that I know was, I don't remember the details, but it was earlier this year where I think it was an SQL injection or something like this, where somebody could gain access to admin API keys.

Austin: There was two, there was the SQL injection one, and there was a cache header, like a preview thing one, and those were both pretty bad. So fortunately, since then we haven't had any huge, like 9.8 plus severity.

Jannis: Yeah. But those were scary. But the scary part I think happened weeks afterwards, whenever you see on the ghost forum, somebody report an issue and then posting like their ghost version number, which was like a very low six version number or five at some point, with an URL to their actual ghost site. That was always the scary parts where I thought, you need to update your ghost site because this is out in public now.

So yeah, this is also I think where publishers or. People running, not just ghost sites, but any software that is hanging somewhere in the internet need to be more aware that we're not living in times like 15, 20 years ago, where an exploit needs actual knowledge to be used. But that, as I said, right now, anybody that has gamed on their computer at some point is technically able to use those without any knowledge. Just to kind of have an outlook on where things are going, you're working as a platform engineer now for three months, you said, right?

Austin: Thereabouts I joined in mid-June, so three or four months roughly.

Jannis: So if we're looking ahead like next year, Ghost 7 at some point, what would need to happen that you say, okay, this was really successful, I'm happy with the stuff we've been doing as a platform team?

Austin: I think building a setup where people can migrate pretty seamlessly from CLI installs to the Docker setup. That's my main focus right now is making sure that's doable because we're not going to support the CLI going forward. And we want to make sure that people aren't just kind of left hanging. We've run into this a lot with local setups where Ghost CLI is the main way to do a simple Ghost local setup for theme development or other different use cases and trying to make sure that still is supported, even if it's slightly more complicated than it was before.

But I think, yeah, there's a number of other things coming with 7.0 that we're really excited about. And I think I'm hoping they'll be received pretty well. I know some of the things people are probably hoping like mail adapters or different payment providers, stuff like that, may not be in 7.0 just from a timing perspective. And a lot of the technical debt that I mentioned, like cleaning up some of the underlying limitations.

But I think the idea is that Ghost 7.0 gets us into a good spot where we can start to make those sorts of changes moving.

Jannis: Forward. Yeah. I love the idea of building the foundation now or improving the foundation because it's already built. And I think the very important thing that we shouldn't forget as a Ghost community as well is what you said before, that things that might've made sense 10, 12 years ago might not make sense right now. And if you came back after so many years and you thought, oh, well, this looks familiar, then that doesn't necessarily mean that it's bad code right now. It just means that lots of standards are still the same, but it also means that lots of things have moved. And that's, I think, always the challenge we face as developers.

I mean, I know it from our code base at Magic Pages as well, our backend and everything. And that's barely four years old now. And I realized that sometimes, well, that might've made sense four years ago with different decisions made. It might not make so much sense now. So how much of the time do we spend on improving that versus working on the fancy glitter stuff that gets people really excited? But in the end, I think the one thing that we can take from your experience as well is that it sometimes takes those improvements that we don't see to enable all of those things and to enable all of those nice glittery, fancy things that we can do in the future then.

Austin: Yeah. And I guess that's also one of the upsides of AI is making some of these more foundational changes, especially that span the whole repo, are significantly easier when you can do them. With AI, either AI doing the changes directly or writing the scripts to programmatically make these changes. It makes it so much easier to update the old code base. And I think the main thing is figuring out specifically what the new setup looks like to move to that. But that's been one of the definite upsides.

Jannis: Yeah, that's true. I have one potentially odd question for you now towards the end. People that don't like Docker, what would you tell them in that case? It came up a bit in the Ghost forum with Ghost 6 where people said, well, I don't want to learn how to do Docker. I want to stay on the Ghost CLI. What would you tell them to convince them to look into Docker and how that works?

Austin: Funnily enough, when we first started working on Ghost CLI, Ghost itself had a similar approach. For the longest time, Ghost Pro used LXC instead of Docker, which had its own drawbacks. But I think also at the time, 10 years ago, Docker was very much not as fleshed out as it is today. And I can see the whole bit of not wanting to learn a new thing. That's totally understandable. I think one of my goals with the new Docker setup is to try and achieve the same Ghost CLI-like experience without having to maintain a separate CLI, but also trying to make it so that you end up using most of the same Docker commands that you would use for any other open source product.

And I think that's also one of the things that is worth mentioning is Docker and just containers in general is where the ecosystem is going. And one of the benefits is. Specifically from a memory usage standpoint, one of the biggest issues with production CLI installs is it has to install all the dependencies and that can take quite a bit of memory, especially with newer package managers. But with Docker, it's just pre-installed and you just end up essentially downloading them all in one place. And we've done a fair amount of work on Docker image, both the official one and the nightly-ish one that Ghost publishes to make sure that the Docker image is as optimized as it can be.

And that's a lot harder to do with the CLI installs where any optimizations you have to do have to be done in the CLI or done post install, which adds a fair amount of overhead and also potentials for breakage. Whereas in Docker, it's a lot easier to just add those optimizations there. I think the other thing too, that is why Docker makes a lot more sense. Having maintained the CLI for a decade, the amount of problems you encounter when your abstraction layer is the operating system is significantly higher than the amount of problems you encounter when node is your abstraction layer. And so one of the problems with the CLI is we can't officially support anything outside of Ubuntu because Linux distros like to put different things in different places and trying to make a system that handles all of that gets incredibly complicated versus Docker where you can basically standardize around a single OS and distribution model.

And then it's the responsibility of the OS to support Docker. And I do think there are ways that we're trying to also improve the user experience so that people don't have to think about Docker as much. One of those, which I've not really done any code changes in Ghost yet for this, but one of the things that Docker makes doable drawing from some of the examples like Home Assistant is one-click admin updates, which has been a thing that I think people, self-hosters specifically, have been wanting for a while. Not so much on hosting platforms because most of the rollouts are automated, but say you're running a single self-hosting instance and you don't want to have to shell into the server to update something, hopefully with this new Docker setup, that'll actually be.

Jannis: Feasible. Yeah, I've never thought about the updates as well because truthfully that is one of the main issues. We touched upon that quickly, also with security vulnerabilities now. The reason why people didn't update Ghost was because they had to log into the server and they had to figure out how did I install Ghost two or three years ago? What did I do back then to do that? And this is I think where self-hosting software is a lot of fun, but it might not make sense for everybody. If you have never touched a Linux server or Linux itself before, it might not make sense to now get the DigitalOcean droplet with the one-click install because it installs it once for you.

You will not have any automatic update. And if that is a possibility, that you have a one-click updater within Ghost itself, then that would open up that road for a lot more people, I think.

Austin: Yeah, there should hopefully be some progress on that in the next couple of weeks, but in theory also working with the extensibility goal of Ghost itself, making that a pluggable adapter too. The Docker Compose setup uses one way of doing it, but if there are platforms that host Ghost that want to be able to do it in a different way, it might make sense for them to implement an adapter to do that as well.

Jannis: You're telling me lots of exciting news here.

Austin: Yeah, you heard it here first, folks.

Jannis: The gears in my head are already spinning. What can you do with this on a platform like Magic Pages? That's really, really cool. Those are the details that you only find out or that you only figure out when you're really immersed in software like this and when you're really working on those issues for a long time and when it's not just this one thing that doesn't work or. I want to have a different email provider, which is also perfectly fair, but sometimes it's those quality of life features that will impact a lot more people, truthfully, because I don't think that in the sense of security of the overall platform of Ghost, the impact of having a new email provider is as big as having a one-click updater.

Austin: Yeah, and it's also interesting that it brings up that different platforms and different users have different ideas of what the most important thing is. We talked about this internally after listening to you and Murat talk, the focus on different payment providers versus the focus on translations versus what we internally think is the most important thing. It's good to have that feedback of what do people value as the most important thing, and some of that may or may not shape how we think about things internally, but it's definitely good to at least have the knowledge that is important to people. And so even if it feels like, on the forum, that we don't always respond or that we don't think or care about these certain things, I think we do.

I think what we're trying to do is make that feedback loop of, oh, I want something done. Here is why we can't do it now, or here's why it's delayed for whatever reason, make that a little more clear so it's not just shouting into a void.

Jannis: I'm excited where that leads us or how it develops over the next couple of months, and I love the fact that you're thinking about those things. Murat and I, we now hear from different people how it was a topic at the team week, for example, and we're both in awe about that. We would have never expected that. I think a big thanks goes to John for that again, to just also be aware of that and to have that on the radar and to talk about that. And to all of you, to the entire team of the Ghost Foundation as well, to listen to that, to think about it, also to counter some of our points because you have a different experience than we do. We have the perspective of open source contributors.

There is the perspective of people using Ghost on Ghost Pro, on Magic Pages, on Synaps Media, self-hosted, wherever, that have different perspectives again. And then there's the perspective that all of you have, which is, again, different. So I think in the end, the big important goal that we should have in mind is to bring those experiences together somehow and to combine them and see what makes sense for the overall ecosystem. Yeah, definitely. Austin, we've talked about most things that I had on my list, but is there anything from your side, any more topics or anything that you would want people to know?

Austin: I think it's basically just restating what I've mentioned is that we are paying attention internally to a lot of this stuff and we are working to improve how we share. What we're working on internally and how that gets publicized with rough timelines on things. Because we do know it's been a problem in the past. From the early days of Ghost, when it was incredibly open and super transparent about everything, to the last few years where it's been a little more closed and now opening it back up again. Yeah, we're working towards it. And from you and Murat and everybody else that runs hosting platforms, it's helpful to have that.

Even from the community too, just continuing to provide feedback in the forums for how we're doing and how we could be improving, hopefully in a nice way. But in general, we're keeping tabs on things and trying to continually improve how we engage with the community. Well, thank you so much for.

Jannis: Reaching out, first of all, for also making time to come onto the podcast here, for sharing your ideas and thoughts or giving us all of those insights into how you work in the platform team, how the Ghost Foundation works a little bit. And yeah, it was absolutely lovely speaking to you about all of this, Austin.

Austin: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

Jannis: All right. Bye-bye.

Austin: Bye.

Back in July, Jannis recorded a solo episode about why a web hosting company was sponsoring a print festival. Now the three of them are back from it. Jannis, Mariia and Christine sat down together in one room — three voices, one microphone setup — to talk about the weekend Magic Pages spent at Indiecon in Hamburg: walking into the Gleishalle am Oberhafen, a former freight hall with trees growing inside it, and finding out what a room full of print publishers makes of a hosting company.

They get into the booth and its two reactions (polite confusion, then genuine curiosity), the workshops — bookbinding and a free-writing session about a flying dog, and a newsletter workshop full of print publishers asking where to host — the little magazine they printed and handed out, and the 90-minute Ghost workshop that twelve people walked out of with a real site. The episode ends on the question Jannis brought home from his solo episode: how do you bring the tight-knit feeling of the print scene into the digital world? The answer turned out to be the opposite of scale.

Jannis: Hi and welcome to the Magic Pages podcast, the podcast where we sit down with the people building, hosting, and publishing on Ghost. I am, as always, Jannis, and today I'm here with two guests you might already know, Mariia from the very first episode, and Christine, who you know from episode two. Hello to both of you. So the reason there's the three of us is that back in July, I recorded an episode on my own about why a web hosting company, Magic Pages, was sponsoring and going to a print festival in Hamburg, Indiecon. And well, it's now Friday, September 11th, and we're back for a couple of days because the three of us spent the last weekend in Hamburg at Indiecon.

And we quickly wanted to have a conversation to talk about how it was for us and our impressions. Christine, you had heard me share about Indiecon for a couple of months already. And at some point we said, Hey, it would be really cool if you could support us there. And you've heard lots of ideas how we imagined it would be, yet none of us has ever been there. Can you remember when you first walked into the venue? What was your first impression when you entered?

Christine: I've done conferences in fitness, but it was really interesting to see the environment and what the building looked like. And it seemed like it fit kind of like what I was expecting for the weekend. Like, I think the guy beside us was saying, you're not going to see someone with a suit here. And I think that kind of set the tone for the rest of the conference is that you definitely saw a lot of artists.

Jannis: Yeah. So the guy next to us was Steven from the Ueberschwarz Publishing. And yeah, it's exactly what he said. I think we had a quick conversation with him on Friday after we arrived. And he said, he loves it here because you will not see a guy in a suit walk in. And even if you do, we would just politely show him out. Mariia, how was it for you? When you first entered there, you have a little artistic streak yourself. How was that for you walking into that very, let's say, vibrant and creative space?

Mariia: The first thing I noticed were the colors. It was just so bright and vibrant there. I remember walking in and seeing even the branding of Indiecon itself, which is beautiful, like the stones, different types that speak to the theme of compassion or compression. When you take everything in, the venue itself is just so interesting and so special. I think it works so well for the conference of this type. So just for those who don't know what kind of venue was there, it is essentially, it was just one spot. It was, Jannis, was it a freight terminal or something?

Jannis: The venue itself is called the Gleishalle am Oberhafen. So translation would be the track hall at the so-and-so Harbor. And it was until a couple of decades ago. I don't know when exactly, but it was a freight terminal where the lovely Deutsche Bahn or maybe also private train companies unloaded freight trains. Yes.

Mariia: Yeah. So with this type of like a bit of gritty environment in there, you have as well plants and trees growing on. When we entered, we started seeing like, you know, posters from different independent publishers or artists that were setting up their things. And then you just have a look. And then basically at the end of the tour, you see almost like an untamed forest. Well, it is like that corner where they had all the like bushes and trees. Um, and when you have a look around, actually the workshop spaces and the like round tables and all the other like, you know, spaces for activities on that conference, they were almost nestled in those trees and those like oasis pots.

So to me, it just felt very conducive to that creativity, to that untamed thinking that you walk in expecting something that is very out of the ordinary. And I think that for three of us, well, correct me if I'm wrong, but I do think that for us, it was something different because we, three of us come from the digital background, um, and interacting with publishers who are all about print and who as well have their touch points was digital. Well, I think it was quite eye-opening.

Jannis: Christine, you mainly make things online. You work online, you now live in Austria, your friends are back in Canada. So. I would say similar to us, most of your life happens online. You are not somebody that regularly picks up paper and makes something out of that. But seeing all the people that do that regularly at Indiecon, how did that make you feel? Do you feel like you actually belong there? Or was there like a feeling of being like how I always put that Indiecon, the odd one out?

Christine: I think there were definitely a lot of people and I attended a workshop that was about building a newsletter. And before that, like the day before, I felt like it was very heavily dominant on published print, but then when I did the workshop, there was actually a lot of people that were published print that wanted to get into the newsletter. And it was really interesting to see the other side and the type of questions that they asked me.

And then it was also interesting for me to ask the other way. And I think it's like the common phrase, like what's obvious to you is interesting to someone else. So it was neat to like see the two worlds combined and some people blending the two.

Jannis: I remember you coming back from the newsletter workshop and telling us that it was a completely different world for you, that, you know, you are embedded in newsletters all the time and email marketing all the time for you, this is also natural. But what were some of the questions that the print publishers ended up asking?

Christine: Yes. One of them was where should I host my newsletter? And, you know, trying to sneakishly say magic pages. But it was interesting because the common form was a Substack and then someone else interjected being like, but Substack, you don't own it and also going into the conversation of the backstory of Substack, like how there were some things going on with the company and people were like, we want to join someone that's more ethical. And I think magic pages does great job about that.

And then other, yeah, the question was like, do I do it on my own website or do I join Substack? Cause it's free. Uh, other questions were like, Oh, what do I write about? Um, yeah, like the questions many of them were asking me were actually the technical, they're like, where do we start? Uh, what platform? And that was like, I think a great, it would have been a great thing to chat about at that workshop, but we didn't get to it.

Jannis: Cool. Thank you, Christine. And Mariia, how were the workshops for you?

Mariia: Well, two I attended spoke more to my creative side. One was about book binding and the accordion style book and filling it out with prints done by stencil technique. I have experience in printmaking and book binding. So that was very interesting for me to actually work with somebody in person, because both of the things I've picked up from watching YouTube videos and learning from things like, you know, Reddit, subreddits on book binding and printmaking there, of course, I have access to experts. Or people who are doing the same things as me all around the world.

But in that moment, I got to actually be in person and speak to somebody who does book binding in Berlin, who runs their own collective and somebody else who does prints and, you know, who, um, has a big extensive background in that. So interacting with them in person, uh, was incredibly valuable to me. It was not only just looking at how they do things differently, but generally you see that while they're doing it in real time, in real life, it's not like somebody on the screen or somebody just sharing their work online, which is, you know, as well, super important, but this is to me was felt like two of my things colliding in real life, something that I just see online and in real life, in my surrounding, I might be the only person who's doing this, seeing and being surrounded by other people who do the same thing.

That felt incredible. And the other workshop actually attended together with Christine. And that was, uh, from, uh, one of the two Ukrainian magazines that were present at the conference. Um, it was from DACH magazine and they are, um, like all about like highlighting Ukrainian culture, poetry. And so we attended the workshop, which was about free writing, about writing the story on the flying dog. And that was, I didn't even know how to put it in words. It was just so absurd when we looked at it with together with Christine.

So sitting there again, in that, um, little alcove surrounded by trees with noise from the fair going around you, we all just sat down and for half an hour, we had that prompt from, uh, Viktoriia from DACH magazine, who was like, I know that there are so many excuses to not do your own thing and not to write. And oftentimes you're like, Oh, I'm let me scroll something online. Or, you know, I'm, I'm busy this, this, or that's coming up.

So I don't have time to do my own thing. So that was exactly half an hour where we all sat down with other participants were like around 10 of us. And we each wrote something. And gosh, that is really great example of how everybody's brain works differently because, you know, I started with one story. I realized halfway that I didn't like it. So I wrote a poem. I did not expect myself to do something like this. I think the last time I did it was in high school.

So that was really cool. And then, um, a person next to me wrote a very heartfelt essay, exploring their own fears and insecurities about sharing their work with the world, sharing their work line and see that this flying dog is so absurd and they're carefree and you can just share your work. Somebody else wrote another story and somebody else wrote a poem. Like it was just incredible in that sense. So yeah, I, you can hear, I really enjoyed my workshops. Like the themes were incredible.

Jannis: To me, it then also sounds like that's, you know, independent of us going there as a hosting company. It was also just a space where people can come together and maybe do all the things that as you said, Mariia, um, nobody else in your life actually does and just see that there are other people interested in that. And I think especially for all the print publishers that we saw there, it was a space to come together and realize like, Hey, I'm not alone. There's somebody in the booth next to me that might be writing about something completely different that might be doing something completely different. Um, for example, as Christine pointed out, Stephen and his publishing house, they were a nonfiction publisher publishing about some quite philosophical and political topics.

So quite far away from what magic pages does as a hosting company. And yet we ended up chatting with him for quite some time and figuring out that there's lots of like similar problems that we encounter and just seeing, you know, the other side, I think opened, uh, the eyes for me a lot. And it feels like in the workshop, it was similar that people just came together and were able to see that, Hey, there's somebody else that faces the exact same problem. And maybe with the example of the flying dog. So, Hey, we just going to take this time now and we're going to do something that we wouldn't necessarily do at a busy conference. And take time for some creative writing.

Mariia: Yeah. To me, that as well was like building a bridge between two worlds, digital and print, and what I see here is not necessarily what you think immediately about digital and print to meet digital is about, you know, online opportunities. It is, um, something that sitting in my apartment, I would have never thought about book binding, unless I'd seen those videos on Instagram where somebody took their favorite book and created a new cover for them. And this to me, whenever I see videos of people sharing their work, a lot to me stands for how you can let your curiosity grow and just explore something that you would have never thought before, simply because in your environment, you don't have people who do the same thing.

And then you have this print world that in my eyes, like at Indiecon, it was a lot about connecting in real life. It's doing something together because quite often when you just consume things from digital, let's say you see those videos on YouTube. You see on Instagram, you read maybe someone's blog, you still do it while sitting, let's say alone in your room. You are interacting with somebody else, which is incredible. Um, you interact with somebody else who is on the other side of, um, of, and yet you might want to have as well that connection in real life. So. I would love to have something that is in the middle.

So you want to share your work and tell your story and maybe share what you do with somebody who would never even thought about this. And this is the beauty of digital and then come together to spaces where you can co-create things, where you can observe somebody else in their element and learn so much more and build those lasting connections. It might sound like a lot of buzzwordy things, but truly at Indiecon, I felt a lot that you are not alone and you can do things like that. And it might be from my side, the artist side in me that really felt this, but also somebody who works at magic pages, who sees so many artists and publishers share their work and building the audience and seeing how their ideas go to all the corners of the world.

I felt as well right in that, that when you're doing things, you're not limited just by your environment. You can connect with somebody in completely other country can share the story, you can highlight something that is near to your heart.

Jannis: I want to also talk about our booth. So at Indiecon, we were offered to have a booth there. We had three little chairs in the back and we could do whatever we wanted there. There were a couple of requirements, you know, fire hazard and everything, which thankfully we didn't light it on fire. And the one thing that I reflected on when preparing for this episode and just thinking about it was that if I think back to our booth and sitting behind our booth with the little magazines that we brought, and at some point we installed it as a counter that showed how many emails our publishers sent in more or less real time. There were mainly two reactions that.

I remember and it might be very biased from my side, so you can correct me if I'm wrong, but the first reaction that I saw was a very, let's say, polite confusion, like what is going on here? People at the fair happened on Saturday and Sunday, walked through rows of tables, seeing like all the different print magazines, all the different publications, and then they came to our booth and they scanned our booth, looked around, looked at us, looked at the iPad we had with the email counter there, and we're slightly confused with a smile.

And then the other reaction that I noticed is them turning away and just, you know, kind of resigning and saying, okay, that's not for me. That's like nice, but it's not for me. Um, both of you also sat behind the booth and interacted with people that came by. Was that similar to you or was that different? Like, how did you feel like the interaction with people were Christine? Maybe it's somebody that doesn't work on magic pages every day. How were the interactions for you with people that came by?

Christine: I think it was similar to you. It was definitely a mix. Like some people walked by, um, yeah, like all for print or some people that were interested in like, how do we do go digital? For me, it was a good mix. I remember some people I think had open minds for us for sure. Like they weren't sure about what we did do, but when we started talking to them, it did get them interested about, Oh, like we can have prints online or what is it that we can do on the websites.

I think that was really interesting. Cause to me, I thought it would be, cause I'm so used to all the online world. I thought it would be pretty straightforward, but when you do get talking to them, um, and they have an open mind, it's really interesting to hear them learning about, Oh, you, you can build a website and you can send emails on magic pages.

Jannis: Interesting. And Mariia, how do you remember that?

Mariia: There are two sides in that for me personally, because the whole activity of setting up the table and then interacting and then thinking about how the interactions went, it's just really great exercise in putting yourself into someone else's shoes. So to me, I didn't really go in with like what we have. It would click with them often try to think from the perspective of like what matters to them, to publishers. Um, but this is, you know, it's great in hindsight because when you are there on spot interacting, you can obviously see that with our first conference and I think we were trying to figure out, okay, what, what we need to do and I think on day two, we really figured out that, okay, our goal is not for them even to understand immediately what we do or what we stand for, because let's be honest, we are this vibrant, colorful, creative conference and we are there with our muted purple branding and colors, so it's not like we have those crazy wild illustrations going for us or something that immediately catches the eye of the creatives.

We stand out in a different way. And so people sometimes were approaching when they're walking by, we would immediately stand out because we are not as bright and colorful in their eyes and of course it takes a moment and essentially you have five to 10 seconds to retain their attention. And I think through our, like when we, three of us were talking about it and kind of reflecting a little bit, that's when we started incorporating changes and thinking like, okay, we don't need them to know immediately what we do, how about we start conversations? Because, uh, the most active person who was talking at our booth was actually Jannis, um, and as well, it was incredible for other people.

You know, you have a founder, you have somebody who does it, who is a developer and can explain easily from his relationship with publishers. So you did like from the side, like you had amazing conversations with people. Um, I think for me, I was quite often just observing and whenever I was in the role of talking with other people, I would listen to them sometimes. And that's where probably my inexperience was, those conferences was kind of getting through. Sometimes I also, I didn't know what else to talk to them about it, but sometimes it's, um, I think when three of us were there and we would hear like, uh, them mentioned that, Oh, they do something online.

Um, but, uh, the costs are just too high. Um, and those were like little, like, you know, doors opening, so to say for us to start talking about the whole online and digital world with them and what magic pages can do and all of that, and quite honest, magic pages was the last thing that we would talk about. It was really more about like why publishers would need to go digital. And in our opinion, or like from our perspective that would need is not that, you know, you have to be there. You have to have a website. It's more like, well, if you have the need and you feel that you would want your work to be way more accessible to, um, to the outside world, when you don't want to be limited just by the next conference, the next booth, the next crowd that just comes to the conference, uh, or to a fair, then yeah, you should have some kind of foothold online.

And I think that this way we had quite interesting conversations and we did have a bit more context and to how publishers think and feel about online quite often publishers had this like various staunch and principle stance on print only, which as well, I respect because it is something that in the past year has been dying as the industry replaced by, you know, all things digital. So there is that strong conviction that. I want to preserve the thing that I care about. And there is as well a rise of analog again, as an anti-AI response to what's happening in the world. And I find it's beautiful to see that revival and yet I don't think that it's one or another.

It is a symbiosis of the two that should be. And I think throughout conversations when we had some really great response was publishers, it's sort of the, the through line that we came to.

Jannis: I think we, we also need to give a lot of credit to one of our customers that showed up all three days, Jan, who is running a Casual Friday Club. I'm going to link to that in the show notes so you can have a look. And he is a local in Hamburg and he came out to welcome us on Friday. He came out every single day, also had dinner with us on Saturday and basically hung around and his perspective as a designer, also brand designer, and somebody that just has a feeling for, let's say how things are getting across was really helpful sometimes. And he also helped us to optimize the booth and to just basically make it more conversational and give us an outside perspective.

So thank you to Jan, if you're listening to this, I'm pretty sure you will. Um, and he also brought a very interesting perspective. He went to a workshop and I hope I'm not misquoting him here, but he went to a workshop, it was all about launching a magazine and he came back and mentioning one of the disconnects that he felt there where everybody was talking about costs of printing and cost of paper and how much it will cost to launch your first issue and when he asked like, okay, but why are you not starting with a digital version, why are you not putting up a first digital version that you sell digitally to, you know, collect the funds to finance your first print run that was one of the moments where he got really confused and where he didn't very much understand the sentiment.

And I think this is one of the things that we want to take to next year a little bit, that it is like you said, Mariia, it's not always a print versus digital, it's not always going against each other, but that there is like a symbiosis and yeah, sometimes it doesn't work for whatever reason. Sometimes publishers have that very clear stance of just publishing on print, but in the end, they will probably still have a website because if their magazine from let's say Berlin, they might not just want to sell stuff in their local bubble. They might also want to sell things maybe in Hamburg, maybe in the Netherlands, in the UK, in the US, they might want to ship things there.

And for that, they need a website. And that is still one of the conversations that I personally feel like was missed a little bit at Indiecon. Um, but I think that the sentiment we went out with was mainly not, okay, this was a miss and we didn't have a good time here because everybody just talked about print. But I think we came out with a challenge that said, Hey, we're going to be back next year and we're going to start that conversation and we're going to talk to the organizers to see how we can have that conversation, not to push us as a provider, but because we work on the other side of, let's say the internet connection and we see every day how, um, the sentence that I mentioned in my solo episode, which was basically that, uh, the magazine maker and the newsletter creator are the same person just working with different materials.

I think that really was reinforced for me in those conversations with Jan, also with the two of you and with all the other conversations we had at the conference that the problems we face, both as an online publisher and a print publisher are very similar. They often evolve around reaching the people that they want to reach. They often evolve around cost, often evolve around memberships and pricing and all of those things, they are similar. They are not the same, but they overlap in some aspects. And we think we can learn from each other in both directions.

Mariia: Yeah, I agree with that. And especially it was your point about what was highlighted at the conference, because I feel like the whole topic of digital versus print, ideally it should be digital and print. It's great as long as it works for you. If you go fully for print and this aligns with your vision and with the direction for the business or with the art that you create, that's incredible because sometimes you are based in Berlin and you just want to create for Berlin because it is about the city, for instance, it is about the local, so your audience and who you want to work with dictates your final product, the final outcome, the final object, but sometimes you might not know what exists, what is available that would actually fit your vision.

And I feel like our conversations with people at Indiecon highlighted that because first it starts with I'm print only. I don't really need digital. I have a placeholder website or maybe like a business card website and. I don't really need more. But the moment when they saw, for instance, on our interactive iPad saying that our publishers connect with that number of fans every day with their subscribers, that's when you see their eyes lighting up. Why?

Because we tell them about something and they might not have even thought of this, that, oh, there are ways of how I could be in touch with my subscribers every week, like with newsletter, or maybe I can grow my magazine or my art project to have memberships, to engage people who are interested more and also help me sustain what I'm doing. So I think that there is always a case whether you want to go digital only or print only or find that way of symbiosis.

But I think that we need to talk about it and that the next conference should ideally as well highlight it because there is just so much more available, so much more accessible that maybe publishers are not aware of and they could incorporate something because even while we were talking in our workshop about creating a Ghost site from first post to memberships, we were showing and highlighting different examples and ways of how you can do it because there is just no one size fits all. There is not just, wow, you have a website, you need to sell things there, you need to be active post five times a day or something like this. No, you figure out your way that fits exactly with the vision you have for your art, for your magazine, and go from there.

Jannis: Yeah, that's a great point. Christine, you were one of the first people that actually had our own magazine in France because you got exclusive access through our living room when you stumbled in for a cup of tea and I told you, hey, have a look here, there's a magazine. You also read it, but you read it in one sitting. Can you share a bit of the impressions, like having all of a sudden this tactile thing in your hand, this like printed thing that talks about lots of things that are happening online as somebody that also publishes online. How did that come across to you? What were your thoughts when you read through it?

Christine: Yeah, I got the opportunity to read the magazine before we went to Indiecon, which I'm really glad I did get to read it beforehand because reading that magazine did give you a glimpse. You kind of shared a bit of the history of like how we got to where we are now with publishing online. And what I really liked was like the different platforms you broke down of. Do you build your newsletter on Substack or Patreon or other platforms and the importance of owning your, or having more control of your website and the information you share because like I've, I've started my newsletter on multiple different platforms and I had a ghost site in 2021 and I've gone back to using ghost as my platform for my newsletter after five years.

And I think that was really valuable for the magazine to share that too. Like what I liked was that there wasn't a bias. It was very objective, which I think is really important. So when people did come to me and they're like, Oh, should I go directly to magic pages or should I go directly to Substack, I didn't directly answer that. I had one person ask me, I brought them to the booth and gave them the magazine to read cause you had provided like links and resources and references in there that I think gives people a better overall idea of where they should go next with their website and business.

Jannis: You mentioned one thing now, which was bias. And that was for me, writing the magazine and the essays that are in there. Sometimes a bit tricky because I think that it is obvious that we didn't just go to Indiecon just to have a good time. I mean, that was one big part of it. But there's obviously with a commercial provider like us, always a commercial interest behind it as well. So it was clear from the beginning that we will not recuperate the cost that we spent on going there on travel costs, on the sponsoring costs, on the cost of printing and everything from new website signups, but in the long run. And I think this is where Mariia comes in a little bit.

It is a branding exercise as well. And it is a part where we show up in communities that we feel like can benefit from us as a provider. So writing that magazine, I always tried to put that in the background and just say, okay, if that was somebody that had no idea, if that was a magazine publisher, a print publisher of any kind, a book publisher, maybe, that just said, okay, I want to go online. What would I love to have known?

Because I think many times people might just Google or just search on YouTube. How can I launch a newsletter online? And very quickly you get into the trap of watching one YouTube video of one person that obviously has an affiliate partnership with so-and-so with that platform or with that platform, or you read the typical listicle blog post with the five best newsletter platforms and everything, and all of them are affiliate links and stuff like this.

So I'm glad that you thought that there was no bias in that because that was my intention a little bit to just say upfront, okay, we are a platform where you can host your website, but this magazine, this little booklet is not for that. In introduction, I mentioned in there that, hey, you can host stuff with us. I would be very happy to do that. But if you go with one of our competitors, or I think the quote was, if you have a server in your cupboard, that's perfectly fine with us as well. Do you think that this also came across to the people that picked up the magazine at our booth?

Christine: I think giving them the opportunity, like there was this one person. I remember who came, his booth was related to allowing young writers to write on their website and all of their previous issues were available online. And if you want to support their nonprofit, you could pay for their print. And I think it was the same person that we did give him a magazine or we chatted with him and learned about his website and he took the magazine.

And then Mariia's this correct, he came back the next day with his friends and they were interested, like giving people time to read it and not come off as pushy and, you know, they can come back, but I think just allowing them space to read it, I'm not sure about the immediate, but I think long term, I'm curious, maybe in a week from now, we hear more replies.

Mariia: If it's free magazine, which in our case it was, then of course, something at the back of your head is saying they wouldn't just do it out of the kindness of their heart. They want something out of it. So of course, with us giving a free magazine, there is an expectation that it will be tied somehow to the product or they want my attention in exchange for something. And therefore I think that yeah, it might be this, like this first thought, but when they spoke to us, because nobody really immediately took a magazine and once they read it, then that impression changed.

And what. I actually loved about the magazine, because Jannis was the one who wrote everything. So I got the chance and the pleasure of editing and reviewing it. But even for me, lots of stories were new. And some things were really grateful for thought about, you know, the legacy of, of digital, the permanency of domains and links, volatility of digital and things like that. And I think that Christine, the example you got, I think that organization was Junge Netzwerk Verein, if I'm not mistaken. And yeah, during that, that first day when we spoke to one of their members, it was a little bit of, oh, I don't really understand what you're doing, but I looked at the first page and something resonates, something piques my interest.

And so he took this and then it was just incredible to see when it was like a group of three or four people from that organization who came back the next day and they were like, Hey, we actually all read your issue yesterday and now we want more and we would like to show it to each other and maybe to other authors in our organization. So that was pretty cool. And yeah, I think that's where it won't be immediate. It won't reassure them immediately when they open it and immediately they get an idea of either what we do or what we try to communicate.

But it all takes time. And I think that the moment they start reading the magazine, they see it, that it's not really about the product pushing. It's actually about a topic that Jannis, you started that gets you to think about it, I guess you to think that if you want to go digital, what kind of footprint do you want to leave? For what kind of presence would you like to have, how to protect your work, how to give it the proper home and not to be on the whim of algorithms and all the vault health things and changing things online.

Jannis: Very true. I also want to quickly talk about our workshop. Christine was tied to our booth at that point. The two of us had a workshop that was titled publishing with Ghost from first post to paid memberships. And our idea was very ambitious that in 90 minutes we show people, this is Ghost. This is how you can quickly create a Ghost site. This is your first post. Here are newsletters. And by the way, you can also do paid newsletters. We had 90 minutes for that.

I think in the end, we pretty much managed it in 90 minutes. It would take five minutes or so. How was the workshop for you? Which impressions did you leave with?

Mariia: Well, first of all, the impression I had was that, wow, people are really catching up quite quickly on all the things we're talking about. And I think not to toot my own horn, but I think that we had a good approach knowing that it's a technical workshop and people usually have the opposite problem, meaning that things go too fast. You don't have the right equipment. You don't understand where to click and how you're stuck. And everybody is just way ahead of you. And I think Jannis and I, we did a bit of good planning. We had systems so people could ask questions, whether they were ready or something or not, there were two of us. Our system was basically that we had two circles of colored paper, green and red taped together.

And essentially when they were not done with things, it would be on the red. And whenever they were done with the task, they would flip it to green.

Jannis: So basically whenever there was a task where they would work on their own, we would immediately be able to look at one of the tables that we set up there and see how many of the little paper dots that we had were red and how many were green.

Mariia: Yep. So with things like this and generally explaining and making sure that we have a good demo going on, it was like Jannis showing how Ghost works and where we want them to click and really guiding them through it. Plus a lot of supporting materials that we provided in front of them, but also not overloading with information. All of this to say that I think with those little things, we made sure that people were quite fast at doing what we asked them to do. And quite often we would turn around and one table feel like five posts in. Well, we just asked them to set your theme and maybe explore the settings and they already would come into posts or we asked them to create their first post in newsletter and they already sent newsletters to each other.

Oh, and by the way, there are comments now. So how do we reply to comments? And absolutely love seeing that enthusiasm. It just showed that maybe in the first days we felt like, oh, people feel much closer to print than to digital. So maybe there is some misunderstanding or like Jannis said before, like feeling like the odd one out at the conference, but then during the workshop, you could see people getting excited about this and just constantly saying, it was so easy. I could just quickly write it and send it and already seeing the results in front of them.

So that is my overall impression from it is that we managed to meet where people were, but also make it easy for them so that they could engage with the software that we showed them and explore what matters to them in Ghost.

Jannis: Yeah, same feeling for me. So I think the 12 people that were there, they all got something out of that. They had a demo site that we prepared. They all could send a newsletter in the end. There was like one issue with an Android phone that couldn't upload images, but I'm still pretty sure that that was a phone issue on that specific phone and not a Ghost issue. And yeah, like two people asked that the demo sites that we just prepared for the workshop itself would be kept online because they wanted to show it to colleagues in one case, or they wanted to explore to try out a few different things. And in the end, I think we had 12 people that really got to know Ghost and now have a better idea of what Ghost can actually do and how far they can take it.

And I think that's really valuable for those 12 people. If you remember my solo episode, one of the big questions I wanted to answer for myself at Indiecon was related to something I noticed. It is the fact that the print world is very tightly knit. They have a scene. They have basically a community. I think we all felt that at Indiecon that you walked into a room and even though everybody was writing about something different, we talked about Steven on the booth next to us that published about political and philosophical topics.

And then there were, I know some very unique other magazines that had a very specific point of view. For example, there was a magazine on psychedelic art, which I've never encountered before. And it was obviously very far in the look and feel from Steven's philosophical and political writing. And yet while walking through Indiecon and through all of those booths and tables, I never felt that there was a disconnect between the people there. They all felt like a community. Nobody said, oh, this doesn't belong here. Everybody said, yes, this is great that you're here. There was always that feeling that you belong here and you have a point of view.

You have something to say, and we're happy that you're here. And I sometimes feel like we have a lack of that in the digital world, that we compare ourselves to others. And we say, well, this might be better than me. Maybe I don't belong here. Or, oh, this is like very similar to that other publication. I just read one or the other. I don't read both or something like this. And I asked myself, how can we bring that feeling of community from the offline print world to the digital world? And the answer that I found is actually very counterintuitive to what we do all the time, because what we do all the time in the hosting world, in the publication world, in the, let's just say the software as a service business is that we always think about scale.

And we always think about adding another channel and adding another marketing campaign. And increasing our sales and our revenue and the number of websites that we host or the number of customers we have, the number of members we have, the number of newsletters we send. And the conclusion I came back with is that the opposite probably brings more of a feeling of community to our community. And that came also from a couple of conversations I had with our customers, also with our competitors, also with Dan from Gloat, who decided to sell his business to Magic Pages a year ago. And the things that people pointed out was always like, I really liked the fact that you hear that I can meet you here, that I can put a face to this.

And also I really liked that you have a podcast now because I can listen to it and I can see that there are people, I can listen in this case that there are people behind it. Or I watched your open house. I watched the recording of the open house that you did earlier this year, and I saw that there are real people behind it. So my goal is that we do more of those things, more of the things that don't scale, more of having a random dinner on a Saturday in Hamburg with just the three of us, Mariia, Christine, myself, and three other random customers and people that might potentially be customers for Magic Pages in the future to bring back that feeling of community a little bit.

So big monologue from my side, big rambling from my side. What are your thoughts on this? How do you see that? How do you feel like we can bring more community spirit to bits and bytes to the digital world?

Christine: It's kind of like a full circle moment because we met through Twitter, AKA X, through a course. And like, I took a couple of other courses before and sometimes you don't really, maybe, you know, different personalities and stuff, but I just remember us in this course, it just happened that we both took the course and we both got along and several weeks later I ended up being your neighbor. I think it's also the opportunity to explore different communities is also valuable. And yeah, like going from digital to in-person, like I know I've had mentors tell me that they're like, oh, you need to go do conferences and stuff. And I've always was like very introverted every day, but I'm really glad I did go to Indiecon because I met a lot of people and I had no idea how successful they were with their companies and just how down to earth they were.

I think, yeah, it's something like that. And also the open houses. And it was cool to see you guys open house to see like the interaction on Zoom too. That was my ramble.

Jannis: Or yeah, as the person that will probably need to work on that a little bit from our marketing perspective, your thoughts.

Mariia: Well, first of all, let me confirm. I am happy about that as another introvert in this group that slightly also scares me, but at the same time when you are in it is just amazing because something that we can learn from Indiecon and generally from print is that how much there is to physicality of it. And here. I mean that you have a printed magazine. It is an object that you can hold that can take your attention that can be in your room that you can pick up so many times. There are those moments and opportunities where you meet one another. This year you meet in Hamburg. Then in two months you meet somewhere in Amsterdam and it can extend to absolutely any city around the world.

It was digital. You lose that connection. It's a similar feeling when you post and then you think, oh, I just have 30 subscribers. But actually when you have 30 people in the room, it can be too much. 30 people who are interested, who are holding the magazine and actually reading in front of me and some of them replying and saying, wow, and they start conversations. That's a dream. But of course, when it's online, it just feels differently because numbers just, they always go up. You lose how precious it is. We have 30 people who follow you. It might be a little bit philosophical, but you lose as well the humanity in it in a sense that any name just becomes a username.

So yes, that would be incredible to create that community feeling, to show the same message, which is very simple. You're not alone in this. There are so many others who go through it, who dare to publish, who are passionate about their topic and they create magazines out of it, who find communities who as well invite people in their spaces and get paid for their work. Because when you're just setting those things online and you are alone in the room, you don't feel like that you can do all of these things. You see others and then you start, of course, inherently comparing yourself and thinking of somebody else, wow, they're so huge. They must be so smart.

They do all those incredible things, which of course they are smart and they do incredible things, but it just feels differently. And in this case, I think about our dinner with customers is basically in Hamburg, we had a dinner with three of our customers, Charles, Jan and Mark, and they all have completely different stories. They all have successful publishing and it's just completely different from what you would read online about what they do.

Because online you might think, oh my God, they have brand sponsorships and they just do so many incredible things. They must be so above me. But when you sit and you share dinner together, you talk about things, what they face, what you face, you share ideas and maybe some questions. It's just a completely different feeling. You see, first of all, we're all people. We all share something. We're all passionate about what we do.

So yes, all of this, all the monologue from my side is to say, yeah, well, I agree with your idea that for more personal things that don't scale, but for more opportunities to connect with others.

Jannis: This podcast is actually also very good. Example of that, the three of us sitting in our living room right now, having hopefully figured out all the technical difficulties of recording three voices in the same room. We will see when we hear this episode live. It feels a lot different and a lot more personal to just sit down and just have that conversation rather than, you know, doing it over video calls, which is also great.

But having that in-person recording is really cool. Now. I want to end this podcast by just confirming that we want to go back to Indiecon next year. We have a few crazy ideas that we're going to work on in the next couple of months. But. I want to thank both of you, first of all, for coming to Hamburg to represent Magic Pages, to have conversations there, to represent Magic Pages at our Magic booth, have lots of fun there, drink lots of coffee, have nice dinner with our customers together, and also for taking your time now to reflect on that and to share your thoughts and ideas. I usually ask, is there anything that I should have asked that I didn't?

I'm going to turn it around a little bit and just say, are there any thoughts that you have left on your mind? Anything that you want to share about Indiecon and the trip to Hamburg that we haven't talked about?

Christine: It was a great honor to be invited.

Jannis: Maybe again next year, though, then we have to fly you in from Canada. Mariia, any final thoughts on this from your side?

Mariia: That was cool. Let's do it again.

Jannis: Yeah, I agree. Thank you everybody for listening and have a great rest of your day.

Christine: Thank you.

Jannis: Bye bye.

Now, as expected, we brought way more of our little magazines than we could actually give to people. So if you want to have one of those physical objects, one of those less digital things that Magic Pages produces, then just send us a quick email or message and we will mail one of them to you, no matter where in the world you are.

Murat Çorlu is the founder of Synaps Media – a managed Ghost host built, in his words, as "a calmer way to run Ghost." He's also a direct competitor to Magic Pages, and a friend, which is exactly why Jannis wanted him on. Murat traces the path from a 2015 SaaS for news sites (Synaps News), through a Mastodon-hosting detour after the Twitter exodus, to going all-in on managed Ghost hosting – and why he intends to keep the team small and the service affordable on purpose.

The heart of the conversation is two competitors deciding the Ghost market grows by cooperating, not cannibalising: helping publishers leave Substack and WordPress, closing the internationalization and payment gaps that lock people out, and contributing upstream. Murat tells the story of the theme editor he built and open-sourced – which Ghost then shipped a native version of – plus his wishes for Ghost 7, ActivityPub and fedi.pub, and what it's really like to run a hosting company as (almost) one person.

Jannis: Hi and welcome to the Magic Pages podcast where we sit down with the people building hosting and publishing on Ghost. I'm Jannis and today I'm here with Murat, the founder of Synaps Media, which full disclosure is a direct competitor to Magic Pages. Murat is also running a managed hosting service for Ghost and I've been looking forward to this episode for a long time. Murat, welcome.

Murat: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Jannis: My absolute pleasure. Murat, can you introduce yourself quickly to the people who don't know you yet?

Murat: Yeah, I'm Murat Çorlu. I'm a Turkish man living in the Netherlands since more than nine years with my family, with my ten years old son, with my wife. I'm a software engineer with more than 20 years experience and since almost three years. I left my regular job and started working on Synaps Media and here. I am.

Jannis: Murat, to start off, can you take us back to the time before Synaps Media? What was going on in your life before that and what did you see in the Ghost ecosystem that made you decide that the world needed your version of a managed hosting provider for Ghost?

Murat: The story of Synaps Media is actually tied to a very long time ago, the roots of that story. During that 20 years of software development experience while working on different companies in Turkey and the Netherlands, I was always working on site projects. It was always the ideal situation to have my own project working on my own work. And in 2015, when I was in Turkey, I started to work on a project named Synaps News. It was about SaaS managed service for news websites.

So you could create a news website like you create a blog without thinking about all of the hosting hassles and there were specific features for journalists. So the name comes from there and actually if you compare with the current situation, even the general idea is very similar. At that time, we had to move to the Netherlands and I had to start working in Philips at that time. Eventually, I had to stop on working on this project. Then a few years later, when the Elon Musk drama happened in Twitter, many people were trying to use Mastodon. And at that time with my friend, we started to work on another managed hosting service for Mastodon and that time the name was Synaps Media.

It was five years ago. We also worked on it, but we missed the wave of people going from Twitter to Mastodon. And even though we finished the project and we didn't have any customers. And then three years ago, I had a chance to for the first time in my whole career to work on this project by full time because I was able to collect some money for the first time in my whole life. And the situation in the Netherlands had a lot comparing to Turkey and yeah, multiple circumstances helped me to consider that, yeah, let me stop working in a salary job and try something at least for one year.

And then in the beginning of 2024, I started working on Synaps Media. And in the past, when I was working on side projects, I was always trying to find a very smart idea that no one talked about and will find a super genius idea. But then in the meantime, when I was getting old, I noticed that this is not very important. It doesn't mean that a successful project will always need a super new idea. I was already using Ghost as my personal blog and a couple of more blogs. I was hosting websites since maybe more than 10 years of my friends. And I really liked Ghost, the experience of hosting it. And at that time I checked the other hosting services. I also noticed magic pages.

Jannis: I remember when you signed up for a trial and I thought, wait, I know that guy from.

Murat: The Ghost Forum. Maybe I tried to hide myself, but I couldn't take the success that at that time you were only giving a lifetime option and Ghost Pro was the prominent one as of now. And I also didn't find the other options very clear and good enough. And I thought, yeah, this is a good niche. It's a nice ecosystem to be inside. I was already active in Ghost Forum sometime while I was working on the project. And I like the people and the main idea that motivates me, providing a hosting service like for Ghost and for publishers. It's a very motivating thing because I check the websites that are hosted in Synaps Media regularly. And I feel like a part of those publications.

I'm helping them and they are very nice things to be part of. I have now the customers from all around the world, more than 45 countries, I think. I mean, multiple languages. Sometimes I go there and just use translate and try to read what is it about? And it is a perfect feeling. And I already started to get that feeling in the beginning while hosting a few friends' websites. And then in the 2025, I first announced this publicly in Ghost Forum, then announced in multiple places. And since then, I'm fully working on Synaps Media. It was one of the best decisions that I had in my career. Hopefully it will be even better in time.

Jannis: Yeah, I love that. And I think while you have a lot more experience in the hosting field or in the software development field as well, I think we come from a similar way of very quickly seeing that joy that it brings to host other publications. Because it's similar to me, like whenever I check some of the websites we host, I end up just scrolling on them for hours sometimes, just seeing all the cool different things that people are doing, everything from those little passion projects. And I always bring up the example of David, the beekeeper from Scotland that we host. I had no idea about beekeeping before I checked out his website.

And then we have some other really cool projects that are more news focused, that reach thousands of people, tens of thousands of people every month. It's not only like a project that we do to also make a living, but hosting is a project where we see that it gives so much back and that it enables so many other people to do what they really like.

Murat: It has a social effect in the people's lives, both for publishers and also for readers. And this is a nice effect. I mean, for example, if I could make work on a social media project, you can also consider them as content creators, like the people tweeting in Twitter or X, but it doesn't necessarily mean they are sharing nice things. But the ghost publishers who have something that were to share, they think, were to spend some time on it. It's not just, yeah, I'm eating somewhere now, it's like an Instagram share. They spend some time to write a structured article or share some photos or share some podcasts now. They are results of some effort and it is nice having publications like this.

Nowadays we try to see some contents that have some effort in it, especially in AI times. Some people are just giving their prompt to AI and creates articles just for getting visitors. So in general, I met with very nice people, very special, how can I say, interesting people with Synaps Media and also with other ghost websites in Magic Pages and Ghost Pro as well. They are creating very interesting stuff and I feel very good to be part of this whole community and ecosystem. It's a nice feeling to work on this project. Cool.

Jannis: On the Synaps Media website, the first thing that stands out is your title there. It says, a calmer way to run ghost. Can you explain a little bit where that calm framing comes from and what you are calm against? What is the meaning behind that?

Murat: Yeah, from the beginning, my intention with Synaps Media was trying to simplify all of the frustration points of a ghost publisher, not just about the ghost, the regular hosting itself, but the things around it, like the domain connection, having an email with the same domain that you publish your ghost website. Some stuff like finding and editing a theme regarding your expectations. When I was using ghost, even though I was mostly happy, I already noticed there are many frustration points about publishing in ghost. In Synaps Media, one of my mission that I had in mind, I tried to provide some solutions for all of those frustration points for the publishers.

I mentioned this in multiple places. I'm trying to make ghost a platform like having a social media account, the mindset of this. When you open an Instagram or TV account, you don't think about the storage. You don't think about how much visitors you will have. You don't think about how many TV you can send a day. So that's a good peace of mind. But in most of the hosting services, even though that makes sense for a hosting service, there are some limits that many publishers don't understand at all. For example, if you talk about one gigabyte bandwidth limit per month. For many people, it doesn't mean anything. All means mostly reducing the noise about publishing a ghost website.

I cannot say it is the most silent place yet, but step by step, I'm trying to remove the frustration points, the places that people hit again and again. And sometimes I'm doing this with special features with the Synaps Media itself. I'm doing by contributing directly to Ghostcore. This is my target with Synaps Media, and I'm doing my best for reaching that point. That's the meaning behind the title.

Jannis: Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I already mentioned in the beginning that we're also direct competitors, yet I personally don't think we ever treated each other that way. We're in touch quite frequently. We also met in Amsterdam earlier this year, and we also regularly bounce ideas off each other. So most people would probably look at the Ghost ecosystem and come to the conclusion that our community is so small that the whole thing has to be a zero-sum game. Basically, when Synaps Media grows, Magic Pages cannot grow. And when Magic Pages is successful, Synaps Media cannot be. How do you see that? Do we have enough room for multiple hosting providers in the market? Or is the Ghost market too small compared to, let's say, the WordPress market?

Murat: Firstly, I want to share something about this communication between us. I really like direct communication in my whole life. About Ricky positions in the working life, I was always eager to directly talk with the person that we are talking about or having difficulties about communication and directly ask the hard question. So it was the most easier communication style for me. And luckily, I'm now living in the Netherlands. This is the Dutch style communication.

So I'm living in my heaven. And I should also give the credit to you because this communication started with your attempt. When I first announced the Synaps Media in Ghost Forum in, I think, 15 minutes or 30 minutes, you directly wrote to me from Ghost Forum's direct messages. And it was a very warm welcome. And you said, yeah, I was already expecting this because of your message something. It was the trial that gave you away before that. Yeah, maybe. Maybe it was obvious because of my questions in the Ghost Forum.

But it was very nice. And when I tell the friendship between us to my friends or some other people, they always surprised at how come your biggest competitor, you can be friends with that. But I really liked it because this is easier for me. We could act like strangers to each other, even though we accept and we respect what we do and prefer to not talk because we are competitors. But this is stressing. This adds stress to the general communication. Then one year later, we start complaining from each other. That's not a good way. And as you already mentioned, the Ghost Ecosystem is already small. The main target we should focus on to gain more publishers on Ghost itself, not specifically Synaps Media.

If someone moves their website from Substack to Magic Pages, that's a good news for me as well, because that's a chance. The chance of having these publications in Synaps Media in the future is more than having it from Substack. And when the ecosystem grows, then the attention and the focus will be more on the whole product and the things around it. So I never targeted to take customers from Magic Pages or Ghost Pro.

Instead, I'm always focusing on the friction points of migrating from other platforms to Ghost. Many people migrated from WordPress to Ghost in Synaps Media. There are many difficulties. And in every migration, I'm trying to make it a Sumutri experience. And hopefully, we are also talking with you about this. Hopefully we will be able to find a better migration tool for Ghost that can work for all Ghost Pro, Magic Pages, and Synaps Media, and others that will help having more WordPress or Substack users to Ghost.

Instead of focusing on this, fighting each other, or acting like, yeah, this is the way. I think like Yannis is the main blocker for me to gain enough money, that doesn't make sense. That's not real. Even with that friendship, maybe with the help of that friendship, I had a very nice amount of customers in one and a half years. I think you helped a lot because you mentioned the Synaps Media's name and gave link multiple times in directly Magic Pages blog posts and your social accounts. I also try to give my compliments to you in multiple pages. Even sometimes my customers ask, what do you think about Magic Pages? I say nothing wrong with Magic Pages.

I don't think you will not be happy by going there for sure. There are small differences and you can just decide what to choose. If you go there, you are always welcome if you want to go back or yeah, it doesn't matter. So that's, I think, the kind thing. I think that this is also a need in the broader markets, not just for Ghost. If people can consider about the real effects of being harsh competitors with others and trying to tackle others, that doesn't help. Even if financially helps, it doesn't help mentally, it doesn't help motivationally. If I get more customers because of tricking people or because Magic Pages had bad times, I will not feel good.

So it will not be a good feeling. I will not feel it as a success. That's, of course, a view of the life, how can I say? I'm not trying to be rich with Synaps Media. I don't have a plan to be a billionaire or something, even if it will be possible. Probably I will stop somewhere. I always intend to keep Synaps Media small. It's also in the part of the Mission of Ghost team I see in their website, they also intend to keep the team small. And I really like to see this in the Mission of Ghost. I also share that even smaller. My best scenario is in a few years, four or mostly five people, and then just stopping there, not trying to add more features or something.

I don't want that. I want to keep small. And I'm very happy to have a competitor like you. It's a very big chance for me. It was very helpful. It is still helpful. Yeah, you just invite me to your podcast and you will publish this in your Magic Gaze website. That's very nice things. And hopefully we are giving a good example for other people that it doesn't need to be a harsh competition to be successful. We can consider both projects are successful, even though we are competitors.

Jannis: And I think you mentioned one sentence that we have talked about a couple of weeks ago as well, which is that the goal should not be to get customers from, let's say, Ghost Pro, which is always the big player because they have roughly about 30,000 customers probably. We don't know exact numbers. We can only guess based on the numbers that they publish. It would be the easiest way for us to target them and just to say, hey, come to us, we're cheaper.

But you said something back then. And also now in your answer here, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I think it's the core of who I think you are as a person as well, because you said the goal isn't to steal from each other. The goal is to increase the market, to show people that are on Substack, that there are aspects of Substack that are, let's say, ethically questionable and that they might have a better time on Ghost and whether that's on Ghost Pro, whether that's self-host on Ghost or on Synaps Media, on Magic Pages or anywhere else, that doesn't matter. And I think that this is such a core belief that you hold that makes you the person that you are running Synaps Media.

And I think we should take that as a Ghost community as the goal, that we don't cannibalize each other, but that we show people the amazing things that Ghost can do, the possibilities you have with Ghost as a software, and to rather expand our entire market rather than fight the little battles in between.

Murat: Yeah, I would like to give a real example about this. One of my first customers was a person from Venezuela. And actually, he was a customer of Magic Pages before. I remember he couldn't make the payment to Magic Pages because of the Paddle was not working in Venezuela. He couldn't make the payment and he tried Synaps Media because I used Stripe and it accepted the payment. Now he is still in Ghost because of that. If he could also manage to make payment to me or other services, then, yeah, he will not be able to use Ghost. He will probably go to Substack or WordPress.

But now, even for Magic Pages, he is a potential customer. So if he wants to switch to Magic Pages, it's very easy between the Ghost migrations. So I think that's a clear sign. Having more options in the market, it adds value to the whole ecosystem. There are many people in Ghost Pro, very happy about Ghost, but maybe they are not able to afford the prices of Ghost Pro. Instead of losing them to other platforms, having other managed services adds value to the Ghost ecosystem. Yeah, there are some feature differences or something. People may think if you like each other that much, why don't you merge Synaps Media and Magic Pages? Why you are still competitive?

We even talk about this, maybe you can remember. I do, yes. But I think still having more options, even though we are repeating some stuff with Magic Pages and Synaps Media, still adds value to the ecosystem. Mostly, with Synaps Media and Magic Pages doing the same thing, but there are small differences and that those small differences can make some real difference for some customers. So instead of merging them to a single product and losing some people because of some of the features that you or. I am giving, it's not preferable.

So for a healthy ecosystem, for Ghost in general, I think having more hosting options, easier self hosting opportunities, I mean more local, maybe hosting providers, etc. These will help for sure. I don't think Ghost is the main product here, not the hosting services. If Ghost becomes better, then it doesn't matter how many hosting providers we have. Think about WordPress. I don't know how many WordPress hosting services are there, but all of them earn enough money for them. Some of them are billion dollar companies. That's a good sign that growing the market is the right act instead of fighting each other in a small niche market.

Jannis: When you think about Ghost, are there any areas that you hear in your day-to-day life, in your support chats and everything, where people say, OK, maybe Ghost isn't right for me or maybe they outgrow Ghost? Are there any particular areas that you see that we as a Ghost community and the Ghost Core team need to address to keep more people within the Ghost ecosystem?

Murat: Yes, my customer base is from many countries and especially from Eastern countries, from Asia or Middle East. The people from them complains about the lack of translations or internationalizations in Ghost. Currently, if someone wants to use Ghost for their publication, even though it is a local news or something, they need to know English just for Ghost admin. Ghost admin can only work in English. So this is a real blocker because, for example, I'm coming from Turkey and I already worked in the news publishing area 10 years ago. I would really like to offer my service to the many news websites. There are more than 10,000 news websites in Turkey, the local news website, but only maybe 5% of them can use an English admin panel for their publications.

So this is a real blocker, I think, for Ghost to reach more markets in the more countries. People mostly complain about it and I'm always considering to find a way to add internationalization to Ghost admin. Even the official teams, Cathy from the Ghost community, made a lot of effort for adding internationalization to many parts of Ghost. The public parts are mostly internationalized, thanks to her. But the translations of the official themes are still waiting for a last touch. I don't know what is waiting, actually.

But yeah, so these are the most important, let's say, complaints about Ghost. And also, for example, I have some customers from Korea. There are some quirks about the URLs in Korean websites in Ghost, especially when you migrate from WordPress. It generates very ugly URLs. That doesn't make sense at all. Last week, one customer from Korea was complaining about this. He said, this is the biggest issue that. I have with Ghost. When I hear that kind of feedback, I always note them down and either consider working on Ghost Core, the code base itself, for fixing them, addressing them in snaps media with a site hacking it or patching it. Yeah, there are more, I think, but this is the biggest issue that I see in general.

Jannis: Yeah, interesting. On my side, internationalization is not that much of a blocker in the sense of translations. But what comes up quite often and where people actively leave Ghost is sometimes the lack of payment providers that people say, OK, I want to have paid memberships. But I live in one of the most common countries is South Africa, for example. Stripe doesn't exist there. They can't use paid memberships with Ghost. India still has problems with Stripe, even though Stripe has, let's say, a beta version or a preview version that they use there.

But what I heard from my customers is that it's really complicated to get that because you need special licenses for your business and everything. So. I would also fault that into that. It's the fact that Ghost is very focused on, let's say, the Western world, very focused on English speaking countries. And there is very little effort to expand a little bit. And I think this is definitely something that both the Ghost core team and also we as a community need to maybe bring more effort to for, I don't know, Ghost 7 maybe.

Murat: Yeah, that is really that payment providers is also, for example, Stripe doesn't work in Turkey. Same problem. There are many publications in Turkey that. I would really like to suggest, Ghost. But, yeah, the payment feature they were not able to use at all. They are stuck with the advertisement based thing, which is very sad and ugly. And as I said, internationalization is also another thing. Yeah, as you said, the Ghost seems like a product for Western countries only. That is maybe enough for the core team.

But I think it is killing the bigger potential that we have. I think more than two of three of the world doesn't know English and maybe don't able to use Stripe. So having solutions for those countries would help a lot, Ghost in general.

Jannis: Yeah, absolutely. You also mentioned that sometimes you contribute your ideas to the Ghost core. Sometimes you solve them in Synaps Media, especially if it's stuff that you can add on top. One project of yours that really shows that and that really has an arc, so to say, an arc of how you had the idea and how it ended up now is the theme editor. And maybe to give some context, before, I don't remember when it was, but let's say last year, definitely, until last year, you were not able to edit themes within Ghost itself. You always had to click on a download button, download a theme, a Ghost theme to your local computer, open a code editor, do whatever edits you want to do, upload it back to your Ghost site and then see the finished product.

You thought that it was annoying and you built a theme editor that lives directly in Ghost that Magic Pages then has picked up. We have made it available to our customers because you've open sourced the whole thing and now Ghost has shipped a native version that was directly inspired by your efforts. It's not the same one, it's a re-implementation, I would say, but can you walk us through that a little bit? What made you decide to build a theme editor specifically and how was it from your perspective that Ghost then picked up that idea and it's now part of what everybody, like all the tens of thousands of Ghost installations all over the world can actually use?

Murat: Yeah, actually the same motivation, especially in the first year, almost all of the people that don't continue with Synaps Media, I was talking with people a lot, still talking. And the main problem for them was not Synaps Media itself but Ghost itself and they were complaining about the how hard to edit template because, as I said, most of my customers are from non-English countries and one of the first thing that they want to do is to change that subscribe world in the official theme.

But to change it, as you said, you need to download a zip file, open it and most people don't have a code editor, they are trying to open that handlebars file in either Word or, I don't know, Notepad and then zip it again and upload it again. That's annoying, that was an annoying procedure and people were complaining about this a lot. And since unfortunately, at least until the beginning of this year, there were many PRs in Ghost Core waiting for months or even years to get attention.

So I was not eager to directly open a PR for this because it would be a very huge PR but I intended to give a solution at least in Synaps Media and I started to work on it. Normally, my idea was making it a file manager or something inside the Synaps Media panel but then I noticed that I need to make a huge effort and it will be not that efficient. You will leave the Ghost admin, come to the Synaps Media panel, make some changes and then return back and check the result.

So I was considering to somehow make it in Ghost admin itself as monkey patching the UI with a backend, with a sidecar project but then authentication and the file system storage options that it's not always file system, Ghost can't work with S3 or something. All of things came up and then I realized that actually my career as the web development, I'm a more front-end guy than the backend. I followed all of the improvements in the browser world. Luckily, in the last years, browsers improved a lot so we can do very advanced stuff directly in browsers. I thought that this can be done in client-side directly and made some POC and with the help of cloud, I made an implementation in a few hours and I'm quite surprised that it's working very well because I was expecting it will be slow or it will crash because of huge themes or something.

But it worked very well and since I reached that point, it's just a client-side solution. It was making so much sense to make it open source, to open this to everyone and you also contributed a lot in the first week.

Jannis: I remember, I think it was a Saturday, I woke up and I had breakfast and then I received an email from your blog that I'm subscribed to on the newsletter and it was about the theme editor and I was standing in my kitchen and reading this and thinking, what the hell, this is so amazing and I just dropped breakfast, went to our living room where my laptop was and tried it and then messaged you and thought like, this is amazing and then I contributed a little bit but I still remember that moment because it was really that light bulb moment where I thought it is amazing that someone like you who's more front-end guy, I'm more in the backend, that you looked at things and you found a way to basically add this as a, for the lack of a better word, plugin or an overlay to Ghost without interfering at all with it and just the way to get there was absolutely stunning to me.

Murat: I'm also very happy about that work because it really helped people, even helped me a lot. I'm really happy to have this feature in Ghost Admin itself. It's very practical, it's very useful. And I was not expecting actually but the good part that John also noticed that and liked the idea and in a very short time, I think in three or four weeks, they implemented very similar version directly inside Ghost Admin with HANA and since then we are working, I think it's like a feature something we were using like 10 years.

I think many people already forget the previous version like downloading and uploading again because this is the way that it should be. This is possible with open source even though I didn't open a PR, they just noticed and made the idea and also gave the credits, not acted like it's just their idea. So these are all nice stuff and recently I also added same style with a PR this time for redirects YAML and root YAML files that I think it's also very nice because a few weeks ago, I was helping to migrate a WordPress site to Ghost and they had to play with redirects file a lot to redirect all URLs to new ones. And every time you download, edit and upload, download, edit and upload, now you are able to edit inside the panel.

It's not that much impressive because we already have theme editor but still good thing. Yeah, that really shows the general picture of my intentions about working on Synaps Media and trying to contribute in Ghost Ecosystem and how things works in open source communities. That was a nice idea. Hopefully we will have more of in multiple places. There are more places like, as you said, the payment providers. That's a bleeding issue for many people. The translations, even maybe the email adapter thing. John was very clear about not having it in Ghost Core, but I don't know. I don't know the reasoning yet. I see a good improvement this year about the communication between the community, the open source contributors and the core developers.

Hopefully this will help in future to work together on more controversial features for the sake of improving the ecosystem. Not, of course, talking about Synaps Media and Magic Pages for Ghost Pro itself. These are all about how and where we will be in five years for Ghost in the market. What kind of people will able to use it and what kind of people will not able to use it. This is about that, I think.

Jannis: Yeah, I think I agree with you that this year, the communication between us as open source contributors and the Ghost Core team has improved a lot. Thank you Ghost to Stephen and Austin, the new platform engineers that are working on that a lot in the recent weeks now. I think what we need, at least from my perspective, is a way to communicate about those bigger things. Because I sometimes have the urge to contribute something bigger than a small bug fix or a small improvement to the Ghost Core. And it's a lot of effort to do that. Sometimes you write thousands of lines of code and in the end the communication is very nice.

But we're not really going to merge that into the Ghost Core. So this is the one thing that I'm personally still missing, to have that communication somewhere openly where everybody can contribute to get feedback and to say, hey, this is my idea. What technical limitations do you see? What are the guardrails? What are the internal discussions that the Ghost Core team has had about this before? Because usually right now, the answer that I've received so far was add a PR, a pull request, and then we're going to discuss that pull request. And that's great on the one hand, but on the other hand, it means that a volunteer, in this case, is writing thousands of lines of code just to hear in the end, that's great, but we're not going to merge that.

So I think we're on a great track and we still need a bit more communication about those bigger things to make that more streamlined because we always compare the Ghost Market to the WordPress Market. And I think what the WordPress Market does really well is that hosting providers dedicate development resources to the WordPress Core as well. And this is where I at some point want to get to that. We say, okay, the Ghost Core is not just developed by the team of the Ghost Foundation, but Magic Pages is contributing to that with ideas. Synaps Media might be contributing. Open source contributors outside of a commercial provider are contributing, and that somehow we still have the Core team or something else that can coordinate that and say, okay, if you want to do that, let's bring everybody to the table and discuss that.

Whether that's asynchronous in a written forum of some way, whether we can jump on a quick call with someone, I leave that open to the decision makers on that. But that's, I think, what would help us to get more really cool ideas like your theme editor into the Ghost Core, where maybe the Core team cannot focus on that right now because they have other things that they need to focus on. But we as individual contributors or as other providers in that sense can contribute things, but we need the explicit go ahead for some of those things.

Murat: Yeah, I think that you made a very good effort on you as Magic Pages in general, made a very good effort on making this whole picture better. I think I don't remember the whole history of the other many hosting providers in the past, but none of them were that much visible in the ecosystem until you. And I think that helps a lot that even for Ghost team, I think they probably become more aware of self-oasters more than before because it's not just a few people. At least 1,500 people is living in Magic Pages and there are more and they are open people. They are not just trying to get some money from their pool. They are very kind. They are very open for contributing to the Core.

So this is, I think since a few years, this started to change the picture about the ecosystem. I think Ghost team also should consider about the general view of Ghost in the public view. So. I want to give an example. I'm following a Turkish publisher who used Substake since years because he's not earning money from his publications. It's just free, but he has 70,000 members. He made members. Two years ago, he was complaining about some problems in Substake in his personal blog, and I said, did you consider Ghost? He said, yes, I checked it, but it was too expensive for me.

So he's a technical guy. Actually, he is not a software developer, but he was talking about technical world and he was not aware that Ghost is an open source product and there are different hosting providers at all. But I'm able to understand that. A few months ago, a person started a trial on Synaps Media. Then a few weeks later, I got a message from her. She said, the price that I'm now seeing is different than I saw in your homepage. Why is that? She said, I said, what do you see? And at the end, we noticed that she started on Synaps Media, but ended up creating a trial on Ghost Org accidentally.

Because if you go to Ghost Org, there's a getting started button. And when you press that, you automatically start a GhostPro account. So it's very confusing for the people to understand the difference between GhostPro and the Ghost software itself. You need to be very careful in the Ghost.org to understand this is an open source product and actually I can self-host it or there are different sourcing providers. It's not the same in WordPress, for example. WordPress has separate websites, WordPress.org and WordPress.com. In WordPress.org, there is a hosting section that they list big hosting providers other than their official hosting.

So I think it will be helpful. It's not about asking this for a gesture for Synaps Media or Magic Pages. Because if that guy from Turkey would automatically understand that, yeah, okay, GhostPro's prices are for professionals that earn money from their members, then these prices make sense. But I don't earn money from, even Stripe doesn't work in Turkey at all, but I still like Ghost. If he could understand that, yeah, okay, there is Magic Pages and it's affordable even for me, then we could have it in the Ghost ecosystem. He is still using Substech.

I think these are maybe small but very important details about how we show and tell the general picture. Hopefully, we will have better communication with John and the core team in the future and fine-tune that kind of things. I think it will give a huge impact on the ecosystem. Hopefully, we will go there.

Jannis: And just to give perspective to that, it happens quite regularly. Just yesterday, I talked to someone that sent a support request to us and said, hey, I just paid $35 to Ghost. Why do I still have to pay for Magic Pages? And then I explained the difference to him and we also have an article actually on our blog that goes into all the different ways. What is Ghost as a software? What is the Ghost Foundation? What is Ghost Pro?

What are the different hosting providers? And he then read through that and then understood it. And then the big question was, okay, I did not want to host with Ghost Pro. I wanted to host with Magic Pages. How do I get my money back? And unfortunately, the question is, you probably won't. The way is to cancel the Ghost Pro site and to continue your site here, because he actually set up his entire site manually on Magic Pages and also has very little ways of transferring that to Ghost Pro, even if he wanted to, because they don't import backups from other hosting providers.

So it's not a one-off thing. It does happen quite regularly. And I think that, or to turn it around from Ghost Pros or the Ghost Foundation's perspective, I understand why it is the way it is. I understand why the focus is very much focused on the marketing sites to get to that Get Started button. But it does hurt the Ghost ecosystem in a way, as you described, that people don't realize that Ghost is more than just Ghost Pro. Ghost is a community. I'm absolutely certain that there are more self-hosters of Ghost than there are customers on Ghost Pro. And there are different hosting providers. And truthfully, even if we add up all the customers on the other hosting providers, we will not reach the level of Ghost Pro.

But it is a growing number. Since the last, I would say, three years or so, the number of Ghost sites on other hosting providers is growing. And it is a very fair question, I think, to ask where that's going to go. Because in the end, Ghost is more than just Ghost Pro, as you pointed out. Yeah.

Murat: Yeah, hopefully. Things will be more clear and more communication channels will be opened up in the near future.

Jannis: Yeah, definitely. I also think that none of us are complaining about this. I think both of us understand where it historically came from. And I think we're both thinking about the way forward and that we want to contribute to that ecosystem, to that community even more. And yeah, let's see when we find a way to do that.

Murat: Maybe it was a remark here because it was last year in January or December, I think. I also had direct communication with John by writing as an email. And I directly shared my concerns about the open source view of the Ghost. He accepted all of the concerns that I had, and he said he is aware of them. And he's planning to address most of the issues. So it was a very nice conversation. So maybe when we talk about this, people can think about that we don't have any communication with the Ghost Core team or John at all.

But we are able to directly communicate with John. This is not about just incidental communication. This is about the general view, general roadmap of the Ghost. We don't have any communication or synchronization about that kind of things. We maybe will not have at all. I'm not able to request to get more information about the Ghost Pro plans or something. But at least for the open source part and how we describe the Ghost software, I think this is an important part. And you can talk about this. We can discuss about this if they want. Hopefully that will be the case. I'm hopeful about this. I consider myself new in the Ghost ecosystem since few years.

It's more than 10 year old software, but still I hope I'm able to add good value to the Ghost ecosystem. Hopefully it will be even more in a good way. And then maybe we will be able to have better communication channels between all hosting providers. So for example, when we are talking about hosting providers, we don't mention anything like the Midnight. We know the name, but I don't know the people behind it. Other than two of us, I think there is no one in many services presented in the Ghost community forum sharing updates or getting questions or something. That's actually a bit sad because they seem to work, they seem to have some customers and they are also part of that whole Ghost experience.

Some people start Ghost publications in Midnight or Digital Press and they decide if Ghost is good or not because of that experience. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. So if we can able to communicate with each other, maybe this can be a call to those providers. Please share things in Ghost community forum or even in your blog. I don't see a blog that they share about the region or the roadmap or something. We are mostly talking about the three providers, but this is because we are the most visible service providers now. And this is not about blocking any others.

So it will be better to have more service providers active in the Ghost community, Ghost ecosystem, but not just about sharing an advertisement or something. Please come and introduce yourself, try to get the trust of the community and please try to contribute to committees and share your concerns, etc. Then it will be a better, healthier ecosystem at all. So then maybe we can come together with all hosting providers and think about increasing the general experience of Ghost for more people. Now we are only three, unfortunately.

Jannis: And that call also goes from my side. Whenever I start this podcast, there is one line in the beginning that says that this is a podcast where. I want to speak to the people building, hosting and publishing on Ghost. And it's usually very easy to find people that are building on Ghost, so tools in that sense, like Chris from Vellumine or Pay Clue last week, André. It is also very easy to find people publishing on Ghost because. I have a repository of 1,500 customers that I can use for that.

But it is very hard to find the people hosting Ghost because there is realistically more. I can interview Mariia Sviatoslav from the Magic Pages team. I can also reach out to Ghost Pro. I'm absolutely sure that one of their team members would come on the podcast, but that doesn't show us the entire diversity. So if there is another hosting provider listening and you want to come on that podcast, my door is wide open. And. I would love to have a similar conversation with you because you are also part of the Ghost community. And I think what we've established is that it is not a zero sum game here. We are trying to expand our market. We are trying to build an ecosystem altogether.

And. I would love to just have that diversity represented on the podcast here as well. And on that note, I also think we joked about it before in our preparation. If anyone from the Ghost Core team, be it John, be it anybody else, is listening to this and you want to jump on a call with us or meet up anywhere in Europe mostly because we're both in Europe. Let us know because I think we're both very happy to do that and would just also love to just bounce ideas back and forth and see where that goes.

Murat: Yeah, it would be great to have a meeting with John in person, even better together, three of us even more. That would be a great conversation that will be very helpful for all of us. Unfortunately, a few months ago, I noticed that John's message that I'm in Amsterdam, come and meet with me in the same day, even though I'm in the Netherlands, coming to Amsterdam for me takes more than two hours. So it will be better to be informed earlier.

So I will really want to have a meeting with John, also with other Ghost Core members. It's a part of our life since years. So we are eight hours at least working on Ghost. And these are the people, the core of the team that are making Ghost. So it is an exciting and honorable thing for me to contact with them, talk about the difficulties that they have that I can help anything. So, yeah, I would really like to have direct communication with John or other team members. It will be great.

Jannis: Yeah. And I also love Amsterdam as a city. So whenever anybody is in Amsterdam next time, let me know. There are flights from Salzburg, which is close by here. And there's a night train to Amsterdam. I would love to just join that. John, the location is Amsterdam then. We already decided. Or next week in Hamburg, since you're also coming to the Indiecon conference. So if somebody is spontaneous, hit us up and we're both in Hamburg next week.

Murat: I don't know when you will publish this podcast, if it will be before that.

Jannis: That is very true. It will go out on Thursday. So one day before Indiecon starts.

Murat: I think it's enough for John. He is already deciding in the last day.

Jannis: Yeah. So we've already talked about quite a few topics more. I want to ask you one last question. We already touched upon that a little bit. Let's look ahead in the Ghost ecosystem. Let's imagine we have Ghost 7. We're currently on Ghost 6.61. So for Ghost 7, are there any wishes other than more options for translations and internationalization? Anything that you're missing that you say, you definitely want to see that in the Ghost ecosystem.

Murat: Other things can be more opportunities for theme designers and theme developers. I think one of the things that people are getting trouble when they meet with Ghost, coming from WordPress world, is lack of theme options enough and customizing them. There are some new projects that I see for making UI-based theme designers. These are nice, but even making a nice looking design with AI or something, it's not easy. It looks like easy, but generally you end up with an AI slop.

So better would be to increase the options, opportunities for theme developers to make it easier. I think the team development is not that difficult comparing to WordPress or something, but the limitations about what a theme can do about showing and fetching data or something. If we can have more options, more customization options, I think it will attract more designers and then we will have more options. Also, for example, the official theme list is the same since years. Having more bulletin teams in Ghost itself will be very helpful. Yeah, with the internationalization thing, then it will open up bigger markets, way more people, then it will help growing the ecosystem very quickly.

Hopefully we will have that kind of improvements in time. I don't know their plans. This is one of the things that we want to at least get an insight that, yeah, what is the general vision for Ghost 7 or Ghost 8? It will be great to have that kind of things. And we can focus the supporting ideas of this target instead of just about personal things. Yeah, the important part of having new Ghost publishers coming from other platforms, and I think Ghost seems like an alternative to Substack, but this limits Ghost, I think. We should not limit Ghost software with the capabilities or features of Substack. There is a bigger world in publishing area.

I'm not expecting to have WordPress plugins or WordPress themes in Ghost. Hopefully we will not have that kind of things because that was the main pain point of WordPress already. But at least the flexibility and customizability of WordPress is one of the key things people love WordPress. I think we have many things to learn from that in Ghost. Also, borrow some ideas. I also like the Activity Pop social web service as an idea, but it also now seems like a half-baked feature. It's not still there completely. There are many things to do in this area. Hopefully they have some plans to do because we also don't know that.

I think it will be great to make it more mature with mentions, hashtags, and maybe different timelines, and a public profile page. I made a Fedi.pop just because of the lack of this. I think it can be easily done in a Ghost core to make a public profile page of Activity Pop account. Hopefully it will be there in some time. These are the main expectations that. I have for the future of Ghost.

Jannis: Yeah, cool. They all make a lot of sense, I think. Let's see where we end up with Ghost 7. Murat, thank you so much for taking the time for coming on the podcast. I have one last question that I ask every guest. You might already know it. Is there anything that I should have asked that I didn't? Anything that you want to say that we didn't touch upon? Anything that's on your mind right now?

Murat: I thought maybe you would ask running hosting service by a single person. Is it fun? Is it risky? Actually, you are not a single person anymore, but it was the case since the beginning of the year. Many people were asking this question to us. What happens if you just disappear tomorrow?

Jannis: It always turns very dark. The question is, what happens if you hit by a bus? That is what it always comes in. How fun is it for you? How fun is running Synaps Media as a single person for you?

Murat: Yeah, actually, it's going good so far. And I can happily say, especially in the last few months, I started to get less need for the support request because I think it reached a certain level of maturity in the platform. We didn't have any downtime since one year, I think. And it's going well. But for me, I'm not planning to be the only one forever for the system because. I want to be able to go to vacation or something. And. I want to be able to have the right for being sick for some time.

So hopefully, when I reach to a financial situation that I can afford for another team member, a full-time team member, I will definitely look for that. I understand the concerns, but in the meantime, people should understand the advantages and disadvantages of working with a small team or even a single person team. Yes, that's a risk. In the meantime, this is the key of providing that much quality service in that affordable price. If you will have 50 people, if you will need to pay salaries for 50 people, then yeah, the main cost of service will be not the servers, will be the salaries.

So this is also a preference. But. I want to keep affordable because this is what the GOS ecosystem needs. There are a huge amount of countries in the world that cannot afford to pay $40 per month to have a GOS website. I'm talking with the people from the Far East countries, and they say people here are just trying to self-host because that is the only option for them. Otherwise, it's too much, too expensive. When you try to self-host, it's not a very nice experience if you just want to publish some articles. Being affordable is important, and to be affordable, the team size should be reasonably small. As I said earlier, my ideal future expectation is like being 45 people at most, even though if.

I have, let's say, 50,000 websites, that doesn't matter. I will try to make the system stable and sustainable enough with that small team. Generally, there is a misconception that when the customers are increased, you need to increase the people. Generally, teams don't increase people because of the customer counts. They increase because of the new areas that they want to enter. If you stop yourself somewhere to not enter every possible area, just because you can, then you can keep the team small and you can give a very nice service with an affordable price.

Jannis: I think it's actually a good sign of a good service, especially hosting service, when you can sustain growth with a small team, because it means that your growing customer base that you have doesn't need you as a support. In my experience, at least, the people that need support are always new customers that come in that have questions. The people that are on magic pages for three years, they don't reach out because their website is set up, their website is working, their emails are running, everything is running smoothly for them. There are literally people I haven't heard in three years from them, which is good on the one side.

On the other hand, you're always losing touch a little bit, but I think it's a very healthy sign if you can sustain growth as a hosting provider with a small team, because it means your overall system is good, and the people that need support and the people that want that support are new customers that come in. So that was a perfect example for that.

Murat: Yeah, indeed. We don't know how many people works behind the very popular hosting providers because we generally don't need to contact with them at all. For example, I was using Linode, it was a popular VPS provider, now it's part of Akamai. Yeah, I use it for maybe 10 years, and in total 10 years maybe I need to communicate with their support maybe a few times. So if they could reveal that they were only two people, yeah, that could be possible, because there is a system that is already running, and if you don't need that much support, yeah, the systems that we are creating are actually like a machine that we are programming or something, and it works, it should work by itself.

During today we are not always checking servers and trying to fix the things, so most of the time it just works. We are trying to fine-tune stuff, add new features to make the Ghost publisher's life easier, or contributions to Ghost ecosystem, or write documentation. So I think that probably your routines are similar. This is how we work, and it's quite reasonable to have a single-person hosting service, but as I said, whenever. I have enough financial sustainability for just because of the Synaps media's income, then I will definitely have a second team member.

Jannis: And I think the difference between us is that you anticipate that, and I always said, no, I'm just going to stay just me, it's just going to be me, and then at some point I realized, actually, I would also like to just have some downtime at some point, and looking back, Spataslav is now with us for nearly seven months. He started in February this year, and it's been literally the best decision I've made in Magic Pages so far, because now they're with Mariia, there are three people actively thinking about it at the moment, and I had a look at our roadmap and our change log in the last year, and while the overall things that we changed went down, it was a lot more impactful, like things that we added, compared to, let's say, a year ago.

I can only confirm, it's perfectly viable to run a hosting service as a single person, it's a lot more fun to do it with somebody at your site.

Murat: Yeah, it's also visible, I should say, that in the last three months I followed your blog, of course, and I'm really surprised how come you can manage to write all of this stuff and publish new features and things, but of course you are now three people, this is not fair, I'm on the one. I cannot compare myself with you anymore.

Jannis: And Spataslav is really good at finding those things. When our support chat is very quiet, he just goes through the documentation and just says, that's not right anymore, that was written three years ago, that doesn't even exist anymore. And he then has really developed great skills at updating those things. And I think this is one of the use cases where AI has a great place in our, let's say, tech stack, not in writing the articles, but in finding the gaps. So. I have a little, going a bit off topic now, but. I have a little self-hosted LLM server down in a storage room and sometimes I just tell it to look at our source code for our customer portal, for our backend, and look at all the articles we have published on Magic Pages and find the gaps, and then we just have a list of gaps.

And this is what we use right now to basically update our documentation and add things that weren't there before, that weren't documented at all.

Murat: Actually, the biggest challenge for me about being a single people working on the whole service is scattering between the different disciplines of the project. The writing, the articles about the feature, the documentations, or then social posts, or then the implementation itself, backend and frontend, and system monitoring. Monitoring the external services like Mailgun, like Bani CDN. There are many roles. Normally, big companies are giving dedicated person per role, but as a single person, you try to handle all of them by yourself. Sometimes this becomes exhausting, and for example, especially for the documentation and marketing material, let's say, I would really like to have a supporter for this, because it's a different mindset than just writing the code.

There is no good relation between how you develop the feature and how you explain it to the non-technical people. So having this context switching becomes sometimes very hard and tiring. And lack of feedback is also another issue about being alone. Nowadays, AI helps a little about this, but especially when talking about how to implement a feature, not technically, but there is an issue, and. I want to fix it, how should I fix it? In that case, generally, the suggestions of AI, for example, doesn't make sense. He is just trying to make you happy, so he doesn't really criticize.

But when you have a team member who knows the details about the project and the history of it, then you're really able to get very good points. Probably, I can imagine when you talk, three of you, about something, a feature that you consider to add or not to add. It would be very nice to have that conversation with some team members who already know the old details, your customer base, everything. That is what I'm expecting in the future.

Jannis: And even more, not only to know the context of Magic Pages, but every Thursday we have our weekly team meeting, and yesterday we had a very good discussion about feedback loops, for example, and everybody just brings different perspectives. I bring the technical perspectives, Vatoslav, from the more support perspective, but also from using Ghost actively. Since he started working here, he has also built his own personal blog, and then Mariia from a really community perspective and the marketing perspective. That is an amazing balance that you just have three different perspectives on the same topic, and that has led to some really great discussions that we've had in the last couple of months.

Yeah, I can imagine. Murat, I can already see that this will be the longest episode of the Magic Pages podcast so far. Sorry. Don't be sorry. It's been incredible fun. I will enjoy editing that episode. I hope that people will enjoy listening to it. I am very much looking forward to seeing you next week in Hamburg for the podcast in a couple of days, and we should do this again at some point. I don't know, maybe in a couple of months, in a year, to just get an update where Magic Pages is, where Synaps Media is, and to see how Ghost has developed in the meantime.

Murat: Yeah, why not? It will be great. And thanks you very much for having me in this conversation, and hopefully people will like that conversation. Two competitors talking about hosting services for Ghost. Yeah, I'm certain they will. Yeah, it was a nice conversation.

Jannis: Yeah, it's been a pleasure, and see you soon, Murat. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

André is the founder of PayGlue, a payment-middleware relay that connects Ghost memberships to alternatives to Stripe — Polar, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Creem, Gumroad, Ko-fi, Patreon and more. He built it to solve his own problem (he simply didn't like Stripe), then found the deeper ones: creators in countries where Stripe isn't available, and the merchant-of-record question of who actually remits your tax.

André and Jannis get into how PayGlue replaces Ghost's paywall with a snippet so any provider can grant access, pay-what-you-want and one-time memberships, and what happens when a webhook fails at 2 a.m. The second half is two founders comparing notes: earning trust through open source, GDPR as a filter for tools that actually care, why a sustainable tool skips the free tier, and the nerve it took to remove the Magic Pages starter tier.

Auto-generated with Whisper + pyannote speaker diarization. Names and technical terms have been hand-corrected; sentence boundaries are approximate.

Jannis: Hi, and welcome to the Magic Pages podcast, where we sit down with the people building, hosting, and publishing on Ghost. I'm Jannis, and today I'm here with André, the founder of PayGlue, a payment middleware that connects Ghost sites to Stripe alternatives. André, welcome.

André: Yes, thank you very much for having me here in your podcast.

Jannis: André, can you quickly introduce yourself and tell people who you are and how you came to create PayGlue as a new tool for the Ghost ecosystem?

André: Yes, of course. I solved my own problem. I started three years ago with Ghost, and I dislike Stripe, not because it's not working, only because I don't like Stripe very much. And so I looked for an option to resolve my problem and use another payment provider. And it wasn't really easy for me because there only were manual links to do around it with the API or Make or n8n that works a little bit. And when there are some problems, then you have a lot to do in searching why it isn't working. And so I was looking for a problem solver, a sort of webhook middleware relay that helps me out.

So I built my little product to solve my own problem. And as it was solved, I thought maybe another Ghost publisher needs this tool.

Jannis: Now that you've talked to a couple of people about PayGlue and you have a couple of paying customers already, what did you find apart from your own problem of disliking Stripe? What were some of their problems? Are there other problems with how Ghost and Stripe work together or don't work together in some cases where you say people would need an alternative to Stripe itself for Ghost memberships?

André: I found the problem is not Stripe itself. In some countries, you can't use Stripe. Your country is maybe not allowed in Stripe and you can't make an account. And so you can use Ghost of course with free membership tier. That solves not every problem for a publisher who wants to make some memberships with it. And so they change to other systems like WordPress or something else. And I found out in my country, in Germany, it's no problem with Stripe and other countries don't like Stripe or you can use it.

So I thought for myself, okay, when somebody needs to use Stripe, it should work with PayGlue. And when somebody don't have the option to use Stripe, it should work too, because when you don't use Stripe, you don't have the paid membership tiers and every article is free. So how you compete this with a payment that somebody does and for exclusive articles. So the PayGlue problem at first was only to solving the payment and ghost memberships problem. And now it solves a paywall too. So that users without Stripe connection can use a paywall to get exclusive content.

Jannis: Cool. Can you tell us some of the countries where Stripe isn't available? Do you have any countries in mind?

André: I have a beta tester from Nigeria and there was this problem first. And. I have a beta tester from, who's the country name? I don't get the name, but. I have another country too that doesn't work well with Stripe. They were declined. They could make an account, but they were declined for Stripe. They said, oh no, we don't want to work with you and process your payments. And that was not only the only problem. For example, when you are a solo founder, you make solo publishing and you have cool stuff that somebody wants to read and pay for and you use Stripe. Most people don't know the difference between a payment processor and a merchant of record.

Because Stripe only does like paper, the payments and transactions, but you are responsible for tax remitments and everything else. And that don't come in first place. That comes later. For example, when the tax department sends you a letter and you have to strip it out. What was taxed from this country and this country and this country. Everybody knows this from digital payments. For example, an ebook. Yeah, you take a provider like Gumroad, for example, and they remit the tax for you no matter if somebody buys from the use air from England or from the EU. And because Stripe doesn't do that and. I have a beta tester that said, hey, for my own business purpose, I need a payment provider that works as a merchant of record too. So I set it up.

Jannis: Yeah, that's actually one of the reasons why Magic Pages doesn't use Stripe for payments as well. Because from the very beginning, that was my issue that I knew. I would not just have customers from. Well, back then when I found out Magic Pages, we still lived in Germany, but now I live in Austria. And it was clear from the beginning for me that probably Magic Pages, if we scale, will be an international business where we have customers now literally from New Zealand to the US, Peru and everything. And I don't want to handle Peruvian tax, if it is in that case.

So yeah, this is why we also with a merchant of records Paddle in this case. And it's a super interesting use case, I think. Now that Ghost also has one-time payments or donations included. Does PayGlue also work with those?

André: Yes. Of course, the most problem is what Stripe one-time payment says. You make a sort of donation button, but now you don't need Stripe for that to create a link. You can do it in Ghost natively and they call it donation five bucks and one link to pay. But maybe you start a new block. Yes. And you make a sort of founder membership. Pay what you want. Yes. Or one-time payment. And then the subscription comes later. It's very complicated to set up with Stripe. For example, when you take another payment provider like Lemon Squeezy or Creem or Paddle or Polar, you can set things like this up.

And then no matter what somebody uses one-time payment or pay what you want or subscription, you get access to your block because I'm the first founding member. I pay five bucks to support you and I don't need a subscription. But the problem behind this is the technical problem that. I have access to your exclusive articles as a founding member. And I'm not excluded because. I have no subscription. And things like that, you can't do with Stripe native. You can do it with Zapier and you can duct tape it with n8n of course when you're happy with that.

Jannis: That just opened a really interesting use case or thought that I had. I sometimes in the Magic Pages support chat get questions on how to use Ghost. Whether. I have tips on that both from Magic Pages customers and non-Magic Pages customers. And one that comes up, I would say every two to three months is a pay what you want subscription that they say, okay, my standard subscription is, I don't know, 10 bucks a month, but. I want to be able to offer people a pay what you want subscription. They can pay whatever they want maybe as a one-time thing, maybe as a monthly thing. And my answer so far has always been, yeah, I'm sorry, not possible with Ghost. Is that something that PayGlue would enable people to do? With Stripe in this case?

André: That is possible. Not with Stripe exactly. It's not natively possible because Stripe is a native integrated directly in the Ghost ecosystem as you know. But you can do it with another payment provider of your choice. And the most do pay what you want. But then it's a problem how to fix it in the background with Ghost. Yes, to grant access for your new memberships. Or you have a special birthday pay once and don't have a subscription anything what you want. That is possible. And of course it's possible when you already have Stripe in your blog and you use Stripe subscriptions and just want to add pay what you want or one-time payment without the donation.

Then you can use PayGlue in connection with your payment provider too. So you have more options to grant access for example when somebody pays five bucks for pay what you want in Gumroad or any other payment provider as you choose.

Jannis: Nice and does it work both as one-time pay as you want and also as a subscription?

André: Also as a subscription. That works in two ways. That's no problem because PayGlue is a sort of relay a sort of middleware. You connect inside of PayGlue your payment provider of choice and your blog and the computer talk via the API that is encrypted and the webhook is signed. So for example when I'm on your blog and you have one-time payment and you for example choose Paddle because you have Paddle in your magic pages already and I click buy. Then I get access granted to your blog and when you open your ghost blog and see my name my email address you have some labels and a note what. I have buy it when. I have buy it what was the order number and there are labels for example PayGlue active.

So our pay wall knows I'm an active user. And this works with Stripe when you already had Stripe set up or when you only have free membership here. The only thing that I really needed to detail it out in the documentation. Was that you don't switch to. Paid member in the blog article. So you always leave it blank for free member and then just put our HTML snippet code inside it for the PayGlue paywall.

Jannis: Essentially you're replacing the ghost paywall with the PayGlue paywall in this case then.

André: Exactly.

Jannis: Very nice. That's an interesting model because I'm currently in touch with another customer who might actually be listening to this and we've talked about this a couple of times now and I'm wondering if you had some thoughts on this whether that's possible with PayGlue and whether it would be easy for you to integrate that because then. I would need to integrate that. So maybe another use case for you. Have you thought about metered paywalls where customers say, okay, I want to grant membership XYZ 10 articles a month that they can read. Is this something that you have thought about before?

André: No, I don't have such a question that is very special in my feedback or in my closed beta or now we are an open beta but I will take it with me. I know with, for example, Paddle or Polar that is often used for SaaS businesses you can do metered products but of course you need this metered product 10 articles to be measured inside the paywall and the block and this is of course a sort of special need. I can put it in our backlog in our feedback and when enough customers interested in this of course you can put development in it and test it out if it works because. I have on all payment providers active accounts for testing and developing. And it's very special.

Jannis: I will send that customer your way to get in touch with you just so you can see whether your ideas on this match with his ideas because he is very keen on launching something like this still this year and I've said so far that could potentially be something that Magic Pages can offer but obviously we're not payment experts and it is not something that I can jump on immediately. So potentially if you're listening to this even if we haven't been in touch about this before get in touch with André and tell him that you want metered paywalls so his list gets longer and longer and things to include.

André: Yes and that is the very beautiful thing on the internet yes you have somebody who has a special problem and maybe we can solve it but at first we need to talk about it and then we will see.

Jannis: Yeah I think the reason. I mentioned it now is because of your explanation about the paywall that you replace ghost paywalls with your paywall because that is from the research I've done so far exactly what would be necessary for this so you're already a couple of steps ahead there so let's see what you two can come up with there.

André: The paywall was the mighty big frog in the whole development to get it right and of course we have a demo block blog.io.io and there you can test it yourself yes. I have connected this to our sandbox account so that you have a sandbox credit card and nothing pays directly from it and you can test yourself if your access is granted or not granted. I think this is the best way for somebody who's technically interested to test if a system works and he would pay for it or not and glue is not a payment provider often people ask hey are you a payment provider do you see my transaction and my credit card settings and everything else? No then you need to be a very certified and very security special company for this to do that and we are just a relay of course we need an email address and encrypted transaction that it's granted access for your ghost blog for new memberships but we don't see credit cards amounts or anything else what's very important for the step.

Jannis: Yeah it's also something that you've talked about a few times now is that trust and that security and if you remember when we first emailed about PayGlue that was one of the points that I raised that I personally am always a bit critical of adding an extra piece in a moving chain because in my eyes this is something that can break it's another thing that can go wrong and you had a really thoughtful answer to that can you quickly walk the listeners through how you earned that trust with PayGlue or what your thoughts are on how transparent you want to be to show that the middleware that you've built is something that people can trust.

André: Of course and I think the important thing is you don't have to trust me and you don't have to trust my infrastructure that is hosted in the European Union you can look in the code because PayGlue is open source of course not the things like support system like special needs in the dashboard like sign up but you can just go to our repo and fork it and test it yourself local on your mac for example or on your server directly and you can look into the code and check it yourself what we do and what we don't do so as you said what we see and what we don't see and I think that's the important part you don't have to trust me or my architecture in this point you can do it for yourself but when you say oh okay.

I saw it. I like it it worked for me and I don't need a server for my own on this. I don't need this or maybe my blog is already on ghost pro or example on your magic pages services then of course you can't do it with this and therefore you can use then PayGlue and you don't need any special code just HTML snippets to get it done and as you said for example when somebody buys something and it doesn't work for an unknown reason for example we have of course in the back end in the dashboard for you there you can see what happens whereas X is granted or if there may be a maintenance problem with a webhook and you need to restart the webhook something else because when a lot of machines talk together sometimes the machine may be delayed and you get an error and then it's important that the customer don't buy new you just click on retry webhook and X is granted so it should be very easy for you as an end user and your blog.

Jannis: On that note if something fails in that whole chain between the payment processor between PayGlue between ghost and in that entire chain if something does fail and before we started the recording you brought up a case where somebody bought something at 2am and then it failed what happens in that case now? Would they see an error on their side or would it just be a generic failure that they can't interpret?

André: That is exactly what I talked about in my setup before PayGlue. I had set up an n8n workflow on my own server and because I grew out of Zapier and I grew out of Make and had my own server and wanted to play something and learn a lot and there a webhook failed on 2am and the customer said oh I don't have access and so I cancelled my subscription so I lost a happy paying member and I don't get anything yeah I didn't get anything. I forget to set up an SMTP in n8n to inform me when something doesn't happen because when everything works fine and smooth and every button is green happy life but when something doesn't work you need to do something and in PayGlue of course you get an information email to the customer hey something didn't work please log in and review it and then you see in the analytics tab exactly what process failed for example order payment failed okay maybe the payment on the credit card failed there you have a charge back you need to handle this directly with the payment provider access granted or not or maybe the webhook had a problem because of a maintenance or of a delay and then you can see it you can see what's wrong and you can replay.

You don't want to go to your customer and say it didn't work you want to hit replay the customer get access granted get an email from your ghost blog hey welcome to our blog. The automation behind it should work and yeah because I had the problem that I didn't get any information because I didn't set up any SMTP information in my n8n setup lesson learned for me and I don't want that my PayGlue customers learn it the hard way and lose customers.

Jannis: Been there done that. I think every founder has to go through that at some point that something is failing and you don't even know about it that's happened a few times at magic pages as well.

André: Yeah the silent fails are the fails that are very critical often you don't see in everything every check mark is green but something doesn't work so therefore. I have a couple of steps inside PayGlue to inform the customer and if that doesn't work he can always set up a support ticket and I help out of course.

Jannis: Perfect now one question I also sometimes get with magic pages now a little bit less often than a year ago is the fact that. I have been doing magic pages on my own you're doing PayGlue on your own what if you disappear tomorrow would that connection still work or would there be an actual issue for the ghost publisher and that's it.

André: The nice thing on automations is when they are set up and they work after a test so they work permanently or if somebody changes something on some end and you need to do a little bit of code rework to make it done because a payment provider changed an endpoint or something else that might of course happen in the future but the system will still running and when it's failed you get a notification what failed and you can rework it but of course not when a payment provider changes an endpoint that needs to be done in the code.

Jannis: I think that's something that. Is sometimes a bit underestimated in that sense that even if you or me end up in a hospital for I don't know a surgery or something the things will probably just keep running. Even though we are founder-led businesses the systems the computers are in most cases hundreds of kilometers away from us anyway they don't need to be pet all the time they don't need to have their good night story they will in most cases just keep running and when something fails that's usually when you as an end customer and notice it. I know that I've spent three weeks on the road in Scandinavia this year and have scaled down my involvement in magic pages a lot and nobody noticed and I bet it would be quite similar with most founder-led businesses.

André: Yes and that's intended it should work and it should not only work when you stay on top on the server and pet it and it should work as intended and work flawlessly of course and therefore we're doing this of course now we don't have both time the whole life to sit in front of a Mac and watch the server what he's doing therefore there are some alarm systems when something doesn't work in the background or some provider changes something and as you said you did a great job when you were three weeks on a vacation and we filled your own battery and charged it up and nobody noticed when your system flawlessly works.

Jannis: Building it for three years that's all the lessons I learned put into that basically. I remember having a vacation in Sri Lanka two years ago which also had a time difference to you know all the server infrastructure. I had in Germany and in that case. I actually had to get active it was a case where the server couldn't reach the internet because the infrastructure provider had a massive network issue it was not Hetzner it was a smaller server provider that I'm not with for multiple reasons now but that was one of the last points where I was sitting at.

I think it was 2 a.m. In Sri Lanka in our hotel room on my laptop trying to figure out what's going on there trying somehow to call the emergency hardware support of that server provider from a you know Sri Lankan eSim card which didn't work and that was for me the moment where I said hey this isn't sustainable and since then magic pages has improved a lot and I think that every business has those stories similar to you you had an issue at 2 a.m. Where you didn't notice that something went wrong you built something around it and I think that's how lots of solo businesses develop and evolve over time.

André: You said reliability and I'll give you an example Claude Code 20 bucks subscription you can do a lot of nice shit nice websites a landing page duct tape it together and you have a sort of product yes and but my company lives in Germany your company lives in Austria and we have some laws and for example a simple subprocessor list yeah or a data processing agreement yeah to give it to your customers yeah. I often see software new SARS products microSARS that look in the front very shiny and nice and you look in and didn't see any support email address or a conduct form or a terms or a legal or something else yes ghosts publishing can be an own business with own credibility for your text for your business and everything else and when you are controlled in Germany or another EU you need a data processing agreement with a scribble on it yes so it's a PDF document but it it turned out.

I had a seven days around a week with special experts to make this document yes nobody will see it you only look in you want this document you can download it but these are the little things or do we have a subprocessor list does somebody ask me and I said yes. I have a list here but the list wasn't linked in the navigation my problem huh and I solved the problem the list was online and he could see and a lot of this shit yes then you can see from the outside if somebody does it mean. Really good or just duct tape something in front what is shiny so that there are little things that I'm looking for when I decide to work and to pay for a SARS or not to pay for a SARS.

Jannis: Yeah I think that's a really interesting filter to have for any tool and I know that the EU gets a lot of hate for GDPR and data privacy and cookie banners I've learned from the guest in the last episode from Mark who lives in Australia that he barely sees any cookie banners because he lives in Australia and doesn't have the same regulation and I know that the EU gets a lot of hate for implementing all of this but it created a really interesting filter to see which businesses which tools actually take it serious and say okay in some cases and some points the GDPR might be overshot but on the other hand if you see that somebody takes care of it and has a data processing agreement has a subprocessor list has an actual data privacy policy that goes more than hey we collect data because you know we want to do it then you actually know there's somebody behind that tool that cares somebody that cares about the data of their customers somebody that has thought about these things at least even if the outcome is you know that it's a very relaxed data privacy policy somebody has sat down and thought about it and I think that's a very interesting filter you brought up on how to filter out tools that you want to use in your business and not.

André: Yes because I own a business as you and I need a data processing agreement from another SaaS to work with it when I get controls of my company and that although a little bit of filter as you said and most people think oh I just put it in Claude or in ChatGPT and I get the real text and everything is fine but no that didn't work of course you can make a draft with it no problem. But yeah then you have to talk to experts and experts want money yeah you want money for your SaaS. I want money for my SaaS to make it sustainable and that is the interesting part a lot of people complained about why I don't have a free tier.

Jannis: Why don't you have a free tier.

André: We don't have a free tier because. I want to be sustainable and long in the business and the problem with free tier is you get easy 1000 users but 1000 users take a lot of resources from the server from the database and you have to pay it yes and that is not sustainable when you are not a big company with hundreds of thousands of dollars on your bank account I'm starting with this project and. I want to be sustainable and on a long-term run and the people who understand it say okay right I get it of course they have 30 days free testing you need of course to give it some time to test it out yes.

Jannis: I think it hasn't happened to Magic Pages that somebody wanted a free tier because we have the advantage that people know that hosting costs money that there are a few free hosting providers out there. I know that 20 years ago or so I've used free hosting providers in Germany which always had very fun communities with them but where we saw some resistance was also when we removed the starter tier on Magic Pages earlier this year where we also said something similar we said the starter tier was meant as a starter tier it was not meant as I'm going to run my blog in the starter tier forever because our assumption was it lets you start and once you see some success you will upgrade to the pro plan which has all the let's say the tools and less restrictions that you need as a ghost blog that wants to sustain itself as well and what we saw is that the starter tier grew and grew and grew and people never moved off it and that just became very unsustainable for us as well because on the flip side people on the starter tier.

Needed the most support which we happily give but there's also a point where you have to say hey if half of the support we have to give for the starter tier is just because of missing features that you would have on the pro tier then that's a signal for us that's a signal where we say. Clearly the starter tier didn't work as we intended it so we shut it down right now magic pages actually growing more than ever before now that we removed the starter tier and we see that people actually started upgrading from the starter tier to the pro tier but it was a scary moment for us as well to just remove a tier and.

I remember in February talking to Sviatoslav who just joined in February to work at magic pages and saying hey. I have no idea what's going to happen when we removed the starter tier but. I want to do this because I see that it's not sustainable for us it turned out well but as you said we are running businesses and I think we're happy to give support both you and me we're happy to support people and the goals that they have with our respective tools.

But we also know the charity where we can do that for free so I definitely understand why you don't have a free tier especially as something as critical as something that touches payments because if something goes wrong. I know that people on the free tier also want to have proper support and proper resolution to that and you can only do that if you know that you get something back in exchange as well.

André: Exactly and the pricing was the biggest issue. I normally thought okay. I set a pricing table what feels good what feels wrong what would I pay and you make a sort of founding tier next to it easy peasy I thought and then with the closed beta. I get a lot of feedback so to talk to your customers is a very important thing not only with feature requests and bugs and what feels good what fits right. I internally thought. I have two prices yes a sort of big agency price and a sort of studio pricing yes so you can have two publications and you have enough to do to work with the two prices and then the most people said yes it's nice but when I start with a block.

I only have one publication maybe one payment provider in your list that I like to use and I'm starting out and. I want to get some money and I go outside and write and write what do they do they don't pay such amount of money for it but the step to the pricing is too big to choose it because maybe they have no customer to pay their own bill so I step back. I thought what may be possible so I change the pricing table again in front end because of customer feedback. I already had and now. I have a sort of solo plan when we launch openly then when you have one publication you can do it very well with one publication because. I have more than one ghost blog.

I need another tier on this maybe you are a sort of social agency and you have 10 ghost blogs to work with it yes and that was the question too what do I do when. I have my ghost blogs what do I do when. I have a team somebody from the accountant somebody from the technical and somebody who only writes so I didn't think about it and so now we have some roles and members inside the dashboard who can handle your publications and your payment providers. I didn't thought about this before.

Jannis: Yeah also something we're working on right now because that's as you said you don't think about this before because you know you have one use case in mind when you develop your product and that usually comes from your own experiences because we both solved our own problems and as more and more people. Start using your product. You realize that the same problem. The same solution that you built can solve multiple problems and all of a sudden you need to think about well okay there might be a technical team member in a blog or in a publication that needs certain access there is somebody that does accounting for them that might not even be in the same company they might have hired a separate accounting agency for that how do you do that?

Because in our case we're using Ghost's own built-in billing portal which only gives access to the entire billing stuff to the owner of the blog post do you then give the accountant that is not even part of your company ownership of your blogs that doesn't make any sense so as you say you talk to your customers and you build this step by step to figure out a way that's smart for you and that's also smart for them in a sense that they can use it the way they intended.

André: Sustainability and long-term and the problem wasn't to make an admin role a technical role an edge role that's not the problem or a booking role the problem are security can somebody from bookkeeping close your account and when you change the account owner because your email address changed how do we do this? And that are some little things you think you do a little tweak and then you have three days of coding sessions. Testing, staging and deployment and then you say okay now you can change your role.

Jannis: There's a lot of work in the background that's even as somebody that has built a product for three and a half years now. I sometimes forget and I think oh that's such a small change then I sit there for a week and in the end I'm just annoyed with everything because there's so many little things involved that you simply forget sometimes.

André: And you get feedback for example a few people ask hey we use Mollie we want to use Mollie yes you have Mollie on your list it's a new provider okay I looked into Mollie and Mollie is special for e-commerce yes and it doesn't work quite well with web hooks and documentation and what we want to do with this and so I reconsidered it and said sorry actually we only have one customer who wanted to use Mollie they now use another payment provider of their choice but for one customer 14 days of development it doesn't work out in this system when a few customers want to take Mollie and use it then we can work it out of course so the problem is not to say yes the problem is to say to your feedback. What you get from the users or customers is to say no and why no. To understand it yes and that works quite well.

Jannis: All right so you are not going to do Mollie as a payment provider which payment providers do you actually support right now apart from I think you mentioned Stripe Paddle right now Lemon Squeezy.

André: We support Polar PayPal Paddle Gumroad Lemon Squeezy and Ko-fi Ko-fi is something from PayPal I think and we have Creem on it and Patreon and we have on the list for example for German users Digistore on Copecart and of course some special payment providers from the USA but they are still with an asterisk for planning and looking into it actually I'm focused on what works and what can be optimized and when somebody says hey you have something on their list when is it available we have an open roadmap we have an open changelog we're happy to talk to people when they are interested and often people ask hey Stripe yes of course.

Jannis: We work with Stripe so also if I use something like Ko-fi or Patreon that means even though let's say those users they didn't start the process on my ghost blog they might have come through you know social media whatever saw a Patreon link somewhere have a specific membership there they would then be able to get access to your ghost blog and you basically say here's an extra perk for that.

André: Exactly like in Patreon you have for example Discord yes and you grant Discord access to a server with a role and you do the same with your ghost publication and access and of course Patreon is an own ecosystem yes they want all your texts they want all your PDFs all your creative work and that doesn't quite fit with your blog that is externally but often people use it and I didn't know that before. I talked to my customer who had a Patreon and I found out a lot of people use it as workaround because it works quite well and they take the payments through Patreon and do the most stuff in their own blog okay no problem with that and when you buy in Patreon directly you get access granted and when you buy directly on a button on your blog yes you get access granted through Patreon because we have features not only connection to the ghost blog maybe that I forget to tell you can make a button or a pricing table and for example Ko-fi button or a pricing table with the three tiers from Patreon and then you can choose which product to map it because you need to map it and what happens next do somebody get an hey you're welcome or an opt-in email for your blog you can choose what you like and we recommend something and the most interesting part was in the first UI you need to manual copy paste your Patreon product ID into PayGlue to make it happen of course we reworked it now with every payment provider you have a sort of autofetch product when you make the connection we can autofetch the products and you can map this membership tier directly to this product from your payment provider like Patreon or Ko-fi or anything else.

Jannis: Interesting how it all comes together André it's been super lovely to talk to you about PayGlue about your journey with developing it you were kind enough to give a discount code for Magic Pages customers that can be found in the customer portal. So if any Magic Pages customer wants to have a look at PayGlue and try that out there is an exclusive deal section there where you can also have a little discount code for PayGlue on that note there's a question that I always ask everybody in the end André is there anything that I should have asked that I didn't anything we forgot to mention.

André: No I think we could have a long podcast episode. And because we are stepping from topic to another topic and normally long podcast forms. On the legal basis when you listen to legal podcasts because the topics they are quite special and I think our founding journeys that we talked about the problems and everything else it was very nice when there are some questions and people like to see me again to answer some questions they maybe not send me in my email inbox I'm happy to come back again and we should talk about then these topics at this time. I think we talked about everything.

Jannis: Well thank you so much for coming on André for spending some time with us and as I said if anybody out there has the need to have ghost memberships with another payment provider because maybe Stripe isn't available in your country or you just annoyed with Stripe for whatever reason then have a look at payglue.io and see what André has been up to there.

André: Thank you very much happy to be here and stay healthy.

Jannis: Yes stay healthy and have a good rest of your day everybody.

André: Goodbye bye.

Mark Alexander is a Melbourne-based technology writer and the founder of Tech That Fits, where he reviews gadgets through one deceptively simple question: does it earn its place? He lives in a roughly 40 m² studio with his partner Colin — the creator of Never Too Small — so "tech for small spaces" isn't a category on the site, it's the whole starting point.

Mark joins Jannis on his path to Ghost as a complete newcomer: evaluating Webflow and WordPress first, choosing Ghost for built-in memberships and newsletters, and then — with no prior Ghost experience — building his own custom theme, partly with the visual builder Fantasma. They get into creative homepage touches (a robot vacuum that drives around the page), a repeatable review framework, reaching readers through Google and Apple News, and the road from CES and IFA to Indiecon in Hamburg.

Jannis: Hi, and welcome to the Magic Pages podcast, where we sit down with the people building, hosting and publishing on Ghost. I'm Jannis, and today I'm here with Mark Alexander, a Melbourne-based technology writer and the founder of Tech That Fits. Welcome. Good to have you on.

Mark: Thanks, Jannis. Thanks for having me.

Jannis: Mark, can you quickly introduce yourself for people who don't know you yet? Who are you? What do you do? And what is Tech That Fits?

Mark: Okay, sure. I guess I've always been quite a big fan of technology. Not just what's new, but how technology changes the way we live, and Tech That Fits has become my creative space to explore that. I do this with Ghost at the moment, covering tech news and reviewing products, but I'm also developing some guides. I kind of want my site to help people get more from the technology that they already own, as well as make better decisions when it's time to upgrade. I guess with Tech That Fits, we're looking at how useful the tech is, whether it's thoughtfully designed and whether it's actually pleasant to live with. I live with my partner, Colin, and our dog in a small studio apartment.

It's about 40m2, and in a small home, everything you bring to it has to really earn its place. You become very much aware of the space that something occupies and whether it actually solves a problem, or if you even continue to use it after the novelty wears off. My partner, Colin, is the creator of Never Too Small, which originally started as a YouTube channel, and lots of cleverly designed small apartments, and now it's expanded to different types of media. Colin's recently just launched a magazine, which explores more joyful ways to live and design through some of Colin's partnerships. I get exposed to a lot of new tech, and all this has contributed to the way that I judge technology, particularly how it's used in small spaces.

Other publications touch on these ideas, but I wanted to make that kind of tech in small spaces a starting point rather than an occasional category.

Jannis: The one thing that really stood out to me when I read through your site, your blog, specifically the About page, is the premise that you always judge tech based on the question, does it earn its place? As a tech person myself that has, just looking around, my office cluttered in tech? That is a premise that I should probably take a bit more serious. Is there a particular bit of tech that you've covered in the last couple of weeks where you say that definitely earned its place, something that really stands out for you that people should maybe have a look at?

Mark: Good question. I guess it's easier to find a lot of tech that doesn't fit a place, especially a small space that me and Colin live in, and that's sometimes another way that the tech in our apartment is judged. It's very much judged by Colin, and whether it aesthetically fits our apartment. We have a lot of cool tech in our place, Samsung Frame TV, for example. It's great that when you turn it off, it just blends into the background, blends into our gallery wall we have.

Jannis: I've seen the Samsung TVs like that in a lot of places, and I think the last place was actually an Airbnb in Bergen, in Norway, where we stayed, where at first you barely saw that it was a TV. So that is definitely something that I can see, especially in a small space that. It makes so much sense, I think.

Mark: Yeah, we always get people come over and they don't realize it's a TV until we hit the button and turn it on to a TV.

Jannis: Yeah, cool. You have decided to start a publication, Tech That Fits, and you ended up with Ghost. So now the main question that the audience probably has is, why did you choose Ghost? What was the journey to get there and have you compared Ghost to anything else on that way?

Mark: Ghost initially wasn't the platform that I was going to choose to develop the website on. I did sign up to a few others to kind of test them out and to evaluate, and I guess I spent a few months on another platform, and I spent a bit of time just upskilling some existing web development skills I had. But the more I began to develop things in the background, ultimately I decided that newsletters and memberships were going to be quite important to the future of the site. When I looked back at things I was evaluating, I felt like, you know, Ghost has all that built in from the start.

So I thought, yeah, that kind of ultimately helped me decide. And then I guess the same reasons every other Ghost publication has chosen Ghost. Ultimately you want to remain some kind of ownership over everything and flexibility. I think it's a great way with the membership system to get to know your audience, and. I want to develop a publication that listens to the feedback of my audience and use that to help me influence the development going forward.

Jannis: Can you just share, if you want to, what platform did you evaluate before Ghost? You said you spent a couple of months there.

Mark: So I spent a bit of time on Webflow and WordPress. WordPress I had used a few times before with a few different things. I ultimately found that to be quite clunky. And I can see from WordPress's development blogs, they're getting ready for another version, which is built from scratch. I decided against using WordPress. And the kind of platform I did spend a bit more time using and developing on was Webflow. But earlier this year, they actually took out their membership features and discontinued it for new customers. And they're kind of moving away from that. That helped me decide against using Webflow.

Jannis: I didn't know that they discontinued that. That's definitely an interesting move, yeah.

Mark: Yeah, they discontinued it from their kind of core package. And there's since been a third party app that has another subscription layered on top to add that kind of feature in.

Jannis: Interesting. Yeah. The reason why we're sitting here today is that you actually replied to a post that we posted on the Ghost forum in regards to Indiecon, the publishing conference in Hamburg. That's happening in September. And you mentioned that you started freshly with Ghost and that you were building a custom theme. And that was the hook where I thought somebody that has just started with Ghost, somebody that then decided, okay, I'm going to build my custom theme. That is someone I definitely want to talk to because we've had voices on the podcast so far from people that spent a couple of years with Ghost already, people building tools on Ghost with us, Magic Pages, hosting Ghost, but never from somebody that had no Ghost experience so far and then jumped right into developing a custom theme.

So can you tell us a little bit about that, how you started that, also maybe what prompted you to actually say, okay, I need a custom theme.

Mark: One of the reasons why I saw your post on the Ghost forums was because I was using the forums as a way to look into other people's publications and as to how they were customizing things and seeing how people had customized the other themes in general. I guess I'm quite a creative person when it comes to web development and I ultimately knew that I wanted to customize the way everything was going to look. I guess that because I had developed the first version of Tech That Fits within Webflow, I had a bit more creative control over the way the pages were designed and I felt like just using one of the Ghost templates restricted me a bit. I ultimately know that once I've got a few more posts that.

I want to have a more creative way to display them all together. For me as well, I wanted a way that I can showcase some of the tech from the never too small episodes into some of my pages without actually putting the content into my database or copying that content over. So, I've got some custom codes that are going to be able to fetch content that never too small hosts.

Jannis: You also mentioned that you've used a tool that is in a way quite similar to Webflow. It's Fantasma, which is a visual page builder, a visual theme builder for Ghost. Can you tell us a bit about your experience with that? How have you used it and what did you like about it? What were maybe the struggles with it?

Mark: Yeah, I was really happy once I saw Fantasma on the Ghost forums. I think one of the struggles I was having with using Ghost at the beginning was to customize the templates and to customize the way things are displayed, especially having different sections on my website, wanting to do some quite advanced filters on tags that are attached to posts. Fantasma was great just to let me quickly build version one of Tech That Fits website. Yeah, because I do have some more advanced knowledge of web development, I still go back to editing some of the code and adding in some custom integrations, which can be a bit troublesome with Fantasma, because if you make any customizations to that template, ultimately, once you change it again on their site, those changes are overridden when you press publish.

Jannis: Yeah, that's the Ghost publishing mechanism that doesn't work well with uploading new themes and keeping some of the history there. So that's probably an extra step that you have in the publishing workflow there of having to download the Fantasma theme, applying your changes and then uploading it to Ghost, right?

Mark: Yeah, I think for me, I've been trying to optimize the website to independently run, but ultimately, I want to push content to services like Google News and Apple News to help draw in an audience to use those sites as a channel to advertise on. Yeah, that's why I kept doing custom modifications to some of my code.

Jannis: And what's the ultimate visual identity that you want with Tech That Fits? Is there some more customization that you have in mind or is it mainly the tags and the sections that you've added now that you wanted from the custom theme?

Mark: Ultimately, I know that version one of the site is going to look very different to version two because. I am reviewing a lot of tech products. I am going to break those up into categories so they're a bit easier to find. And I think at the moment, it would look a bit silly to have a category page with just one or two reviews. So in the future, that's what I'll look at adding in. I also want to do just a bit more customizations that just add a bit more creativity to the site. Currently, on my homepage, if you're viewing it on a desktop, there's like a pop out cover of the latest Never Too Small magazine that appears on the side. I want to also add in some full kind of widgets that might appear around the side.

Earlier today, like I'm just getting ready to publish a review on a robotic vacuum. I've just wrote some custom code that will have the actual robotic vacuum driving around the white space on the side of my website that will be clickable, that will take you to that post. Yeah, so I was just looking at creative ways to showcase some of my posts on different pages. The same for maybe linking to a podcast that I'm listening to on the side, having a bit of a retro iPod that you can click and it launches into a podcast I might be listening to. I also want to use Tech That Fits as a way to showcase other publications and link to other websites that are of interest to me and then hopefully of interest to the Tech That Fits audience.

For ghost publications and just websites in general, it can be quite lonely as a solo editor. So I'm always a big fan of collaborating with other people, hence why I'm on this podcast with you as well. I think that's a great way to promote your site to different audiences. Somebody listening to this podcast might have an interest in tech in small spaces and then visit my site.

Jannis: Yeah, and it's also just great to share your creativity in there and to just listen to the ideas that you have because now hearing you talk about a vacuum robot going over the white space, it's such an obvious thing that you can do when you review a vacuum robot. But to get there and to say, well, I'm actually going to take the time and build this just as a little gimmick, as a little creative exercise and as a way to capture somebody's attention. That is something a lot of people can learn from as well. And I'm really curious to see how that's going to work and what robot you're going to review because we have two at home. I'm not very happy with either of them.

Let's put it this way. You also mentioned now that you are publishing all of that yourself, that you're solo publishing the articles. And the one thing I've noticed is that you have a very high frequency of publishing. Slow down now a little bit, I guess, because you've launched just a couple of weeks ago. But especially in the first couple of weeks of having your site online, you published a couple of times a week, like sometimes two or three times a week. How do you see that going forward? How do you want to sustain that? Or the better question is, what's the frequency you're aiming for?

Mark: I guess my aim at the moment is to try and publish two or three reviews a week. And what I've been kind of developing at the start is a common framework that I can use to help me review these products. I think having a regular kind of format helps the audience have some kind of expectation as to how a product might be reviewed. And from an editorial point of view, like having that framework just gives you a template to stick to and focus on. And for my audience, if there's a robot vacuum, for example, having a standard format that I use to review those different products in that category, it makes it very easy for someone on my audience to compare two products together.

Because the aim with Tech That Fits is that we can help our audience choose the product that we're going to fit in their place.

Jannis: With the angle of making sure that it's tech that fits, you also mentioned that Colin always has to judge a tech product that goes into your guy's apartment. Does he also have a part in the review process then for Tech That Fits?

Mark: If you read some of the reviews, there's a couple that have Colin's comments in the background. And I guess for us in our apartment, I'm the technical side of the relationship. And I know now from experience that I need to make sure that anything I implement in home works without too many quirks. I'm always testing out some smart home products, some lights that doesn't always quite maybe work how it should or doesn't integrate into the Apple home system that we use and it needs a physical switch, doesn't work with voice, things like this.

Jannis: My wife, Mariia and Colin would have a lot of stories to share then because same here. Implementing lights, I think that the latest thing that worked well, we implemented a new light a couple of days ago that essentially turns on when at night you pass, so it illuminates the way to the bathroom. That went well. But. I remember one of the other things I implemented a couple of months ago already, which was a smart lock at our door. All of a sudden, the door was just unlocked all the time. And Mariia just said at some point, this is an actual security issue. Like, why is this not working? And I was just sitting there at my laptop and giving her the technical details.

And she just said, still, I don't care why it's not working. It is not working. The door is unlocked. And that was for me that awakening moment where I also had that mind shift really of, yeah, like there is somebody else here as well that needs to live with that tech. So I can relate a lot to the sentiment of, in your case, tech that fits. And in my case, it's probably more like tech that just needs to work without having all the little bits and pieces around it that need to line up. So, yeah, I guess the two of them would have lots of stories to share.

Mark: Yeah, definitely. I think living with Colin, one thing I've learned always to do is try and add in a physical switch where possible. I have a lot of those IKEA smart switches that will just turn things on and off. Yeah, they definitely help, but we still get randomly lights flashing because I've lost Wi-Fi signal or something like this. We're just in the matter of upgrading some of our smart lights from Wi-Fi bulbs to the matter ecosystem just to give everything a bit more stability.

But also me suddenly deciding to run the beta version of iOS 27 so I can get access to the new Siri Assistant has kind of broke some of those things.

Jannis: Yeah, for us, it was moving into this new apartment here, which basically has two floors. So we have some offices up here where I'm currently. And that meant all of a sudden you have a lot more surface area to cover. And especially with smart home, that got very interesting at some points where our smart home hub, which is Home Assistant in our case, is at the very, let's say, front of the apartment. And we are now here at the very back and one floor up. And some of the lights in here in my office, for example, just wouldn't work anymore.

So it's those things where then the whole night all the lights were on up here because I just couldn't figure out how to bridge that gap. And the only solution was to turn electricity off in this room. So it's interesting stories like that with smart home sometimes, sometimes not so very smart.

Mark: Yeah, I think an upgrade to Home Assistant is in our future. And that's definitely going to maybe be a series on Tech That Fits, that upgrade.

Jannis: It does sound like a series, yes. And I'm very intrigued to hear how that goes in the end. You've also mentioned before Google News and Apple News, especially Apple News I've personally never looked into. Do you already see some results from that? Do you see that people come from Apple News to your site?

Mark: I haven't yet finalized an integration with Apple. There's an approval process with them with Google News, though. Yes, you know, being Australia based, there's not too many tech blogs to compete with. So especially in posts where I'm writing about something in the tech space in Australia, it's very easy to rank and to get traffic from Google.

Jannis: Cool, interesting. And how hard was the integration with that? Can you maybe just like on a service level, can you share what you had to do with your Ghost theme to get integrated there?

Mark: Yeah, it actually wasn't very difficult for Google News integration. It just involved me within Ghost creating a custom HBS file. Yeah, which basically displays just posts from the last seven days. And I specifically get it to only show posts which have a special tag, Google News, so that I can control what content is sent out to that channel. And I guess for anyone listening who wants to do something similar, yeah, it's pretty straightforward. I dove deeper into the way that Google News algorithm works. And definitely, if you integrate with Google, they favor sites that regularly post. And in that XML file, they only want to see posts from the last seven days.

So if you're not posting multiple times in a week, then it may be difficult to get any traction with them. Yeah, there's a Google Developer podcast I like listening to search off the record. Yeah, it's quite interesting. It does a bit of a deeper dive on how Google looks at your website and what's important to them.

Jannis: Nice, I'll link to that in the show notes. And I'll see if we can put something together on the Magic Pages site as well for Google News and Apple News.

Mark: Yeah, I'm happy to share with you what I did, and it's very easy to customize.

Jannis: Cool, thank you very much. Are there any other distribution channels that you're looking at, or are you mainly relying on the news aggregators in that sense?

Mark: Mainly on those two at the moment, I guess me, I have been looking at ways in which I can draw some traffic to my site. Another reason why I'm attending Indiecon, I find that a lot of in-person events, it's much easier to explain and talk about and to make connections with people.

Jannis: Indiecon is a good keyword. While we've been emailing about Indiecon, you've also mentioned that you went to CES in Las Vegas, you went to Milan Design Week, going to IFA in Berlin before you go to Indiecon, or while you go to Indiecon, essentially.

Mark: Yeah, in the middle of IFA, yeah, which would be interesting. I attended CES in Las Vegas earlier this year. That was pretty eventful and pretty hectic, I think. There was about 190,000 people attending CES this year, and IFA is like the European version of the same thing. And I think IFA this year, they're expecting around 220,000 people, so it's going to be busy. Yeah, I'm lucky that I've got a media pass. I get to go into the event a couple days early before the general crowd goes in.

Jannis: Right, but you're essentially going from one of the biggest events in that space to a tiny publishing conference with probably 2,000 to 3,000 people in total, yeah. 2,000 to 3,000 people is still quite a big event, I think, yeah. I think for the indie publishing space it is, yeah.

Mark: Yeah, and an international event. Like I see that Indiecon now have the list of everyone who's going, and yeah, it's quite interesting. There's someone else from Melbourne going as well, another publication. Yeah, so it'll be a good opportunity to network around and to get talking to other publications, and yeah, get some ideas on what's working for them, and that work well for me, and yeah, some collaboration, some maybe crossover.

Jannis: Nice. For Indiecon specifically, apart from the collaboration, have you had similar events already? Smaller publishing events, do you know of any others that are similar to that?

Mark: On my way to Germany, I'm stopping off in Singapore for a similar event they have. Colin is attending with me for that event. Never Too Small this last week has just launched issue 8 of the magazine, and it has a bit of a Singapore flair to it. So yeah, we're going to go to Singapore and attend a similar event, and yeah, showcase the latest issue of the magazine.

Jannis: Cool, nice. So maybe you're never too small at Indiecon 2027 then.

Mark: Maybe. I think I mentioned to you as well one of the attendees of Indiecon, the coffee table mags shop that's based in Hamburg. Yeah, they sell a lot of never too small magazines, and they have a lot of international prints. Yeah, so there must be something about Hamburg. Does it have quite a big creative scene? Have you been before?

Jannis: Yeah, I've been to Hamburg a couple of times, and there is in fact, yeah. There's like a big creative scene, both in let's say in the arts, but also in like publishing, also in digital creativity. Lots of where I come from, web development, web design, and so on. Some of the bigger advertisements firms are also in Hamburg, or like the bigger ones in Germany. Yeah, it is. For me, if I look at Germany, having lived in Berlin, we obviously have a big creative hub in Berlin, where lots of things happen, and then personally, I would say Hamburg is like the second bigger one within Germany.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jannis: I have one last question for you. Big picture. Where do you see Tech That Fits in the next couple of years? Where do you want to develop that to?

Mark: There's been so many versions of Tech That Fits in my head, as to how it started and how things have developed. Yeah, I want to expand to some other types of media, potentially video. I would like potentially to interview some of the Tech That Fits audience on their kind of favorite tech devices. I think because I travel a lot with Colin, and I'm in the background of a lot of filming of the Never Too Small episodes, maybe there's an opportunity for me to interview some of the people in the homes that are featured in Never Too Small, maybe to have a deeper dive into the tech that exists in their background. Never Too Small focuses a lot on the architecture and the design, and you often see a lot of tech in the backgrounds of videos, because there's tech everywhere in everyone's houses.

Yeah, I guess there's a bit of space maybe where I could interview people on how they use that tech on what's important to them, and how it fits into their space and their life and things.

Jannis: That's really cool, and I sometimes watch videos, maybe not so much architectural videos, but other videos where people are interviewed and I spot things in the background, and I'm very curious about those things. I love to see that as well, just to see how people are integrating tech, especially in a way that it's not too obvious, or that it just fits into a space. So it sounds really lovely, and I'm looking forward to seeing how your site develops. Yeah, thanks. Perfect. Then, yeah, thank you so much for the lovely time that we spent together for giving us some insights into tech that fits into your world of publishing, where you come from, and also your insights into conferences and in-person conferences. Looking forward to meeting you, Mark, and have a lovely rest of your day.

Mark: Yeah, we'll see you soon.

Jannis: See you soon, bye-bye. Bye.

Now, if this conversation with Mark sparked your curiosity, and you want to come to Indiecon in Hamburg as well, I've got good news for you. We still have a couple of tickets left, so just drop a quick email to [email protected], and maybe we'll see you in Hamburg as well. It would be really lovely to meet more of you, and also to have dinner with Mark, myself, and a couple of other people. For now, that's it, and yeah, thank you for listening, and goodbye.

A different kind of episode — no guest this time, just Jannis. In about six weeks, Magic Pages is heading to IndieCon, an independent publishing festival in Hamburg that's almost entirely about print: magazines, zines, small books, art prints — things printed with ink on paper. Magic Pages is a Ghost hosting company, so the obvious question is what a web hosting company is doing at a print festival. That's what this episode is about.

The short answer: print publishers and online publishers are fighting the same fight — for ownership of their work and a direct relationship with their readers, with no big platform in the middle. Jannis walks through what Magic Pages is bringing to IndieCon — a hands-on Ghost workshop, a small magazine called A Press of Your Own, and a community dinner — and the two things he most wants to learn back from the print world: how to talk honestly about fair pricing, and how a scene built on trust actually forms. Plus how you can win a ticket, and a seat at the dinner.

Jannis: Hi, and welcome to the Magic Pages podcast, the podcast where we sit down with the people building, hosting and publishing on Ghost. Today is going to be a slightly different episode because it will just be me. I want to talk to you about something I've been thinking about for a while. In about six weeks, Mariia, our first customer and friend, Christine, and myself will take a train to Hamburg. Why? Well, because Magic Pages is sponsoring a festival called IndieCon. IndieCon is a festival for independent publishers. It's happening every year in Hamburg, and what might surprise you? It's mostly focused on print, magazines, zines, small books, art prints, things you can hold, things printed with ink on paper usually.

And Magic Pages, well, if you're new here, is a web hosting company. We host ghost sites, online publications, newsletters, blog, that kind of thing. So the question. I want to discuss with you today is essentially why a web hosting company is sponsoring a print festival. What are we doing there? And more importantly, what am I hoping the people that visit us there will get from it? And a small teaser? We have a couple of tickets for the conference left, so stay until the end to find out how you can get one of these and also have Magic Pages pay for your dinner. Let me start with a bit of a deeper dive into what IndieCon actually is, because most people listening to this probably haven't heard of it.

IndieCon runs from September 4th to 6th in Hamburg at a venue called Gleishalle. That's essentially an old freight hall by the harbor, so very industrial, very urban. It's been running for over a decade at this point, and unlike most bigger conferences, it doesn't have a big company behind it. It's run and organized by a small team who wanted a space where the independent publishing world could come together internationally, not just German speaking. And how it was described to me is basically that if you walk into IndieCon you'll see tables, lots of them, rows of them, and behind each of these tables there's a publisher.

So someone who makes a magazine, a zine, a book, some of them are very small, some of them are one-person operations, some of them are a little bit bigger. Some print 200 copies of an issue, some print 2000, and there's a Portuguese photography magazine next to a German literary journal, next to a Ukrainian art publication, next to a food zine from Copenhagen. And what unites all of these people is that they made the thing. They decided what goes in it, they chose the paper, they chose the printer, they took the risk to print something that they believed in, and nobody at Meta or Google decided what would perform well or adjusted the design. Nobody quietly shifted the algorithm, they just made a magazine, wrote content for it, printed it, and brought it to this venue in Hamburg to sell it and talk to people about it.

That's the atmosphere that sold me when I first heard about it. And. I am by far the least analog person you can imagine. Literally everything in my life is digital. It's not a trade show, there's also not a keynote speaker that used to, you know, work at Google or Apple or whatever that will tell you about the future of media. There's no exhibitors selling you ads or analytic tools or CRMs or anything like that. It's the kind of event where people talk about actually making things instead of growth hacks and funnels. And it's kind of scary thinking about walking into that as a web hosting company.

So the real question is, what are we doing there? I've thought about this a lot, honestly, when the organizers approach the ghost community and they essentially just post it in the ghost forum, they also mentioned that there will be podcast hosts and newsletter creators, kind of the people we talk to every day at Magic Pages anyway. And that made me realize that the print world and the online publishing world are actually not that different. We essentially fight the same fight. We want to produce something that we have control over. We want to share something we're passionate about. And most importantly, neither side wants a big company in the middle of that relationship with our readers, not a print distributor deciding which magazines go out to which stores.

No social media platform deciding which posts get shown to which readers. Zine maker and the newsletter writer are, in my eyes, two versions of the same person. They're just working with different materials. And that's where we're going. Not because we've suddenly decided, or because we think IndieCon goers are potential Magic Pages customers, we're going because the people at IndieCon are very similar to the people we talk to every day. They're just doing it, as I said, on another material. See, the thing is, when you sit with this for a while, you realize that the tools and the medium are just two sides of the same metal.

When I wrote the script of this episode, I started with a very vague idea, and the more. I wrote and wrote about it, the clearer it became. Zine maker prints 300 copies of something. They sell them by hand at festivals like IndieCon, or they mail them to subscribers, or maybe they leave a stack at their favorite independent bookshop. They know their readers not as a number in an analytical dashboard, but as people. They probably recognize faces that keep buying their magazines in person, and they know which magazine goes to which shop. A ghost publisher, a newsletter writer, maybe an independent journalist, or a small magazine that publishes on their own domain already does the exact same thing digitally.

Most of our customers have a couple of hundred subscribers for the newsletters. They know a lot of their readers by name, because those readers reply to the newsletters. Same thing happening on Magic Pages. When I send out a newsletter, I get replies from actual people, and I know those people by name. When you send a message to our customer support chat, we usually know you by name, because maybe we've been in touch before. Those ghost publishers, they pay attention to, cancels their newsletters and subscriptions and why. They know their community as people, and not as monthly active user numbers. Both of those publishers, the zine maker or the newsletter creator, they made an active choice at some point.

They chose not to publish on Medium or Substack, or on some big platform that would give them a bigger audience, but take a cut. Instead, they chose a smaller, more direct route. They chose ownership, essentially. Because that's really what it comes down to, ownership. Owning your publication, owning the relationship with your readers, owning the ability to move if you need to move, and not being at the mercy of a platform that could decide tomorrow that your kind of content is no longer welcome. And that's what.

I mean by the same fight. It doesn't matter if you're printing with ink or publishing to your own domain. The impulse is the same. I want to make this thing, I want to get it to the people who want it, and I don't want anybody in the middle who can take that away from me. And there's a second thing that connects those two worlds, which might be even more important. Both of them value the work itself more than the scale of the work. You don't start printing a small, independent magazine because you want to build a media empire. You do it because you love the thing you're making. You want to spread the message you're printing. And the same thing goes for a ghost publisher.

The people I talk to who run small newsletters, they're not trying to reach millions of people. They just want to make something good and share it with the people who care and be able to keep doing it. And that's a completely different angle from the one that dominates most conversations about publishing right now. Most of it is about growth. How do you grow your list? How do you scale your operation? How do you optimize your funnel?

But in my eyes, the independent publishing world, whether it's print or online, is often actively suspicious of that framing because growth isn't the point. The work is the point. And that's the kind of person. I want Magic Pages to serve. That's who Sviatoslav, Mariia, and myself are actively building this for. All right. So if that's the reason we're going, then how we show up matters in my eyes. I don't want to be that tech company that just shows up trying to make sales. Now, to be fully honest with you, we are bringing discount codes. Two months for free if you decide to try Magic Pages.

But we're not going to push them. Nobody in our booth is going to try to close you on signing up for a hosting deal. The codes are there if you already know you want to try ghosting. Magic Pages happens to be the option that makes sense for you. If you leave the booth without one, that's completely fine because selling hosting was never the point of this. What we're actually spending most of our energy on is a workshop. It's called publishing online with Ghost from first post to paid members. It's going to be 90 minutes. It will be about 10 to 15 people. Everybody brings a laptop and by the end of the workshop, every single participant will have a real live Ghost site.

Not a demo, not a mock-up, but an actual working ghost site with their own writing on it, their own newsletter set up and the basics of paid memberships in place if they want to go that direction. I want to say why we picked this format because it took us a while to figure out the right shape. We could have done a talk, stand at the front, you know, at a stage, explain what ghost is, answer questions at the end. But I don't think that talks land the way I'd like because people forget them. They nod along all the time and then usually, you know, when you leave a talk like this, you never actually try what you've heard. A workshop in my eyes is different because when you leave a workshop, you either have the thing you came to make or you don't.

There's no middle ground, really. So by structuring it as this 90 minute workshop and hands-on building session, we are forcing accountability on basically ourselves, but also the participants. If you're in the room, you're building. And when you leave, you have a website. From what we've heard from the organizers, lots of publishers that come to the IndieCon Festival every year want to actually branch out into the digital world. And most of them, unfortunately, end up on Substack. And that's a pity in my eyes because the platform stands against the very thing independent publishers are trying to do, own what they create. And that's why the most important part of the workshop will be that the participants leave with a site that's theirs.

It will be technically hosted on Magic Pages for the workshop just to fit everything into those 90 minutes. But Ghost is open source and a Ghost site is portable. So any participant can pack up their content at any point. They can take the subscribers, the settings, the content, all of it, and take it somewhere else at any time. They can host it themselves. They can host it with us. They can host it at one of our competitors. If somebody walks out of that workshop and never talks to Magic Pages again, but a year from now, they're running a small independent newsletter on their own domain, that's a win for me. That's the whole reason we're doing this.

If we've helped one more person get to a place where they can publish independently, then it's all made sense for us. And that's what. I mean when I say we're not there to sell. I want to be there to give something, to show a skill, a little bit of the knowledge we've built running Magic Pages for the last three years, because. I want to be there to share that knowledge and enable people to not only be independent offline, but also online.

But that's not all because apart from the workshop itself, we're also making a small magazine. It's called a press of your own, and it's essentially a collection of four short essays about what it means to have your own place on the internet in 2026. And crucially, it is platform independent. It's not about Magic Pages. It's also not really about ghost either. It's about the deeper question of what publishers should be thinking about when they set up their own web presence. There are four essays, as I said, and I'm just going to read you the titles of them, because I think that really does a better job of describing what the magazine is than what I could do now.

The first one is called a press of your own, what the platforms keep when you write on them. And it's essentially about what sub-stack and medium keep from you, what you own, what you don't own, and what you're missing out compared to hosting your publication on an independent platform, whether that's ghost, WordPress, or anything else. The second one is called a short history of the homepage where writers used to live and where they live now. That one takes a step a little bit back, and it talks about this full circle moment where, you know, in the 90s and early 2000s, there were a lot of those personal homepages websites where people wrote about their day-to-day, and then we kind of took this side quest towards social media that we've been on for the last 10, 15 years.

And now I think we're coming back to this full circle moment where people start realizing that maybe publishing on their own website, their own homepage might actually be worth it. The third one is called Five Places Worth Visiting, a short tour of publications on their own addresses, and that one introduces five publishers who already do what we talk about at IndieCon. It will also feature a couple of Magic Pages customers, also a couple of other ones that might not be publishing on Ghost at all.

So it's really just like a little place to start where you can dig in and just see what cool things people are doing already. And the last one is called Writing That Lasts 10 Years, on longevity, archives, and what survives. Again, a counterpoint to the social media stream that just, you know, scrolls by, that just flashes by, where everything is this so-called short form content. And it talks a little bit more about longevity and making sure that your writing survives the next decade and even more than that. The magazine itself will be a small print run, so we only print as many copies as we think we can give to people at the conference. And it will also be available online on our website once the conference starts.

So it's not there yet, but once the conference starts in the beginning of September, it will also be on our website. And last but not least, we are also bringing ourselves. So Mariia and I are coming. Christine, who you've met in the second episode of this podcast, is also coming. And a couple of Magic Pages publishers might show up there as well. I'm already talking to a couple of them. So let's see how that goes. And we're also hosting a small dinner on Saturday evening, September the 5th, in a small restaurant right next to the venue. It's called the Oberhafen-Kantine, and it's a 100-year-old institution, Hamburg. The dinner itself is, I think, where a lot of the real conversation will happen.

And as I mentioned in the beginning, there is a chance to win not only tickets to the IndieCon, but also an invitation to this very dinner. So, yeah, that's our presence at IndieCon, a workshop, a magazine, a booth to talk to us, and a dinner on Saturday. But let's be honest, we're not just going to IndieCon to give something. I also want us to learn something, specifically, how can Magic Pages get better at what we do by spending three days with the people who've been doing the same adjacent thing for decades in the print world.

Because that's really the frame. I want to hold on to. We host online publishers, the people at IndieCon are print publishers, and the overlap between what those two groups need is bigger than most people would assume. And there are things the print world has figured out that would make Magic Pages a better product, a better service, and a better company if we paid attention. Let me give you two specific things that. I have in mind. The first one is around pricing, but not the pricing of our own service of Magic Pages, but the pricing our customers charge their readers. Independent magazines cost quite a lot of money sometimes, 15, 20, sometimes 30 euros for a single issue, and the readers happily pay it, because it is usually worth it.

Because a small audience can sustain something they love if you charge them what it actually costs to make. Most ghost publishers I know on the other hand are under price, they're afraid to charge 10 euros a month because they don't want to lose subscribers, so instead they charge smaller numbers and struggle to sustain the work, which then becomes our problem too as a hosting company, because a publisher who can't sustain their work is a publisher who eventually stops publishing, and a publisher who eventually leaves us.

So what. I want to learn from the print world is how do they help each other to get comfortable with fair pricing? Is there a language they use, a framing that works, a set of examples they point to? Because if we can bring that to our customers, that's a real service to them, to help show them that charging what the work is worth isn't greedy. But actually what makes independence sustainable. It won't be a course, it won't be a marketing gimmick. I just want to be able to have better conversations with our own community about what it takes to keep going. And the second thing, and this one is maybe the one I'm most curious about, is how the print world actually builds these relationships in their world.

Not just with readers, but with each other. The independent print scene is usually built on an infrastructure of trust that the indie web is still figuring out. Publishers know other publishers and distributors know other distributors, and that means that festivals like IndieCon exist because the community itself organizes them. Nobody made this happen top down. There was no big international publisher that said, well, let's get all the indie zine makers together. When a print publisher launches something new, they don't have to buy meta ads to find the first readers. They have a network of people who will vouch for them, distribute them and feature them, put their magazine on a shelf essentially.

The online equivalent of that is still much thinner. Most ghost publishers I know operate in relative isolation. They might follow a few other newsletters, they might occasionally do a cross promotion, but there isn't really a scene, the way there's a scene in the indie print. And that's something. I want to think about for Magic Pages as well. What could we do to help our customers get to know each other better? Not as a marketing feature and not as a community in the empty tech industry sense, but actually in a way that Indiecon manages to do it, to have this real thing that brings real publishers into the same room, whether it's virtual or physical.

So. I want to figure out whether there is a version of that for the people that we host, maybe an event, a directory, maybe it's also this podcast to a certain extent, maybe something entirely different. And we have talked about this within the Magic Pages team already, but quite honestly, we don't have the answer yet. So maybe the print world can help us figure that out to a certain extent. So yeah, those are the two things I'm carrying with me, not as rigid interview questions, just as things. I want to sit with and listen and see what shape to take when I get back home. Maybe I'll find the answers I'm looking for, maybe I don't, so who knows?

But hey, let's get to the fun part. As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, we do have a small number of IndieCon tickets to give away. I'd love it if some of you can come with us. And here's how it works. Just send a quick email to help at magicpages.co. Just tell us you'd like to come. You don't need to write anything elaborate, but it's obviously nicer for us to also get to know you a little bit. Entries close by July 26.

So this is this Sunday, right after the episode airs end of day in Central European time. So technically 11, 59 PM Central European time. We will then draw the numbers at random from everyone who put their hand up. And since it's just a few weeks before the conference, we do trust that if you put your hand up, you'll also show up there. We'll have to do a dinner reservation and it would be pity if the restaurant prepares food that nobody will eat in the end.

So if you win, we cover your IndieCon ticket. It also includes what's called the breakfast club. So you will certainly not start the day hungry and you'll also have a seat at our community dinner on Saturday. We cannot cover your travel expenses or accommodations. So have a look at that beforehand, please. And if you don't win, come anyway if you can, buy a ticket, come to the workshop, come find us at our booth, come pick up one of the magazines that we'll bring, because the whole reason we're going is to meet more of the people who care about independent publishing. And that includes everybody listening to this.

So yeah, that's it for today. If you're publishing independently, whether that's on paper, online or both, you're doing something that matters. Not because it's going to make you a lot of money or reach millions of people, but because the alternative is that publishing keeps getting more concentrated and the people making decisions about what gets read have less and less to do with the actual work. Independent publishing, print and web is the counterweight to that.

So thank you also for publishing your newsletter, your publication on Ghost or anywhere else. And if you've liked this, subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts. The next episode, we will be back with the regular format. I've got a couple of guests lined up already. And if you're coming to IndieCon or thinking about it, just send us a quick email and let us know. So see you in Hamburg and bye-bye.

Chris Emunds — the solo developer behind Vellumine, a managed advanced-search and analytics platform for Ghost — joins Jannis to talk about the path from Jekyll and WordPress to Ghost, why he started building on top of the Ghost ecosystem, and the specific gaps in Ghost's native SodoSearch that Vellumine sets out to close.

The second half is a conversation about the reality of bootstrapping software alongside a full-time job — Chris on treating the day job as a superpower rather than a constraint, what real users asked for in his beta, and how much ranking and semantic-search behaviour is really an expectations-management problem. They close on what John O'Nolan has said publicly about investing in the Ghost ecosystem — talk linked below.

Jannis: Hi, and welcome to the Magic Pages podcast, where we sit down with the people building, hosting, and publishing on Ghost. I'm Jannis, and today I'm here with Chris, the solo developer behind the Vellumine. Chris, first of all, did I pronounce it correctly, and can you quickly introduce yourself?

Chris: Yes. Hi, I'm Chris. Vellumine is correct, yeah. I am a software developer of around about 13 years now. I worked for different software companies all throughout business, like CRM customization. Later on, I specialized in AI and went into the computer vision field for some time, worked at a sports company where they needed computer vision. And now I'm working in, I think, what you would call PropTech, so software and AI for civil engineering applications.

But as you pointed out, I also started my own little business called Vellumine, which is a managed platform for advanced search and analytics for Ghost.

Jannis: Very cool. I want to get a little bit into what Vellumine is and what it does a little bit later, but maybe since this is a podcast for the Ghost community and most people listening to this are probably publishing on Ghost themselves. Can you tell us how you came to Ghost? How did you end up figuring out Ghost, working with Ghost, and then also taking the step from I'm using Ghost to, well, I want to build a tool and. I want to build a business on top of Ghost.

Chris: Yeah, so I've always liked the idea of writing, writing blog posts, writing content for the internet. But I never quite enjoyed the experience of actually writing. I struggled a lot because, I don't know, of perfectionism. But a long time ago, I first started building a little blog on top of Jekyll and GitHub Pages, which had the nice benefit that it was free to get started. But the experience in relation to previewing and writing wasn't that great. I also then afterwards tried WordPress for a little bit, but found it to be quite bloated and also not the nicest writing experience.

Eventually, I came across a friend of mine and I found that he was using Ghost as well. So. I actually clicked that little link that said Powered by Ghost and I ended up on the Ghost website. That was a couple of years ago. But I also fell into that common trap of confusing open source Ghost with Ghost Pro, the hosting service. At the time, I saw the price tag and backed off a little bit because I only wanted to start a hobby blog and didn't intend to make any money from it.

So really only last year, by coincidence, I stumbled over Ghost again and took a bit more time to investigate what it's actually about. Because I heard that it was supposed to be open source, so I thought you must be able to self-host it then. It turned out you can. I just didn't see it at the time when I first came across it. So I gave it another look and just spun up a docker container to try playing around with it. And I really liked the experience of using the editor to write content. You could really just focus on your content and you didn't have to tinker so much with settings and configurations. It also felt very slick, not as bloated. So that's how I ended up with Ghost.

Jannis: So you doubled around with Ghost. When did you look into the search? When did you figure out that there is a potential for maybe a little bit of a different search? And when did you decide, okay, this might actually be a good business opportunity for you?

Chris: Yeah, so sometime last year, I also came across a book that kind of changed my perspective on this whole topic. I always was curious about entrepreneurship, starting my own software business. But I also always was under the impression that it had to be this big idea. You found your startup. You go hunt for venture capital. You hire a team and you disrupt some market. So I was always put off by this risk that comes with that. And like I said, last year I came across a book that changed my perspective on this a bit because it was talking about how you can also bootstrap a small micro SAS. And that's actually a much more sustainable alternative to going out and starting a huge thing with venture capital.

Jannis: And you tell us what the book was?

Chris: The book was Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling.

Jannis: I haven't read that myself, but the story itself feels very familiar to me, yes.

Chris: It's a bit on the older side now. I think it was published in 2010. But yeah, some of the parts are still relevant to just how you bootstrap a software business. And like I said, that was around the time that I also found my way back to Ghost. And so those two things just came together. I wanted to start my own software business. And since I still struggled producing my own content, I considered maybe I can take a more supportive role and create tools for publishers that don't struggle quite as much with producing posts to help them succeed and to provide value. And that kind of led me after some investigation into what are those tools?

What do publishers need? How can the Ghost ecosystem maybe be improved a bit in that regard? That led me to finding out that the native search had some gaps that are sometimes an obstacle for serious publishers with a lot of content.

Jannis: Can you tell us a little bit what those obstacles are? Ghost does ship with the native search engine. That's included for a couple of years already. So every single Ghost block that you have out there, unless it's actively disabled, is able to search your content. But what obstacles are there that you found?

Chris: So the Ghost native search widget or application is called SodoSearch, right? And first of all, the major difference between SodoSearch and a search platform like Vellumine is that SodoSearch performs search in the browser on the client side. So basically, it downloads a bunch of posts, authors and tags from your blog and performs this search client side. That comes with some limitations. For example, it is very expensive to do full text search.

So it's not easy to search the full body of your posts. Instead, SodoSearch really just searches the title of your posts and maybe the excerpt. So you can either set a custom excerpt or it just defaults to the first couple hundred words of your post. But if the words that your readers are searching for do not appear in the title or this excerpt, then Ghost SodoSearch will not find those posts.

Jannis: Maybe to give an example, if. I have a post with the title, the best tomato plants, and in the content, I have a body that starts with in today's gardening journal of the month, we are talking about the new tomato plants, then the Ghost search itself would not find the term gardening, for example. You can find the post by the keyword tomato, but if you're just looking for a broader spectrum and you want to search for all the gardening posts on a blog, then with the native Ghost search, you wouldn't find that, right?

Chris: Yeah, and there are also some other limitations. For example, you cannot search pages in SodoSearch, which is something that Vellumine does, so you can also index pages. And there is also one very fundamental limitation that becomes relevant for larger publishers, which is that Ghost search only lets you search the last 10,000 posts.

Jannis: I mean, it makes sense on the one hand, because all the search is performed in a browser, so especially on, let's say, older and maybe smaller devices that can become quite an issue. But on the other hand, as you pointed out, for bigger publishers, that becomes a problem. I have had publishers reach out in the past that said, well, I've published my content for the last 20 years now, and I realized that there are maybe 15, 16,000 posts that they have published, because there are new sites, something that publishes on a very, very frequent basis. And I cannot find that one post that I know. I have published 15 years ago about a specific event. So how does Vellumine come in there? What do you do differently there? And what do you solve for those publishers?

Chris: Yeah, like I mentioned in the beginning, Vellumine is a managed search platform. So basically, I try to make the setup as easy as possible. You sign up, you enter the name of your site, your Ghost Admin API key, and the URL. And then Vellumine goes and pulls all your posts, pages, tags, and author information into the search index. The search index itself lives server side. So that's fundamentally different from how Ghost Native search works.

But it allows you to build an index that is like the index in the back of a book, where you can look up which word appears on which page, or in this case, which words appear in a given post. So this way, you are able to search much faster and also search through the whole content of your post and not only through title and excerpt.

Jannis: And that then also lifts the limitation of just 10,000 posts, right? That means you can index all of that instead of just having the most recent 10,000.

Chris: Yes, of course. You can technically index as many posts as you want, and the search should still stay fast. So we're talking about, in my experiments, like 50 to 100 milliseconds maybe, and that is while typing, right? So you already get results back while you're still typing your search query.

Jannis: So apart from, let's say, the indexing side of things, indexing more posts, but also pages, and the fact that it all happens on a server, on your server in this case, not on a Ghost server, are there any other benefits of why you say publishers, mostly bigger publishers, should look at different search integrations like Vellumine?

Chris: One big thing is, I would say, definitely the analytics. So you get analytics for what your readers are searching for. This includes popular search terms that your readers look up frequently, but also no-hit searches. So if your readers are looking for keywords and they are not getting back any results, Vellumine also surfaces that and shows it to you on the dashboard. So you can even go and get a feel for what are my readers looking for that they cannot find, and maybe you can even derive some content strategy or content ideas from that.

Jannis: That is super interesting. Some of the listeners might know that Magic Pages also has an advanced search integration that is, in that sense, essentially a tool for Magic Pages customers where it's similar to Vellumine. And when I tested a new feature recently, which was also analytics and showing what people searched, it was super interesting to see that, and it did surface some of the things where people just pasted entire error messages that they received in our customer portal into the search. And.

I remember sitting there and sharing my screen in one of our weekly team meetings and realizing if somebody is searching for a complete error message, that usually indicates that there is a problem with that, that there's something that we're missing, something that we're not solving for that. So it's probably a very interesting tool for bigger customers. Do you maybe have a typical customer where you say, that's somebody that comes to Vellumine to integrate that? I imagine it doesn't make much sense for people that just have a couple of posts, but who is your typical customer that you love working with or that finds extreme value in Vellumine?

Chris: Yes, you mentioned it already, right? Vellumine is really an advanced search tool that you would commonly need once you try to build a business on your publication. And you already have a certain amount of posts. If we are talking about a handful of posts and maybe you're just doing this as a hobby, then you're perfectly fine with Ghost's native soda search. But some of the users that signed up for Vellumine, they have around 200 to 400 posts.

So it's totally possible that in that range you might find yourself needing better search already. One of my users mentioned how they have difficulty finding their own content, right? They know there is a post where they talked about a specific thing, but they cannot find it anymore. And what you said about. The whole error message that someone might paste into the search field. In the best case, this is where Semantic Search would maybe come in if you're lucky.

Jannis: For someone that doesn't know what Semantic Search is, how does it help in that case compared to, I just type... Let's stick with the example from before. If I type tomato, how would Semantic Search help me in that case?

Chris: Yeah, so Semantic Search is something that came up. In the last couple of years because of the rise of LLMs, right? So what it basically does is it takes your content, your posts, and it shoves it through an LLM to turn it into a vector of numbers. And this vector is supposed to encapsulate the meaning of your post. So this is supposed to really distill what this post is about on a more abstract level than basic keyword matching, right?

And then what you do in Semantic Search is you get the ability to find posts. Based on not just keywords, but meaning. So if there are posts that talk about similar things or even the reader's query, you can find those posts without the user having to use the exact words in this post.

Jannis: As soon as you talk about LLMs and AI in that sense, does that mean that the content that I write as a publisher is then sent to a third-party company that would process that, or how does that work?

Chris: In my world view, that should really only happen if you explicitly consent to that. So on that. I mean, your content is not sent to OpenAI or Google to be processed by ChatGPT or Gemini. Instead, we use local models. So because Vellumine is actually based on typesense, like Magic Pages Search, typesense has the ability to use models that run on your own servers. So you do not send your content to third parties. That said, you could totally. Have that possibility if you wanted to, right? This is not currently a feature on Vellumine, but this is something that can be done. For example, if you provide your own API key and you say, but I do want to use ChatGPT or the OpenAI interface to generate my semantic embeddings, that is something that could be done.

Jannis: Cool. Another similarity that we both have is basically that neither of us has started their business, their project from the get-go and we both ended up more or less on the side of another job. So you already mentioned that you basically read a book. You've then decided you want to try building a tool that supports the ghost ecosystem from a fellow, let's say, site business entrepreneur. How is that going for you? How does that work for you? And how do you manage your work between your main job as a developer and running Vellumine?

Chris: In regards to how it's going, it's still early days, but yeah, I was not ready to take the risk of quitting my day job and start a big thing. So this was really after I read that book an epiphany to me. I somehow, it seems straightforward, but I never really considered, oh, you can actually start a small thing, not raise millions in venture capital and then build something sustainable on that bootstrapping model. In regards to how that works next to a full-time job, of course, it's a lot of work. You have to manage your time very well. And when you start your own business, suddenly you're not just a software developer anymore who implements a given piece of software for your employer, but you are responsible for the whole pipeline, right?

You're not only developing software, you are responsible for customer support, for marketing, developing new features, maintaining old features, managing your infrastructure, monitoring, all those things. But yeah, I chose this consciously because I wanted to, first of all, gain this experience and I always wanted to try and get out there, start my own thing and yeah, really put my skills to the test.

Jannis: A sentence that I've always said in that regard, when people told me that, yeah, you should think about doing this full-time, I always told them that actually having a full-time job or. I mean, I've scaled my full-time job down a little bit now because Magic Pages has had quite a bit of success recently, last couple of years. But the one sentence that I always lived by is that my full-time job was always my superpower because it really gives you the ability to not think about rent coming up. It gives you perspective and it gives you maybe not finite runway where you say after 12 months. I need to have that business running because otherwise.

I can't afford to live anymore. But yeah, I really see it as a superpower where having a job on the site while you build your business enables you to do so many things and ultimately also gives you the freedom to actually be closer to your end users, I think, to not have to report to investors and have to fulfill duties in that regard but it really makes sure that you're building something that is close to your users and that also serves your users in that sense. Speaking of users, how is the feedback going? So you've launched Vellumine and June. Before that, you had a beta, right?

Chris: Yeah, I started the beta in February on the Ghost Forum. You don't know what to expect before so. I have this tendency to either be completely like this is not going to work. Nobody's interested in this, right? Or be on the complete opposite end of the spectrum and be super hyped and oh my god, someone posted a response on the forum. This is going to take off now, right? So yeah, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

So it took a couple days for me to be noticed at all on the forum when I announced the beta but then I was surprised by how much people engaged with my post. And then I started the beta. I had a couple signups and that was also really the most valuable, right? The reason why I started the beta to get some first users to get feedback about is this really what you guys need? Because in the end. I want to provide or. I want to build a service that provides value. And if I'm just building a nice little add-on that doesn't actually fulfill your need then I might as well not do it.

So I was lucky. I got some users that were really willing to give me feedback on a couple of things. It's small things like they were saying oh, if I look for this or that word. I was hoping that this post would show up but it doesn't. And then you investigate. Okay, why doesn't the post show up when they search for this word and you find out oh, it's actually because they use hyphenated words. And the way I set up my search index it regards hyphenated words as one word.

So if you search for the second part of the hyphenated word you do not find the post. Small things like that but this is ultimately what makes or breaks it. And yeah, I launched the full product in June, basically on the 1st of June. Had a couple trial signups since then and even one or the other conversion. So overall. I would say it's going well. I just need to figure out how to maybe get in front of more people with this. Hopefully it's not annoying but I need to be on people's toes a bit and find out so what is it that you need, right? Please tell me. Can I make this product better for you?

Jannis: You just mentioned something very interesting which was people coming to you with feedback and expecting certain posts to show up from certain words. Having built a search myself for the last one and a half years that is the number one reason of why I dig deeper into search all the time. And I find it very interesting to see how the expectations differ sometimes and it also showed me that search is such a complex product where you might enter one word. In our case this is for example custom domain. How to connect the custom domain to your magic pages site. And we have one article that is three years old and if you search for custom domain on magic pages you get lots of other posts that are ranked higher because they're more recent and they also talk about custom domains.

How do you handle the balance between. I want to show the most relevant posts but also there's evergreen content might be a little bit older.

Chris: So yeah that's a very tricky thing. I recently added some kind of advanced filtering panel that can filter by authors post or even date range. But of course if you don't know what tags you're searching for or what author you're searching for then this still doesn't help you. What I plan on doing is give users more control over how things are weighted in the search. So you could say some users expect that the title of the post is a lot more important than the body content. This is usually a natural thing but some user might want to have it the other way around. They have some other expectations according to how things are weighted in this ranking.

So ultimately. I want to give users control over that for them to define it themselves. But it's tricky. How do you expose that to the user? How do you give the user this possibility without just letting them enter a bunch of numbers into some fields which still doesn't really give you a feeling what effect it will have on the search results. But yeah regarding that evergreen content there is a feature that. I have in mind which I don't know if we should talk about that already. It's entirely up to you. If you have posts like that and you know they are evergreen and people are constantly looking for them there would be the possibility in the future to basically make them pinned.

So if a user searches for certain keywords like domain you could pin this post to the top and say. I want this to always appear at the top. That's currently not supported but definitely a thing that. I would consider adding. And another way. That you could approach this for example it doesn't quite solve the problem but in Vellumine you can also define common search terms and popular tags which get recommended to the people or to the reader who searches while the search bar is still empty.

So they basically open the search bar and they are already presented with a selection of common search words which you can either define yourself or have them be driven by the actual analytics to guide your readers to the content that you think they should be able to find. Still doesn't quite solve this problem that maybe your post about domains gets buried the older it gets but I think with this pinning or curation feature this is something that could be solved.

Jannis: It's super interesting because that's kind of where we came from from that perspective. So I think it was yesterday or the day before Sviatoslav who works in support for Magic Pages wanted to send someone that post about connecting a custom domain to their site on Magic Pages and we have those common searches set up in our search for example. And obviously one of the main reasons what people want to do with their site is to connect the custom domain.

So that is one of our common search terms and he then clicked on that and I sent me a screenshot and just asked Jannis why is our post about connecting a custom domain the 11th search result and he also suggested the curation and he actually sent me a documentation of typesense that has a feature like this but it is a topic that comes up all the time for me at least in search. How are things ranked and how are publishers expecting things to be ranked and as you said you can always give more and more options to customize that but I think there will always be those little edge cases in there on how certain things might surface that people are not expecting quite the way they do surface.

Chris: Yeah you need to think about how to develop this feature so that users would actually engage with it because what I'm seeing on my platform is that. I have a bunch of features that I launched with now like the dynamic suggestions feature where those common search terms or the popular tags are actually derived from the search analytics so it's based on what your readers are actually searching for and very few people use that.

So somehow either because they didn't find it or because they didn't quite understand what this means and it's the same with synonyms and stop words and barely anyone is using that. First of all it can be a hell of a lot of work to configure all of your synonyms but so this is already a signal like nobody or very few people are using that why is that? Is it because they don't need the feature or is it maybe cumbersome to use it if it's the latter? Is there something I can do to make it easier for them? Yeah very interesting.

Jannis: I do think that especially a platform like yours is built for publishers that have the need for something like this. Listening from the outside. I think that especially synonyms can be so powerful because we all understand different terms differently depending on which direction we're coming from which also kind of leads me to. My next question. Is it before that you need to kind of get on people's toes and get in front of four people? So I'm actually wondering who is your ideal customer? Who do you say would profit the most from Vellumine?

Chris: So we talked about that. Basically both of us built a search integration right? The main difference is that your search integration is built into magic pages and I think the appeal of Vellumine specifically is that it's constructed to be a drop-in replacement of Ghost Native Search and this also means it's not important what platform you're hosting on. You could be hosting on GhostPro or self-hosting your blog or host it on whatever, DigitalOcean.

Jannis: You could even host on magic pages. If you love synonyms that we don't have you could very well use Vellumine.

Chris: If you want the slick dashboard with the analytics. Then you can use Vellumine by being on magic pages. So yeah but mainly for people that are on other platforms that I know you also open source your solution so technically people can set this up themselves but that would mean they need to spin up their own server where they run this type sense search engine and. That also means maintaining it themselves and that's typically not something that non-technical people like to do.

So if you are someone who wants to focus on their content publisher that really wants to just focus on their content and you want better search. For your readers and to get analytics to know what your readers are searching for you don't want to deal with infrastructure and setting this whole search infrastructure up yourself. Then yeah Vellumine is the tool for you.

Jannis: I just want to underline that there are different hosting providers there are different team providers and there are also different search providers now. It's a super interesting field and before we started the recording here we talked for quite some time about the different solutions and different issues that we also see and while the ghost type sense search that magic pages publishes is open source. I do think personally that Vellumine is a way better fit for most people that are on other managed hosting platforms because as you said somebody that posts their site on let's say Synapse Media, Ghost Pro, Midnight any of the other managed hosting platforms they do that for a reason they do that because they want to have their ghost blog and they want to write on that but they don't want to take care of all the technical stuff that's going on maintaining a server updating a server which as we saw recently with Ghost having security vulnerabilities as well is becoming more and more important and while I love our own search it is super cumbersome to set up you need to have a type sense server you can also host it with them but then you know that's an additional expense that you have there you need to have a webhook connection and so on so for people that do want to have a really really great search independent of where they're hosting it.

I do think that products like Vellumine are amazing and you know I've played around with the thought of offering a hosted search somewhere but then I always came back and I said no we're doing one thing we're doing one thing really great and I really love seeing that the other people that do other things really really great and that we have those specialized tools in our ecosystem same as we have you know theme developers that are really great at developing amazing themes.

Chris: yeah that's a good thing actually it's also my philosophy when you're developing a product right you should focus on your core and really make your product. Be excellent at this one thing. So yeah you already mentioned the headaches of setting up your own server of course you can also technically host it with typesense cloud offering although that gets kind of expensive quite fast so my highest priority was always to not break my user's search right ultimately your readers should get the best search experience they can have. I really took care to have enough redundancy and fail saves so that really your welcoming search experience should not break.

Jannis: and you know what I just realized that stuff like this is. Obviously good engineering practice or best practice in the sense that you have that redundancy and that starts with in your case search it starts with the fact that magic pages services be it the database services or our compute is all redundant and that's where again I'm very biased in that but that's where managed services like magic pages and velamine have a big advantage obviously split all of those costs you split that cost among all the different customers and if I were a single customer setting up a typesense server or a database server in that sense. I would do one server because if I just run one block setting up three of those or whatever number it is it just doesn't pay off but.

That also means on the other hand. I don't have that redundancy. So if I need to do maintenance on my self-hosted block and I need to upgrade my database or I need to upgrade my search server then that block is offline for ideally a couple of minutes sometimes if something gets screwed up then for a little bit longer so I love that philosophy of always building redundancy from the beginning so totally get where you come from that was also a big learning for me that it lets you sleep a lot quieter when you know okay even if that stuff breaks at 2am you know you can keep sleeping and deal with it in the morning because there are other servers it's obviously not great if that happens but it's better that one out of three servers breaks instead of one out of one.

Chris: yes.

Jannis: and been there than that in the very beginning it's not fun. Yeah. I want to look a little bit beyond search maybe and talk to you about the Ghost ecosystem as a whole because both of our businesses exist because we have found gaps Vellumine exists because you saw that the built-in search had gaps in how it served bigger publishers and how it served publishers that wanted to find specific content on the searches Magic Pages exists because hosting Ghost was either expensive or very technical in setting it up so is there any field where you say there is a gap where third parties can still fill that gap in that sense something where you say okay there is a need that you see with publishers in the Ghost ecosystem that can be filled or do you think that we kind of have everything covered now?

Chris: We certainly don't have everything covered things can always be better but this kind of goes back to what I said earlier about do one thing well right. I have ideas of where I could take Vellumine and expand and put more and more features in it but then you have to decide is that still one product or is that a different product? So from the top of my head. I actually can't name a gap that would be a good niche to fill right now because. I would probably try to do that.

Jannis: Fair, very fair.

Chris: although also always need to consider your own, how do you say.

Jannis: resources?

Chris: Your own resources and not risk burnout so maybe it's not that good of an idea to have a full-time job and two bootstrap startups so let's start with one.

Jannis: I haven't tried it myself to run two businesses on the site but I think one is fairly enough.

Chris: What are you thinking in terms of a gap in the Ghost ecosystem?

Jannis: Yeah. I mean I come from my own experiences and. I do see there is an image editor that is very proprietary where I don't think that there is like a business opportunity there but there's obviously something where the community can come together and provide the solution so hint hint that is also something that magic pages will do in the next couple of weeks an open source image editor for this but what I find super interesting is how whenever I think we've done it now we've created an amazing ecosystem there's usually someone on Reddit that jumps in out of nowhere and presents a new solution that you just haven't thought about there is you know Vellumine as a search engine there are e-commerce solutions for Ghost now that tap into the existing Stripe connection so that you don't have to spin anything else up but you just have you know like kind of like a sidecar to Ghost and you create this e-commerce online shop for that there are now solutions out there that add more subscription options other than Stripe to Ghost.

So yeah I do think that this is a very interesting market and obviously it always has the risk involved of well what if somebody pulls that into Ghost itself so honestly same as for you. I don't have anything and mind from top of my head but I love the creativity of our community of always thinking. In a very creative way of making Ghost better and figuring out solutions that you know. When you look at it seems so obvious but nobody has ever within the effort of actually doing it.

Chris: yeah definitely and you as a hosting provider you have a longer lever even than me because you can integrate more sidecars as you mentioned in your hosting offering right. I was thinking about possibilities of integrating the analytics that I mentioned before like the popular search terms. I have nice graphs for that that show you how those search terms were searched for over time and the no hit queries how I could integrate those maybe into the Ghost admin panel because that would be the most seamless solution for publishers right ideally. I want to have everything in one place now we have the Ghost Native analytics that show you which posts perform well and how your audience interacts with that wouldn't it be great to also have the search analytics right next to that turns out to be a bit tricky because from the outside.

I have very limited ways of modifying your Ghost admin panel basically I don't have any you as a hosting provider you have ways of injecting stuff into the admin panel like you also did with your existing what do you call it customer portal but me from the outside with Palomine. I have no way of modifying that admin panel.

Jannis: you know it's very interesting because we are trying to actually go away from that because we we noticed that it's kind of like this full circle moment three years ago in the beginning of magic pages. I had an external customer portal but then at some point. I figured out that it's actually quite easy to pull that inside Ghost so I thought this is great people don't need the external customer portal anymore they can have everything together and now we realized like half a year ago that there's actually so many things that we want to show people about the Ghost site that can be advanced analytics can be you know they're billing that can be something very simple as multi-site management that you simply cannot do in an integrated panel like this.

So yeah we are going away from that we will probably still have like an integrated panel that shows the basic information but all the main information will be somewhere outside. I think that yeah we have all of the opportunities to do those things and what I always believe in is that we shouldn't overuse that you know site cards for example are perfectly fine but people still sign up for a managed hosting provider to get the experience of Ghost and if you modify that too much then you might confuse people but you might also just dilute their experience with Ghost and tailor it in a way that they don't expect too much especially when they come from somewhere else maybe.

Chris: yeah. I mean the thing that you mentioned with multi-site management where this external customer portal really becomes relevant it's the same in Bellamine basically because you can also create multiple collections so one collection is the same as one Ghost site and the external dashboard just lets me create the experience for you to be able to manage all of those collections in one place at the same time I'm still aware that you want to focus on your content and your audience so that's why I built this convenience of having your search analytics sent to your inbox as an email once per week.

So that you don't have to necessarily log into your dashboard to see the gist of what people looked for if you want to see of course graphs over time and compare what did people look for this Christmas and what did they look for last Christmas to maybe do some trend analysis then of course you don't really get around a dashboard like that.

Jannis: yeah but I think that's that's a very interesting approach because you obviously have two different needs on the one hand. I want to dig into the data as you just said what happened last Christmas what happens this Christmas where do I maybe have a gap but then also realistically publishers on Ghost or on any platform their site is probably a tool for them and it's not their main business for most of them they have their head somewhere else sometimes so surfacing that as an email is very very smart because it's also the stuff that I look at sometimes so. I have an SEO tool that I never log in that I maybe log in like every like once every year or so but every week on Monday.

I get an email from them that says hey like here's your search rankings and here are the keywords and here's how they moved a marketer would now tell me that I should act on that and I should log in and then fill the gaps and everything for me it's just super interesting to actually see how volatile that is so I love the idea of sending emails for stuff like that.

Chris: and it's still opt-in right you have to explicitly tell you have to explicitly say. I want to receive this email.

Jannis: which is the nicer way than my SEO tool which just does it. And I don't think I can opt out because it's an American tool. So yeah.

Chris: yeah well that's also a point we didn't talk about yet right like we are located in Europe so all of my servers are also in Europe or in Germany more specifically so all of those things that you might be used to from some American tools where they send you emails without you asking for it that's not something that we are even allowed to do we need your consent for that.

Jannis: yeah. I have one more question if you had the chance to sit down with John the founder of Ghost and you requested one thing from him in the Ghost ecosystem is there anything on your mind where you say Ghost should tackle that.

Chris: so I cannot tell from first hand experience but someone told me that John gave a statement sometime last year when there was this whole WordPress thing going on that he said he wanted to invest in the ecosystem more right.

Jannis: he said that in a talk he had at a conference that's on YouTube I'm going to link that.

Chris: in the show notes that is where it would start right to get the support from the official Ghost Foundation that at least they give you some visibility if you are a serious business building on Ghost. You are providing a valuable tool and then they could start by giving you a shout out right to further the ecosystem to develop the ecosystem and just be like hey people look there is this cool new tool if you have this demand maybe this fills your need of course I'm daydreaming about you know in the Ghost documentation there is a page where it says if you need more advanced search try Algolia. So if I get to the point where it says if you need more advanced search give Vellumina a try then I did it.

Jannis: well I see two points here you know Ghost does have a huge database of integration which are mostly right now say peer connections that they surface so I do think that there is a very good point of also showing dedicated Ghost integrations there that are purpose-built for Ghost and the other point about the documentation it might just be worth trying it because the documentation is open source now and anybody can submit PRs to a repository yeah but you know not from a. I want to have my tool promoted but from a community perspective of showing that sometimes there are more tools than what is in the official documentation. I always see that in the hosting field as well there is not just magic pages many of them and when I talk about hosting on our own blog.

I usually try to show you know the diversity we have in there so it would be really nice to maybe try that and maybe. I want to do that today in the evening as a little evening project to try to see how far a PR can go for the search documentation whether we can get Valium in and some other search tools in there as well.

Chris: I already feel very honored for you wanting to try.

Jannis: the one thing I learned is you just have to try and you just have to see how far it goes.

Chris: you mentioned this Ghost integration directory right they have a page where they list all of the officially. Endorsed integrations. I think at the bottom it says they are not open to submission they basically populate this page based on customer demand. So if there are enough customers on Ghost Pro let's say hey. I want to use this integration or can you give me a guide to how to set this up then they add this there right.

So yeah I need to gain some visibility and get a bit established first I think before that happens and the other thing of course we didn't talk about that yet but one limitation currently is that you need access to your admin API to synchronize your content with Valium in some hosting providers. In their basic starter tier you don't get access to your admin API this is also the case on Ghost Pro so in that case you currently wouldn't be able to use Valium in and maybe back to that point when I reach that point of getting Valium in not on the custom integration tab in the admin panel but on the first party integrations then I did it at least that's what I feel like now.

Jannis: then we're gonna have a party yeah. But yeah I you know. I do think that the official integrations page is maybe a different wheelhouse than to documentation and I do think that adding options to documentation is worth it because Algolia is not the only search that's out there there are you know other proprietary tools there are other tools like yours based on open source technology there are complete open source packages which also means. People need to stand up their own servers and everything and manage that if a documentation should show us the options and show us. In that sense if you need advanced search or if you need more advanced search options.

That also means there should be variety of tools so let's see how far that can go we'll see in two weeks on the other hand. That also means if the integrations are based on actual customer demand if you want to see Vellumine in the integration tab then sign up for it give that a try and message Chris with all your feedback that you find.

Chris: yes I'm always hungry for feedback yeah this is what drives the development of the tool really because. I have a vague idea but ultimately I cannot know what you need to solve your problem right.

Jannis: and that's always the fun part figuring that out step by step and finding those really really niche use cases that actually make so much sense that you haven't thought about yourself and I love that about building a product and engaging with people on a daily basis. So yeah any feedback always send it to tools that you use. I bet that there are just very few out there that will not act on that or that will you know just jot it in a drawer somewhere and never look at that again so Chris is there anything that I should have asked that I didn't ask is there anything I missed anything that you want to tell people.

Chris: I think we talked about pretty much everything at this point the only thing left for me to say is really what we already iterated on in the podcast if you feel like in the current Ghost Native search does not serve your needs you cannot find the content you're looking for or maybe you even get requests from your readers saying hey don't you have an article on this because I couldn't find it right or maybe you have more than 10 000 posts then give Vellumine a try and tell me what you think.

Jannis: Chris thank you so much for taking the time for sharing about your tool and your journey how you've come to Ghost and Vellumine and yeah thank you to all the listeners for listening and have a lovely rest of your day wherever in the world you are.

Chris: thank you very much for having me. I feel very honored to be on this podcast already after really just launching in the beginning of June. So yeah thank you to all the listeners.

Jannis: it was my absolute pleasure and yeah you know. I do see that as this collaborative spirit that we have in the Ghost community you have just launched a product. It deserves to be heard by more people. That also means if you're listening right now and you're building something for Ghost and you want to share it with the world with the Ghost community then reach out. I am doing this every two weeks now sitting together with people hosting, publishing and building on Ghost.

So if you know someone if you are building something yourself like Chris then just reach out and we'll schedule something to record the podcast together. So yeah as I said thank you for coming on the podcast Chris have a lovely rest of your day and goodbye.

Chris: thank you too bye bye.

Christine Trac was Magic Pages' very first customer, back in 2023. And now, for the podcast's first in-person recording, she joins Jannis in Bad Ischl. They retrace how they met on Twitter, the trial-and-error of moving her first site from Wix to Ghost, her path from a master's in kinesiology to the creator economy, and her recent move from Canada to Austria.

The second half digs into the technical side: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, why a sending domain is different from the email address your readers see (more on that in Understanding email sending domains at Magic Pages), and the tools Magic Pages has built to take the DNS-record headache off of publishers.

Jannis: Hi and welcome to the Magic Pages podcast, a new podcast where we sit down with the people building, hosting, and publishing on Ghost. My name is Jannis, I am the founder of Magic Pages, and I am here today with, well, our very first customer that goes all the way back to 2023 with Christine. Hello.

Christine: Yeah, so I'm a freelancer who also works for a agency that helps with email deliverability. And I basically help a wide variety of companies from creators to e-commerce with making sure that their emails are out of spam and making sure that we provide good practices so that subscribers feel safe and we ensure that they're not scammy.

Jannis: I mean in today's world, [that's] something that the world can definitely need. I want to take the listeners and the two of us a little bit back, actually further back than before Magic Pages existed to the year of 2022. When we met, can you tell your side of the story? Do you remember how we met, how that happened?

Christine: Yeah, so back in 2022, we had both taken a course. And in that course, we all had different projects. And we both focused on projects providing value on Twitter. Like some colleagues would focus on "I need to sell products", but both of our projects were free. And we just wanted to provide value, which I think really helped us bond. And you introduced me to your wife, Mariia. And then when we jumped on the call, I laughed so much that I thought I needed to go to the hospital.

Jannis: Yeah, I remember that. And in the beginning, we didn't know whether you were serious or not. It's the best way to get to know each other. But yeah, so we met on Twitter. Twitter doesn't exist anymore. It's now called X. We're both not on Twitter slash X anymore. Yet, that was the place where Magic Pages was essentially born. It wasn't as part of the course you mentioned, I've done a couple of other projects from there.

Specifically, I've designed templates for a service called Carrd. And then at some point, I started talking about this new thing, which didn't really have a name back then. But it turned out to be Magic Pages. I started talking about the fact that it will be based on Ghost, that it will evolve around Ghost. And you immediately showed interest, because you've already worked with Ghost before. What made you say, yes, I want to try this? What did you think about the project back then?

Christine: There were a couple of reasons why I was interested. One being I was also... I purchased one of your card templates. And I was thinking, wow, like there was just so much quality in those templates. I remember your templates were definitely different. And they were more aligned with what I was doing, which was being a service provider, and trying to get people to book a call or email me. So I remember just being amazed. And anytime I needed any tweaks, you were so willing to help me. And so I remember us chatting. And when you were building this platform, a lot of things actually stood out for that. Like my previous experience with other platforms was... if you're a small creator, you don't have that many subscribers, you're kind of limited because sometimes that plan doesn't give you the option to add a custom theme.

And that was something that I wanted to include. And then if I wanted to, I would have to pay more. And then I tried many different Ghost providers. And not being very technical back then, it became a bit of a challenge because some people were telling me, oh, you need to learn how to code and all these different things. And I remember when you had helped me previously with projects like on Carrd or Ghost, you were able to do it without making me feel like a tech dino. You actually guided me and were just so willing.

So when you were telling me that you were creating it, I already knew that it was going to stand out. One being because the quality of your work is very thorough. And you always make sure that there are no errors and also that people can come to you, like I could come to you for any support. So those were some of the things that stood out.

Jannis: Well, thank you. I'm wondering, can you quickly walk us through what other platforms you have used before? Was it WordPress? Was it something else that you've tried before for your website?

Christine: Before getting into marketing, I was also a fitness coach who was also a creator, and I tried many different platforms like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix. And the very first site I created back in 2018 was just very complicated for someone who started out with like zero dollars. It was like, oh, you need an SSL, you need a domain. Oh, actually you need another inbox. And by the time like I finally had my website published, it took six months and a thousand dollars on all these different things that I learned you don't actually need. So if I had learned about Ghost back then with magic pages, it would have been so much better.

Jannis: Specifically about Ghost itself. It's been quite some time, but do you remember how you learned about Ghost and what made you want to try that even before Magic Pages? Do you remember how that happened? How you found out about Ghost?

Christine: Yeah, so it was from a friend. He already had his Ghost site running and he had sent emails and I just remember, wow, it's so clean and polished. And he like said that he didn't need to like do all these crazy setups like WordPress. It was already nicely set up. And I remember him telling me the design part. He didn't have to do things like other platforms where you have to adjust every single block for every single color design and all that. It was very simple. And so when he told me, I was like, oh wow.

And then I tried a plan on Ghost and I was like, wow, I really like this. It's very simple. You can get it up and running and it looks very clean and easy to read.

Jannis: I also remember a very distinct moment, which was the weeks leading up to me actually, let's say pre-launching Magic Pages about telling the world what it is and giving people a way to sign up. And I remember that every couple of days you would text me and he would say, please take my money. Where can I put my credit card? Can I pay already? And honestly, for me back then, that was the nicest thing somebody could have ever done, not because of the actual money that you paid them, but it showed to me an incredible support that somebody believed in the thing that I did back when I think I didn't even believe in it myself.

So for me, that was extremely helpful. But the question that always stood out to me was essentially, why did you trust somebody so blindly? You bought the very first lifetime plan magic pages ever sold. There was no product. There was nothing that you could actually look at and you were willing to put 249 US dollars down back then. Why was that?

Christine: One being like, we definitely built a really strong friendship at that point. And I knew that I could trust you. If something were to happen to the site, I knew that the value was there. And I think even if we weren't friends or if I was to be really objective here, I think that was a couple years membership on another ghost platform. I was like, oh, if I even have this website running for a couple years, it's already worth it. And I already knew that the support would definitely be pretty high quality. And yeah, when you did it, when you started it, I was like, okay, well, I know Jannis and I know he's going to do good work. I've had other friends that said they were going to do it.

And I was like, okay, I'm just going to keep bugging him until he actually ships it because this could be something. And it's a crazy full circle moment to see where it is now.

Jannis: Yeah, I will be forever grateful for pushing me like that, for pushing the development further as well, because you were also one of the first that actually then set up the ghost website. Because I'm not sure if you remember, but there was like a gap of, I think three months or so between when I opened the presale and actually people actually being able to use their first Magic Pages site. And you were also one of the first people that then tried that and set up their site and told me like, "there's a bug here. I cannot press on this button and this doesn't work and this doesn't work".

Christine: And then I deleted my site.

Jannis: I don't think you ever deleted your site, but there were definitely challenges to getting that set up. And that constant feedback, even now, like whenever you use your current ghost site, you actually reach out and you give feedback. And that has been incredibly helpful. A couple of months after that first site launch, you actually came back and you asked if you could buy another lifetime plan for a second project of yours. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Christine: So the second blog that I created on Magic Pages is called Your Kines Mentor. Something that I value a lot in my life and my career is having mentors and people that are a couple of steps ahead of you. I have a master's in kinesiology, and when I did my master's, I had so many people that were so willing to help me — a lot of alumni older than me. They were very generous, they never asked for anything in return. And I remember asking one of them, like, how can I repay you? And he was like, you don't repay me, you help the next generation. At that time I had already left the kinesiology field to go into email marketing.

So I thought, okay, what can I do that can be timeless, that can provide value not just in Canada but maybe internationally? I talked to my colleagues in my master's program, and a few of them agreed to join forces and to share their knowledge and connections through a blog. We thought a blog would be great because it's a place where people can Google it and read it. We tailored the posts to read like a letter — a letter to our younger self. Some of my colleagues during my master's didn't have mentors and wished they had one, so the goal of the blog is to feel like one — the reader feels like, oh, I have a mentor. We don't ask for any money, you can jump on a call with us, you can email us.

Some people still reach out to this day. We haven't really created any new posts in the past couple of years, but sometimes people still reach out. It's pretty rewarding. Originally we had it on Wix, which was an interesting process. It was only one colour, and when you set up a website on Wix, each box auto-defaults to purple. I remember spending so many hours switching the default purple to our brand colour, which took forever. I reached out to Jannis to ask if we could do another plan, and within less than 30 minutes I was able to migrate all the previous blogs and the design — everything — into Magic Pages. Super easy.

Jannis: To be fair, that's Ghost's job. They're doing a really great job at making this start as easy as possible, I think. The one thing I remember from that is that Wix doesn't have any proper export functionality, which was one of the big disadvantages from migrating from Wix to any Ghost site. From WordPress, for example, you have automated migration tools — you just point Ghost at your WordPress site and in the background your Ghost site pulls in all the content. For Wix, that doesn't exist.

So I remember we had long evenings where you copied everything over and you asked, oh, is that correct? In the end I think the site looks a lot better now, just because it's a lot more structured. But hey, I'm glad we ended up where we are now and we can laugh about it. Can you also tell us a little bit about your personal blog? Because that has changed over the years. I remember in the beginning you used it in a similar way to how you used Carrd, where you told people about email marketing and the services you can provide. Then you actually hid it for, I think, years now behind a private flag. And now you are starting to use it again. What's the thinking behind that?

Christine: When I started, the website was tied to when we were building personal brands on Twitter / X. During that time I was heavily focused on talking about email marketing. But my newsletter was almost like a personal journal entry, just talking about career, growing up, being in my 20s, living in Canada. And it was great. But social media has pros and cons, and towards the end — maybe similar to you — it just wasn't the same place anymore. Everyone was trying to sell you something. I didn't really sell on my newsletter. I shared the silliest things, and sometimes a potential client would reach out because of a silly email about my dog and world domination or something.

And I kind of wanted to just end that chapter because it didn't feel the same anymore. The people who were joining were also doing the reverse thing — they were like, hey, let's jump on a call, and then they tried to sell me something. I didn't really like that anymore. So I kind of took a step back. Mentally I wasn't in the right spot, so I decided to become a ghost. I deleted my Twitter account and I just hid myself, because some people were kind of using my credibility — I didn't really want people to associate my credibility with them winning.

So for me, I just took a break. And then recently, it's kind of a funny full-circle moment, because back in 2023 we joked about maybe meeting one day, and you guys had moved to Austria. I was like, oh, I have family in Austria. We kept talking, and then I decided, okay, I want to go visit Europe. You guys showed me around Europe last year and I was like, wow, I really love Europe. And then in September I visited you again and I was like, wow, I think I could really live here.

Jannis: Just to interject there — you did not just visit us. You visited people you had met on the internet, flew all across the Atlantic to meet us, and then [did] a six-and-a-half-thousand-kilometre road trip through Europe with us. That is generally something I would not advise. But I'm glad it turned out the way it did. And yeah, then you came back in September for a second time, which again started as a joke, because we said, oh, Christine, come on, we're busy in October, but you could still come over in September. And then in September you were here. And I remember you saying, yeah, I could live here.

Christine: Yeah, for context: I never really left North America. A couple of years ago I'd never really travelled or made any big plans. So moving here to Austria was definitely a big leap. I'm turning 30 this year, and I wanted to make sure that I kept the promise to my younger self that I would do something adventurous. Thinking about my younger self and writing to my younger self — I was like, I definitely should be documenting this. The way I'm able to actually live in Austria is that in Canada we have a working-holiday visa that allows people roughly under 30 to travel and live in countries for a year. When I started sharing about that online with friends and colleagues, they were like, oh, I never even knew about that, I wish I knew about that.

So it made me realise that I should probably document it. But there was an obstacle to using my Ghost site, because of DNS record issues. I was on a — how do we call it — a provider that was hosting my domain.

Jannis: The domain registrar. Yes. Do you mind if we spill the beans on who it was? In the end it turned out to be Squarespace. But I think you actually registered your domain with Google Domains in the very beginning, right? And then Google didn't want to host domains anymore, for whatever reason, and they sold it to Squarespace — who weren't a domain registrar at all. They were a content management system. And all of a sudden they inherited a ton of domains from Google Domains.

Christine: Yeah. So even getting that news from Squarespace randomly reaching out to me after so many years was confusing — I was like, why is Squarespace emailing me? And then Google [was] updating: we've basically given your domain — or transferred it — to Squarespace. There were some DNS record issues. If I wanted to change anything, it would forward to an inbox that I no longer had — an email inbox, yeah, from my domain. Which doesn't seem like too much of an issue, but when you're trying to change a DNS record in Squarespace, it will ask for an authentication code that they sent to that email inbox.

So no matter what I tried to change — and when I talked to customer support, I talked to them multiple times across a week — no one was really giving me an answer. They were like, oh, we're sorry, you need to talk to my manager. And then the manager would be like, oh, please fill out this ticket. And then the next manager was like, please fill out this ticket. It became a hamster wheel of tickets that went nowhere. And then I was like, okay, you know what, I'm going to go to Jannis. And I just went across the apartment and was like, I need your help.

Jannis: Yes — because you're now our neighbour, so that works as well. You live here for a year now, so we can have some live support sessions. Basically what we did was hack the system a little bit — not literally, but: they wanted you to have an email inbox where they had the DNS records set, but you couldn't change that. I think it was pointing to Gmail still, but you didn't have that Gmail account anymore. So you also couldn't sign up for Gmail another time, because you wouldn't receive the confirmation code they wanted. And you couldn't change it on Squarespace, because Squarespace sends a confirmation code to the actual email that we wanted to change — where we wanted to change the MX records.

In short, what we did was add a second second-factor, after nearly an hour of trying to figure it out. We figured, oh, we can just add a second second-factor — basically just an authenticator app — which then let us change the DNS records. We then moved your domain to Cloudflare, with lots of other hoops to jump through. But finally you were able to connect things again, and then also log in to your Ghost site, because Ghost now also sends a second factor to the email you've registered with. So, long story short, we have rescued you from hell. You can now use Ghost again. And all of that because of a transfer where Google said, we don't want to host domains anymore. But now you have your Ghost site back. What are you going to do with that?

Christine: Yeah, so now — well, right now it's just kind of a funny post, but it's going to be more about documenting the year. Sharing more — definitely. I've had friends ask, what's the difference between living in Canada and living in Austria?

Jannis: What is the biggest difference? I remember the first time we went to a grocery store and you were very surprised about one particular thing.

Christine: Yeah, so in Canada — or maybe I'm unaware — most toilet paper you buy is single-ply or double-ply. I usually buy double-ply, and triple-ply is like the premium stuff. And then I learned here that triple-ply is not enough — three-times-four-to-five-ply is the good stuff. I picked up a triple-ply recycled one and thought, this seems decent. And then I learned it's actually for…

Jannis: …this is the kind of toilet paper that your employer buys when they don't like you.

Christine: Yeah, so that was very fascinating. It's amazing how different things are. And also, because of my fitness background, I'm just very intrigued with ingredients. The EU is very strict with ingredients — there are fewer processed or random things, like food colouring being a separate ingredient here.

Jannis: Yeah. I mean, on the other hand, we have lots of what we call E numbers — where the colour red as an ingredient turns into an E number. But yeah, I also remember us cooking one day and you looking at the pasta and being very confused how the only two ingredients were water and flour. You also said in the beginning, you're in email marketing. I think at some point you used the term email deliverability manager. Is that still correct?

So you basically make sure that businesses end up in the actual inbox, right? What does that usually look like? What's the most common thing that people mess up?

Christine: So I think there are two routes to this. There are certain things that I can help with, and then there are certain things — like the platform, for example Magic Pages — that I would communicate with my client about, or with the platform. There are kind of two streams. If you're a solopreneur or creator, you don't need to go as far as these eight-figure businesses that I'm working with. But for both, there are things to take into account when it comes to getting out of spam and making sure that the inbox is right. So maybe we can focus more on the creator side, with Magic Pages.

Jannis: That would be helpful. What is the most common issue that you see smaller senders basically do? Let's say they set up a new email sending domain — what is the most common issue you see with that?

Christine: Actually, this reminds me of when I had to put in my new DNS records into Magic Pages: making sure that the right DNS records are properly authenticated. I know we're kind of getting technical here, but there are things you need to put in to make sure that your emails are properly sending. Otherwise service providers like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft will automatically put your emails in spam, or it won't even send because your records aren't in.

Jannis: I think we can actually be technical, because most people are running their own website — and worst case I will also link one of our blog posts in the show notes. (There's still a sentence I need to get used to: the links are in the show notes, where we explain it a little bit more.) Essentially — and you correct me if I'm wrong — we have three technical areas to look at. The first one is SPF, which basically says: these are the sources that are allowed to send for me. Then we have DKIM, which is more like a signing algorithm that says: yes, this email actually comes from the right source. Is that correct?

And then we have DMARC, which is basically saying: if something is fishy about this, then deal with it in this certain way. Is that correct?

Christine: Yeah, I think that was way better than what I would say. Those are the three things that we definitely look for. And the common error that happens is that people will have multiple SPF records — especially if they're adding in a new platform, like maybe they were sending from one platform and now they're sending from Magic Pages. So there are multiple SPF records for their domain. For example, my domain — christinetrac.net — I'm only allowed one SPF record, so it should only be one row.

But often when people are sending from a new platform, the new platform will be like, oh, add an SPF record — and you add another one, and then all of a sudden, potentially, all of your emails are going to spam. And that's when clients come to me. What I like about Magic Pages is that when I was setting up my DNS records, it actually alerts you as to where your DNS records are — like GoDaddy, Squarespace, all that. And it also tells you if you need to update your current SPF record or if you need to add a new one, which saves a lot of time. Otherwise clients come to me and they're like, wow, everything's failing, I don't know where to start.

That's the number-one error — and I've worked with eight-figure businesses for whom that was the reason they were having spam problems.

Jannis: Interesting. So, the background of why I've built it this way: as I said before, DNS records are literally the number-one reason for support requests we've had. There are two sides to that — two places where, on Magic Pages, you can or you will have to deal with DNS records. The first is your custom domain itself, so that your blog is reachable at — in your case — christinetrac.net. The second is the sending part, where you send email newsletters. Technically you can send through our sending domain, which is mymagic.page. It will work, it is monitored, we are sending a couple of hundred thousand emails through that domain every single month — but it has the disadvantage that your emails will be branded with that sending domain, and some people don't want that.

So this is where they set up a custom sending domain. And this is the second part where you have to deal with DNS records: you need to add SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and some other stuff that we show you. I realised that there were a lot of support requests coming in specifically for the DNS setup, and it was always the same. I couldn't blame people, because honestly, for you and me — we touch DNS records all the time. We know what they do, what an MX record is, what a CNAME does.

But for most people who just want to have their own personal corner on the internet, they might touch DNS records once. Maybe they touch them once every two to three years, when they move platforms. For them, DNS records are this really black hole, where you tell them, well, go to your domain registrar — that's already the first term they have never heard about. Set your DNS records — the second one — to a CNAME — the third one — with the host of this and the value of that. From a service provider's perspective, that's completely right to explain it that way.

But from a customer's perspective, they just tell you: what the hell? What am I supposed to do with that? And then earlier this year we built a widget of sorts that essentially looks up which domain registrar a domain is on. That can be Squarespace. That can be — in your case now — Cloudflare. It can be GoDaddy, Namecheap, whatever it is. We have, I think, 60 to 70 different domain registrars in there, where we just looked at the data: what are people actually using on Magic Pages? Then we created step-by-step guides for those registrars specifically. Because honestly, we didn't know most of them. 60 to 70 domain registrars — that's just so many that you don't know all of them.

I can tell you how to set DNS records on Cloudflare. I can tell you how to do that on GoDaddy, Namecheap, maybe Squarespace now that I looked at it with you. But I had no idea how to do that on a small niche provider like NameSilo, for example — never heard of that before I looked into it. And there are people who host their domain on it. So what we did was point an LLM at this list and say: please look at the documentation those domain providers have out there, and figure out what the steps are. We still manually went through it and double-checked. We also signed up for accounts with some of them to confirm whether the steps were actually correct.

Now we have a widget that is a little bit of magic, I think. You say, I want to connect this domain — or this custom sending domain. It automatically knows from our configuration which DNS records we need. It then looks up which domain registrar you're on. And then it tells you not just the list of records that you need to put in, but it tells you the exact terms — what the columns are that you need to put what part in, and how you get to those columns. All you need to do is click one button and wait for it to verify. All of that basically came out of the need that it was one of the biggest support requests we had. I wanted to take some of that support burden off us — that's the honest answer from our side.

It was a lot of support requests, and we cut them down by a lot. Just to give perspective: in December, before I hired Sviatoslav, who now does support, I think we got 20 to 30 support requests per day. I was doing all of those alone. Then Sviatoslav started in February, and in mid-February we added the widget. And now we have days where we don't get a single request — which is scary. It is so scary that at some point I sent test requests to our email and to our chatbot to double-check whether that actually works. That was the impact of making DNS records — and sending domains — understandable for people.

Christine: That is honestly a game changer. I wish more software did that.

Jannis: I think one of the next steps that I want to do is to actually open-source that solution. There is a very gated solution that can do that for you that costs 250 US dollars per month starting price — but the underlying technology is openly available. Anybody with a little bit of programming knowledge can look up where a domain is hosted. We've now tested it for, I think, four months, and one of the next things during the summer is to just open-source that solution and give it to other software companies and service providers out there. It has saved us, personally at Magic Pages, a lot of time answering messages.

But on the flip side, what I'd rather look at is that our customers were just unable to do that themselves. Having spoken to some of them, that is a very empowering feeling — if you don't previously know how to do that. But we came at it from a completely different angle.

Jannis: I just stole your show.

Christine: No, no, that was great. I think that's very insightful. Like, I remember doing it for the first time and being very proud — I was like, wow. So I'm looking forward to hearing more about those updates.

Jannis: Yeah, I think you did that yourself one evening. And then the next day you came over to our apartment because, you know, we just have drinks, tea, whatever, together. And you basically said, oh yeah, I just connected my custom sending domain. That was the moment where I also felt like, yeah, I'm honestly glad that this worked so smoothly. Christine said before: you should only have one SPF record. And then she plugged into our tool. And our tool does exactly that, because it also knows those rules. It knows you should only have one SPF record, so it checks specifically whether you already have one. If you do, it shows you the adapted version of it — because you can add multiple sources to one SPF record, but you cannot have multiple SPF records.

That is the entire magic. Apart from having only a single SPF record, is there anything else you would want a newsletter sender — sending maybe a couple of hundred emails per month, maybe a couple of thousand to their subscribers — to keep in mind? Anything where you say, that is maybe overrated advice in the email deliverability space, or that is underrated and you wish more people knew about it?

Christine: I really liked that question, because back when I was on Twitter, I remember sending all these tips — but I think it may have done more harm than good, because people got overwhelmed to the point where they couldn't really be creative. They were like, oh, I'm worried I'm going to have too many links or too many images. At the end of the day, what's even worse is if you don't send that email at all — if you only send one email every six years or something, it's going to be hard to really improve your deliverability long-term. You'll probably see online that people will say, oh, limit your links and images. For creators specifically, I would say: be more consistent.

If you notice your open rates do drop below 20% — especially as Magic Pages users — reach out to Jannis and see, okay, what's happening? Could it be a Microsoft issue, a Yahoo issue? What I like about Magic Pages is that you guys have dedicated IP addresses.

Jannis: Yes, we use a pool of IPs that we expand when we see the need for it. And we also balance bigger customers with smaller customers, so that the IPs themselves are balanced by what they send. Some of the people on that IP might send tens of thousands of emails every month, and others might just send a couple of dozen. And what I've seen is that this balances pretty well by the end of the month — if you look at the deliverability rate.

Christine: Okay, yeah, that's perfect. Because I remember Ghost, at one point, could only show opens and clicks — and things like bounce rates

Jannis: I don't think you can see on Ghost yet. You cannot — but if anybody ever wants to know their bounce rate, I can get that out of Mailgun. Mailgun is the email backend that Ghost uses, which is completely managed for you, so you don't need to know about it. But if you want to know what your bounce rate is, or the reasons for bounces, then just reach out and I'll be happy to share that.

Christine: Perfect. Yeah, that's really good. So I would say, the biggest thing is: as long as your open rates are consistent and you don't see a huge drop, then there are no huge issues. Usually a huge drop can indicate a delivery error or possibly emails going to spam — and that's when I would say, talk to Magic Pages or whoever your provider is to look into it further. But for most creators starting out: as long as you have the DNS records in place, my biggest piece of feedback is, don't let these tactics of 'oh, use these certain words to get out of promo times' be your main concern. It really isn't going to be a huge thing — unless it's a big company that really heavily relies on it.

For creators: if people are a fan of you, they will look for your emails. They'll go looking for them in the inbox and they'll reply to them. I wouldn't worry too much about the nitty-gritty.

Jannis: I actually really love that — just have consistency, and just regularly send emails, rather than focusing on how many links, how many images. And also, just from a creator's perspective, I think it also matters because you take away one of the barriers — where you think, okay, how can I further optimise that, rather than just sending what you want to send? Just taking that step and sharing your thoughts, sharing your thinking, rather than getting stuck in all the technical details — because over time I think they will iron themselves out. Yeah, love that. Thank you, Christine. Last question: is there anything that I did not ask you that I should have asked?

Christine: I think we covered everything in terms of how we met, and seeing Magic Pages get to where it is now. I just want to share more about my experience with Magic Pages. I've used all the different providers — Ghost and different platforms. And what I can say is that — well, I have some insider insight — I like how Magic Pages is becoming more of a community. You don't feel like it's just another software where you're talking to a developer or an IT person in support, where they make you feel like they're belittling you because you don't know how to do DNS records. It's really important to have someone who can assist you without making you feel like you don't know anything — like you're back in school, scared to ask questions because you have a teacher who won't let you ask questions.

But I'm really glad to be on the sidelines and to see where Magic Pages is growing. The reason why I usually recommend it — especially Magic Pages and Ghost — is that a lot of my friends and colleagues, especially in fitness, ask me, where should I build a website? And they're like, oh, don't I need to send emails too? Those are the two common things that coaches and creators need: their own website, because people ask, well, couldn't I use Substack or something else? And I would say, yeah, but they could kick you out for any reason. You don't own it — something could happen to it.

So progressing to something more technical, it was nice to be able to recommend Magic Pages, because it takes five minutes to set up. You don't need all these SSL certificates and all that stuff. You have a website and the ability to send emails to subscribers, all in one — and you can protect your data and privacy, and know that it's not going to be sold somewhere. Well, that's my assumption — like, [with] Magic Pages. And I think that's really important as time goes on. With all this technology, I think it's really important to find a platform that you can trust long-term. I've had to move my site so many times, and I don't think I'll be moving away from Magic Pages, hopefully.

The other thing is being able to message and say, hey, if I needed something tweaked or something — it's just so easy to do. So that is the one thing I wanted to highlight, especially for coaches and creators: use Magic Pages.

Jannis: Well, thank you very much. Honestly, I don't know what to say. Thank you for also trusting us with your website, for always having our backs, for sharing about Magic Pages and talking about Magic Pages to people. Thank you for coming over from your apartment to our home office / podcast studio for taking the time.

Christine: A long commute.

Jannis: It definitely was, yes. For being the first external guest, for being the first in-person guest — because even last week, with Sviatoslav not being in Austria, we had to do a remote recording. So this is the first in-person recording, which is also new. We'll see how it's going to sound. So thank you for taking the time. If people want to find you online — where is the best place to look?

Christine: Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm super honoured. And I would say: check out christinetrac.net.

Jannis: Perfect. Last time, in episode one, I learned that you end the podcast episode by saying thank you. So: thank you to you, Christine. Thank you to everybody listening. And have a lovely rest of your day. Goodbye.

Christine: Bye!

Welcome to the very first episode of the Magic Pages podcast. No script, no slides, just Jannis and the whole Magic Pages team, Mariia and Sviatoslav, working through one deceptively simple question: what is Magic Pages? Beyond the easy answer ("managed hosting for Ghost") we get into what the work actually looks like: support that refuses to be a ticket queue, the idea of being a "translator" between people and Ghost, helping non-technical creators get unstuck, and the kinds of customers they never expected to serve.

People we mentioned in this episode:

Jannis: Hi, and welcome to the Magic Pages podcast, a new podcast where we sit down with the people building, hosting, and publishing on Ghost. My name is Jannis, I'm the founder of Magic Pages and was running our service alone for almost three years, till recently. I'm here today with the rest of the team running Magic Pages, Mariia and Sviatoslav. Hello.

Mariia: Hi.

Sviatoslav: Hi guys.

Jannis: Hi. And as some of the listeners might not know you yet, can you two quickly introduce yourselves, who you are and what you do at Magic Pages? Sviatoslav, do you maybe want to start quickly?

Sviatoslav: Once again guys, I'm Sviatoslav. I work in customer support at Magic Pages since February. This, I think our staff helping our customers with Ghost related questions and yeah, pretty much it.

Jannis: Cool. Thank you. Mariia, who are you? What do you do at Magic Pages?

Mariia: Hello everyone. I'm Mariia. I joined Magic Pages in March, but before that I used to consult one and off on brand strategy. But right now, as I fully joined the team, I do all the things, brand and marketing.

Jannis: So thank you both for also joining me here today at our first podcast recording and a small little detail on the side. Mariia and Sviatoslav actually have no idea what we're talking about today, which makes it so special that they're both here. You as a listener to this podcast actually already know a lot more about what we're going to talk about than they do, because you might've read the title of the episode. I've literally told them, hey, we're going to record our first podcast episode and they did ask what it's going to be about.

But I said, no, we're going to figure that out while we go. Because the reason I wanted to be this way is that we have a real conversation. I don't want this to be prepared statements, prepared answers, prepared questions. So please also bear with us. We're going to figure out how this is going to work together. We might get stuck here and there, but that's kind of the entire point. So Mariia, Sviatoslav, you might already have a vague idea. We had our weekly team meeting yesterday, and I actually already heard what I want to talk about there and then play it cool. The question I want to talk about is, what is Magic Pages?

Mariia: I knew that. Well, I felt like that. That's a very deep philosophical question.

Jannis: Yes. And yet there is an obvious answer, which I already want to get out of the way, which is, well, Magic Pages is a managed hosting service for Ghost. And now that we have that out of the way, we can actually dig a little bit deeper.

Mariia: And I accuse you of stealing my answer for that. I thought that I could, you know, be the first one.

Jannis: Some might say that was on purpose.

Mariia: Yeah.

Jannis: So I want to start with you, Sviatoslav. So you've worked in support for the last four months. You had Magic Pages. You joined in February. You've had weeks where things were rather busy, where things were maybe a little bit calmer, like the last couple of weeks. So if you think back, what is Magic Pages from a support perspective? Are we a rigid ticket queue where all that matters is churning away tickets or maybe from a support perspective, are we something else?

Sviatoslav: Well, definitely not a ticket queue. Definitely not a ticket queue company, because everything I've seen at Magic Pages for the last four months is completely different from what I've used to do at my previous job and to have work experience in tech support. And when I joined Magic Pages, everything felt completely different. And I think that most of all, I love that there's a lot of freedom for myself as a tech support here, because we are focusing on our customers. First of all, we are not focusing on fulfilling just our internal metrics, SLAs and stuff like that. And we take our customers as a top priority, which I pretty much appreciate and which gives me more feeling that I'm doing something human of just following the guidelines and ensuring that I have my monthly SLA completed and stuff like that.

Jannis: It's quite interesting. You mentioned that there are no SLAs, there are no KPIs, there are no metrics in how we measure support. Does that translate to the work you do? So when somebody sends a question, I have one example in mind where sometimes we say, well, okay, this question, which sometimes very detailed about the theme customizations for Ghost, for example, where somebody asks, okay, like I have to see my board from a theme developer and we look at it and we say, well, that might not be the clear definition of the support that we usually give, but since we don't have any metrics where we say, okay, we need to churn away so many tickets and so on, you usually like to jump on those tickets because you say, actually, there's a human on the other end that is stuck with the Ghost theme right now and they can't use magic pages.

They can't use Ghost if they can't figure that out. How do you see this? Like when somebody comes with a question that might not be directly related to the core product of what we have, which is hosting service for Ghost, how do you see this?

Sviatoslav: Yeah, I guess this is also one of the main reasons why I joined magic pages because here, even if something is out of scope and even if you know that this is not directed to magic pages in a way, even then I still, it's doable and we can do it on our end. I'm pretty much going to deal with that. And I think that this should be one of the main points of the customer support generally, because you shouldn't be just limited by some playbooks and guidelines because there are a lot of things that might fall outside of the scope.

But still, as you said, they are just humans and they decided to ask us for the support. So why just not help them? Even it's an extra step from us. I see no point of not helping them.

Mariia: Yeah. And I would add as well, so I just love to your point that when you were just treating every request as incoming and you seeing what you can help and how you can contribute and alleviate the worries that people have and you actually as well bring a different perspective or approach compared to Jannis. So sometimes it's quite fun to be, you know, in the background, just seeing how our customers engaging with us, what they are asking us, what they interested in. And it's pretty interesting to see the way how you both handle it.

Because it truly feels like that it's not really that you're picking out of like, let me see what is on page one and what Jannis told me. But you bring something different, a different flavor to conversations.

Jannis: It's very true. And I truly appreciate that we have that diversity and support now that we can say, okay, like somebody is better or one of us is better at this. One of us is better at this and then together we're figuring this out. But yeah, super happy with how we have shaped this in the last four months. I'm really happy to also see that you are taking this approach, the magic pages way, basically, that support is a bit more than just opening an email and talking about this, but it's also thinking deeper. It's also thinking ahead and thinking, what can we do to avoid this? Now, Mariia Sviatoslav just described magic pages from inside the support box.

You aim at it from a completely different angle. You knew magic pages before you joined as my wife, as a consultant as well. And you watched me build it for three years. What was it like from where you stood before any of this was your job? How did you see magic pages evolve from like this little side project to what it is now? How did it take shape?

Mariia: You know, you're asking what's maybe like how it grew or what changed and things like that, but to be honest, when I think about it from the first day that you back then when you were still active on Twitter and announced something like about magic pages that you're interested in making that happen to me would stay true since that day one, seeing it still as an outsider or like rather from the external perspective, is that you had the relationship with people from day one. I come a bit from, maybe that's the marketing part speaking that it's a little bit cautious. You sometimes, you know, in communications or in branding, you kind of think about different perspectives and how a product, a brand, a company can be perceived, and so I'm sometimes a little bit in cautious side.

I would think more first before acting, but what I enjoyed and appreciated from day one is that somebody messages you and you're like, yeah, of course I can do that. You need that feature. You're working with your site in this way. Well, yeah, we can make it happen. And I was always amazed by the speed and the down to earth and what is it like bias to action that has been like encoded into magic pages. Is that there is something happening? Yeah, we're going to respond to it. There is a, we see that kind of mood or you see what people want and we're going to bring it, which is to be honest to the core of marketing.

So that has been always interesting to me. I've seen magic pages as well evolve and there've been so many interesting sites into passionate projects that people join in. To me, I've always felt a little bit on the outside, you know, like something interesting is happening in the shop. Like imagine it's like a Christmas night in a sense, and something is happening funky in the shop and everything is bright and there are a lot of conversations and everything. And sometimes I would just be sending and just looking at Jannis and imagine like standing behind that window shop, being like, what is happening there? It's so interesting. Why does Jannis have so many like conversations and there are so many different things happening.

How is it happening so fast? So always been fascinated as well by that. And since I've joined, I, I'm so happy that I've become part of it. I remember I was so amazed the first time when we had an idea based on what a couple of people on Reddit suggested, like they wanted to see how fast we deliver content and how fast it would be served to the audience. Like they said, will it load well or not? The answer to this is that magic pages has global CDN content delivery network, but it's a boring answer. And so in one of our conversations, actually three of us were talking about this, and then we came up with the idea how to visualize it after that meeting took a couple of days.

I put brief concepts for how to do this. And then two hours later, Jannis is messaging us three of us, like in our chat and like, yeah, this is now live. This is how it's going to be. And I get so excited and I really, truly felt like now I'm part of the shop. I'm part of the, like where the fun happens that you have an idea, you have something on the, you want something for your project, for a product. You want something to work the way you want and voila, it happens. Yeah.

Jannis: So I think one of the key moments that I remember where I felt like this is now actually a team. It is not just me coming up with things anymore and implementing that, but it was an idea that mainly the two of you shaped when I listened to you. And I remember back then I raised a few concerns and I said, well, like this cannot work because of this and that and that, and you were both very passionate about this. And you were both like, well, but still, like, how can we make it happen? And this is where for the first time I felt personally, like this is now really more than just one brain coming up with, with crazy ideas. It's three brains coming up with crazy ideas.

And that also shapes conversations and conversations turn into ideas and ideas turn into features. The really interesting part for me is that this is probably what I would describe now without ever sitting down and defining that, but I would define that as one of the core magic pages DNA. And you've both mentioned it now that we do go above and beyond, and I don't want to turn this too much into a, a glorification of what we do here. And you've had a conversation, but both of the answers basically touched upon the fact that take the extra mile. We take the, we take another step towards our customers and we say, okay, from the support perspective, we might do a little bit more so we can unblock a customer.

And quite honestly, if we think from a business perspective, probably even very self-serving because the customer will be unblocked and they will not have to ask us more questions from the marketing perspective as well. We go the extra mile. We can try different things. And if we see that a feature isn't working, we can always get rid of it.

Mariia: I would even put it in the way that we're doing what we would love to receive as customers ourselves, because I have two sites at magic pages before I joined magic pages. And of course I had that benefit of having Jannis sitting on my sofa or rather on the sofa next to me and being like, this is not working. I would love to do this and that. And of course, this is a little bit of a selfish side, but at the same time, this is not the service that you would expect.

I think from bigger companies, because like you mentioned, you used to think about the business side, because it is the way the things are on, like you, you have to think about it, especially as the team growing. But I love that there is that element is that we personally would doing what we would love to have. And who would have thought that it's that simple is just to listen to what people want and asking for. I think that is as well, what fascinates me and what endears me to, to magic pages. It is because you, Jannis, you're also part of the ghost forum of Reddit forum. It's somebody who is more of a lurker on those platforms. It's as well, quite interesting to see how you interact with other people.

And it's not really from the, Hey, sign up for us, but more like, Hey, let me help you with this. So I find that very interesting.

Jannis: But let's actually turn it around when somebody does sign up for magic pages. Let's say somebody signs up for magic pages and writes to us a couple of days later. What do you see is the moment that they realize this isn't quite what they expected. And that can be in either direction. Maybe they sign up, they have a question and then they're pleasantly surprised. Or maybe they have a, wait, I thought I was getting something different moment. Is there anything that stands out to you where you say that surprised you, that customers were surprised in either way, either the positive side or something where they thought that they would be getting something different, maybe.

Sviatoslav: Yeah, well, there are quite a few examples for both ways. And I think the most noticeable moment when someone signs up for magic pages is when they realize that the people around about the team who runs that and deal with the infrastructure and with the technical related questions and everything, they are really passionate about what they are doing. And this is what I also love seeing when we are engaged in conversations, when we are doing some workshops or just calls, because this is where I feel myself more inspired and this is where I basically get more insights, more motivation and just more feeling of how I would love to develop myself in the future as well, because this environment just gives you much more than the generic sources.

And I think that one of them is that they see how we respond to them, how we deal with the technical related questions, how we deal with everything they need. On the other hand, I wouldn't say I'm 100% sure what they expect at the end of the day from Ghost, specifically when someone is just moving from another platform or if someone just sign up for the first time to Ghost. That's a CMS platform. But, yeah, people just have different expectations and if it's not what they want from the tech perspective, or if it has less features than they expected and stuff like this, I guess it makes a lot of sense. And I think the most important thing is that we allow them to test it before.

Jannis: And specifically about that, let's say somebody moves from WordPress, for example, are there sometimes things that they're missing on Magic Pages or Ghost specifically?

Sviatoslav: Yeah, probably. Yeah, I guess people who move from WordPress specifically are used to quite a bit a different approach of dealing with the website, of having more freedom, of having more customizations available, different blogs and things like that. And they're used to different style of managing their website. And at this point, I say that Ghost is pretty much relatively young and developing software and who knows how it comes up in a few years.

Because we are seeing it constantly improving and WordPress has been on the market for, I don't even know how many years and it wasn't like that in the beginning. So I think that if you give it a try, you might find it really useful. And I think that it's even more useful for people who don't want to deal that much with the technical stuff and infrastructure, but are more dedicated to the creative part of the blogging.

Because then, in my opinion, this is one of the best CMS to work with because it just gives you everything you want, everything you need through the user interface even. And yeah, at the end of the day, it's limited to what you personally want. There are still a lot of different ways to work around things, to make things work as you want.

Jannis: And you're really good at figuring out a creative way of doing something, kind of, you know.

Mariia: Can I actually emphasize this part because Sviatoslav as well mentioned that some people, you know, come in more from a more non-technical background for like more creative blogging. As being one of those people, I always find it wonderful the way you and Jannis explain to people and help out with any technical difficulties. Because I think that for a lot of people, like we have a lot of really cool developers and more technical people, and I mean, it's just incredible to see the way they use their setups, the way they mold ghosts into something they would love to use and that fits their needs.

But there is a lot of people coming in who have absolutely zero idea about how to do those things. And I find that I personally experience those wow moments when somebody can resolve it for me. And like I said before, it is a bit of a privilege that I have with Jannis helping me out directly. But imagine it for somebody who comes in just who has maybe no acquaintances who would help them out with that. No. And they just reach out with us and they might not even expect it because let's be honest, which company would really jump out and like in the first message or so explain something to them or offer help to them.

So find it as well pretty interesting and I appreciate it a lot the way you do it. Because you approach both you and Jannis approach it with a very technical perspective and you easily help out and it might be so obvious to you. But let me be like a spokesperson for the non techies for the non technical people. I'm always like, wow, I could just do that. So it's easy. So yeah, this is what I appreciate. And yeah, I identify with those non technical group of people who come to Ghost.

Jannis: So maybe to answer to the question we started with what is magic pages, maybe sometimes we also a translator of understanding Ghost and understanding what Ghost can do what Ghost cannot do and translating that into creative ideas that people have. I just think of those very long emails that we sometimes get where somebody describes sometimes a very complicated setup that's they're trying to replicate it if maybe built on WordPress on Squarespace or somewhere else. And they come to us and they say, well, I really love Ghost. I love the idea of Ghost. I would love to start using it.

But I don't know how this is what I want to do with it. Can you help me? And I think this is also where we come in as a translator of taking the customers or the users that want to use Ghost as they are from wherever they come from and translating the world of Ghost into what they want to do. So apart from, you know, we are a managed hosting service for Ghost. We also a translator for Ghost. We are translating the technical capabilities as they are.

Mariia: That's a good perspective from that. Yeah, I can see that.

Jannis: So that's just love. You've spent a lot of time recently in our help center, in writing documentation, thinking about our new customer portal as well, the one that we want to release later this year. And all of that pretty much forces you to imagine customers using our product, using Magic Pages and Ghost without your help. So that is the goal that they don't need to reach out to us not because we don't want to speak to them, but because I think all of us believe that the Help Center self-service solution is always the most pleasant first step for somebody to fix their problems. I'm wondering why you were in the documentation in the Help Center and also going through all the tickets of the last three years that we have in Chatwood, which is our customer support suite, basically. What did you realize people are actually trying to do that? Maybe we or Ghost is not making easy enough?

Sviatoslav: Yeah, well, it's a really nice question. And I'd say that it has different layers on top of each other. So I couldn't say that there is one specific thing that Ghost is missing overall. There are just a few things that I think naturally appear with the developing of Ghost as a software because it's more the Ghost introducing new features, the more questions customers have. And I think it's pretty natural and it's expected because everyone wants to have something specific and there is no generic picture of a typical customer of a typical Ghost customer, because everyone has a different background. Everyone has different ideas of their blog or of their newsletter.

And this is where I wouldn't say that we have to focus only on this specific area, for example, on setting up the DNS or helping our customers with theme tweaks or things like that, because it's going to be different all the time. And with every new update, with every new feature added, the scope will raise as well. From what I've seen, these are pretty much naturally things that come from everyone who's trying to understand something new, the new product, the new software explored. And there are always people who love to do it on their own, take their time and go through everything independently, read articles and stuff. And there is also a type of the customer who always would love to contact a human.

And I think this is where we should also distinguish this part, because even though we have something written out as an article and as a step by step guide properly explained there's still an amount of people who would love to get the same answer from a real human. It has, I think it has a lot of benefits as well, because you always want to double check out the person who understands the truth. I think it's also a nice way to get in touch with someone with a person who basically run your website. And I think it's pretty logical to start your conversation, start your journey with the company on the job.

Jannis: Yeah, that's, I think, a very good point. How many people can actually say, hey, I'm speaking to the people actually digging through the server logs of my website? I think that's the fact that we are that close to both ends of this to the customer facing side, but also the infrastructure side makes it very unique. So maybe apart from a hosting service and the translator, we also a bridge in that sense.

Mariia: So doesn't it feel quite reassuring to speak to people to humans on the other side of it? Because I feel like no matter whether it's on magic pages, ghost, WordPress, absolutely anywhere, we're talking about people who have their passion. They're passionate about something. They have that project. It can be something of the outlet, how they express themselves online and, you know, that piece of owned land on the internet. Or maybe it's a publication or maybe that's they're running a local organization and it's a new site. And it's we have to see that there is so much effort, so much passion that is going from their side. That is their project.

That is their baby. And they wanted, they want others to understand that and take care of it, treat them the way they treat their own project. Because we see so many people like that who have those projects. It's very easy to see them as numbers, to see them as entries of like, oh yeah, it's another customer who reaches out. It's another customer who creates the website. It's another customer who sets up a new domain and things like that. And again, it's not really limited just to us. It's any other company that does that kind of work could perceive them this way. And I find that the best way to utilize and if you offer customer support, if you take your time to answer through those questions, it better be from the perspective of that you see them and you see what they bring and you treat their project with that level of care the way they do it themselves. So I find that that is the reassuring feeling.

Sviatoslav: Yeah, I think that I think

Jannis: go ahead.

Sviatoslav: Yeah, I think that magic pages moves in the right way, because I totally agree with what you said. And if you see that someone, the person who never just goes, just reached out to us and shares with us the idea of their blog, it shows me that our position here and our perception by the customer is pretty much the way we want it to be because you wouldn't want to share your personal ideas or your personal feelings about your blog or anything with someone who doesn't care about that. If it would be some kind of a generic support queue, you wouldn't even think of sharing something like this with them. And this is what I love here, what I love as a part of the customer support, because I always love to talk with real people and I always love to see their ideas. I always love to be involved and help them to understand and to explore the ghost. They want it to be, you know.

Mariia: Yeah, I think that as well that sometimes the excitement and the eagerness you bring to those requests into emails, it just reminds me, have you guys been ever confused as AI?

Jannis: Yes. That magic pages is not an AI chatbot. It is very funny when we reply so fast in our live chat that the only reply we get is speak to a human. And you have to reply with, I am human. And the reply is connect me to a human. So yes, sometimes we are also so eager and excited to help people that our customers don't believe that we're real. So we are true ghosts in a sense.

Sviatoslav: Have to wait for a few minutes before answering.

Jannis: I have actually thought about that, that like sometimes when I see a chat message come in, I sometimes hesitate a bit and I think, okay, I'm going to give it like half a minute or a minute until I reply because I don't want to freak them out. And I mean, you both know what I'm talking about, but we have essentially in our support suite, we have added an integration where we can also see a customer's website right away.

So when you actually connect through your customer portal on magic pages, or you submit your email address to the chat form, then all of that happens on our infrastructure. So it's not going like that the data is going anywhere else. It all happens actually on the same server. In this case, we look up the website and we have all the data more or less next to your conversation. And this is how sometimes it's very, very easy for us to already spot what an issue is, because it's also built around the fact that we want to have all the context there. And this is why yes, I do sometimes hesitate to just write the fully formulated answer within 30 seconds, because it can come off a little bit creepy.

But yeah, I think we strike a good balance with that. So on the other side, Mariia, in the last couple of weeks, you have been building something that I've put off for a long time, wasn't the existence of far, it was the email marketing strategy. And that involved a lot of thinking about who our customers actually are. I know you've dug through quite a bit of data and also looked at a lot of websites and found lots of interesting sites that are sometimes so special that we look at them and we are amazed on what people are building. And I'm wondering, is there any type of customers that you did not expect, or a reason people sign up that actually surprised you?

Mariia: Yes. And now that as you were asking the question, I've been kind of going through my mind's folder of the size that I've seen. And you know, the ones that always stood out to me, well, I have a soft spot for fiction writers. And so those are usually my favorite type of sites that we come across as our customers. I'm always amazed about how people utilize their, like this online space and channel like their creativity. Well, so this is exactly this is that I, you know, I have expected that you have people who sign up because they run a blog, they write about a certain topic, let's say digital marketing or web design or something that is, you know, is out of the realm of very common niches or, you know, topics that people online create content about.

I've expected to see consultants and business owners. It's incredible as well to see people who have their offline stores. So actually one of them is my mom who is as well in magic pages and to see that she's not the only one that is as well is really cool. So I knew that a lot of more technical minded people who run either sites for others, or maybe they do their own projects. So more of a like technical technical themes. This is all out of what I associate with online businesses. There's people who are online. They talk about things that are interesting to them online. Let's say content creation, social media marketing and all of this or other sites building or programming coding and AI and things like that.

Again, it's expected. It's like, you know, it belongs there. But what I find there interesting, and it is the subset of people who as well become our customers who run something of their like, they write about something they're passionate about. And then it turns out that their writers, they share some creative pursuits that they have. It's one of them is actually so I just love sites because you as well write about like different creative pursuits that you share that you try out your experiments.

So it's something unexpected to me that when people combine this with their personal writing, because with Ghost, you have a chance to write a bit more to share. It's not just that you think about, okay, well, I have 30 seconds. How do I capture their attention? How do I make sure they understand who I am and what I do and things like that. But you truly can read, can get into their mind, can see through their perspective, why they do it. You get interested in that. You also can talk to those people. So this group is very exciting for me to see as well, what they bring from offline to online.

Jannis: That is sometimes really amazing. And I just think of some of the other publications we have where I've personally learned so much. I mean, both of you know that I always love talking about David, the beekeeper from Scotland, who I had no idea about bees before, and now helping him with his site and figuring out some technical issues as well, because he's been a Magic Pages customer for quite a long time already. Back when things were still a bit bumpy in the beginning, just looking at his site and figuring out certain things, you obviously have to skim through the content and you read something and you sometimes get stuck on a customer website and you're just thinking, that is so far from my reality, but it's so damn interesting.

I want to keep reading. And this is honestly one of the parts of running this business and helping people with their ghost sites that I find the most rewarding personally.

Mariia: Yeah. For me as well, one of the side examples is Jatan from Jatan Space with his Moon Monday, because this is like the part of astronomy or rather like seeing and thinking about what is beyond us. Like to me, that was part of what I feel curious about. It, you know, extends into reading science fiction, but it's also was very interesting to hear about like about the Moon specifically and about different news that are happening because in my reality, like, what do I know? I knew about the Apollo missions and about the Artemis too that recently happened. And so with the with that, I remember seeing Jatan's publication.

I remember like reading a few posts and the next time our local astronomical association at that point, like they held their like stargazing night that you could see Moon and other planets. Back then it was I think that we saw Saturn. I was immediately like, yes, let's go, let's do it. And since then, I've become a member of that association, our local astronomical association. And it's just super cool. It's like sometimes I feel this is like extension of those people who are passionate online. They're able to reach beyond just their local part. They are able to influence people like in across the world.

And then it results into something of like me joining the association and just doing something locally here and being interested in that. So I find that most of the time that listeners might not see right now is that while in front of me are three like my face and the Jannis and Sviatoslav's. And I think that when we talk about it and share about our publications, the really are curious about and what we love from what our customers are doing is that we are all kind of our eyes are lit up. And that's sometimes the feeling I get that we're like backstage. We're seeing what happens there on the main stage, how the performers are creating the act and how they interact with the audience, with their subscribers. And we just, we get to witness it. We get to see what's happening behind the scenes, but also help them out.

Jannis: So first of all, we just found another thing that Magic Pages is. We are the backstage managers, the theater managers, the production assistants. And secondly, I can actually say a sentence now that I never thought I would say all the links to those publications are in the show notes.

Mariia: So without us knowing what it's all about, we connected with it.

Jannis: Yes, absolutely.

Mariia: Part of us, that's one team working.

Jannis: Yeah. So yeah, with everything we've gone through, I do kind of see a red thread and everything that we've described, support conversations, customer profiles, documentation gaps sometimes. In my eyes, what I know that down here is it's all about people. It's actually not about infrastructure. It's not about Ghost. It's not even about hosting in most cases. So when we started this episode saying the obvious answer to what is Magic Pages, managed hosting for Ghost.

What stood out to me is that none of you actually told me a story about web hosting, but both of you just told me and all of the listeners stories about our day to day. And we connected to the fact that Magic Pages is not just a hosting service. It's also a translator where we translate technical things about Ghost and how Ghost works to the creative ideas that people have. We have said that Magic Pages is a bridge of also bridging that gap between a physical server that is somewhere about 300 to 400 kilometers from me physically right now to the customers. And those customers might be anywhere in the world. We literally have customers from New Zealand over all of Asia, Europe, North America, South America.

I think the only continent we don't have customers on is Antarctica. So if anybody wants to write about penguins, we're up for it. We can help you with that. And what was the last part we just mentioned? Magic Pages is also just a bunch of really, really crazy ideas sometimes. And honestly, I love all of that. Is there anything from your perspective, from the two of you that you would still like to add to this? Anything that Magic Pages is for you that we haven't mentioned?

Sviatoslav: Yeah, I'd love to add that being here for the last four months and seeing how everything works from the inside of Magic Pages. I love the part that Magic Pages is a product because you don't need to have any prerequisites when you're signing up for a trial and trying to build something because if you have an idea, that's all you need for it at this point. And this is what I love because a lot of things are manageable and are doable from our side. And even if you have some generic computer knowledge and if you don't know how to deal with some stuff and if you don't know some concepts or technical things. I'd love being, as you said, being a bridge of connecting the technical world with the ideas for our customers.

And I love being them just on something more personal rather than spending weeks figuring out how to deal with this or that technical issue.

Jannis: So I think, Sviatoslav, you now need to have an eye on our inbox when people are flooding you with all the crazy ideas they have. Absolutely. And we'll both be here for that. As Sviatoslav said, we are happy to do that. Mariia, anything from your side that you want to add?

Mariia: A second word Sviatoslav says, to me, that is as well extension of what's happening when three of us are working. Because while my role is in Magic Pages, there's a lot about thinking about our relationship with customers and what we can make better. Not necessarily, not from the support standpoint, like in the moment, but more like how do we build it when everything is great? Because one part of Magic Pages, when we discuss it to the bare bones, it is about hosting your website.

So it's usually like with any general company for hosting is that you set it up once, it works, you forget about it. But I find that oftentimes because of our relationship with customers, which started in the very beginning since day one, when you, Janis, when you were in touch with people who ask you something on Twitter, you reply on Reddit and you just solve something, you implement something new. It's always so in tune with what people want and we make it happen that we started building that relationship. It became beyond of just it's hosting. You set up your website, it's done. It's a great scenario when you forget about us.

But I do find that it makes it better, like that our service gets better or product gets better because we meet what customers want, because our needs evolve, our ideas about the website, but also because of the technology of evolution, because of what things that we can do and how we can help people better. So my frame of reference is a lot just thinking about like things like that. So my day to day is not really talking with customers or to customers like it is for you, Janis and Sviatoslav.

So what I often think is that our internal process that makes it happen. And for me a lot, it is like that idea that pops into into the chat and then three of us are figuring out how to happen. Sometimes we're like one big what to say, brain cell. No, maybe one big squirrel that jumps into something interesting and we all try to tackle it. But we all bring something of our own into that. So to me, this is also what Magic Pages is. It says somebody who came from the background of having different experiences working for different companies in marketing. I've never had so much fun like this. So that's for me as well.

Jannis: Yeah, that's beautiful. So Magic Pages is also a crazy squirrel running around an online chat figuring out ideas.

Mariia: Exactly.

Jannis: Mariia Sviatoslav, thank you both for trusting me with this. First of all, I know it wasn't easy to just jump on this podcast recording unprepared. I had a lot of fun. It took a completely different turn than what I was expecting. I love that. And I can't wait to do this again. Now, the next episode of the Magic Pages podcast will, however, take a little bit of a different perspective. I will have a conversation with our very, very first customer and how she's using Ghost and Magic Pages.

So for now, thank you for listening. And if you're interested in starting your own Ghost site or maybe migrating, I guess, an existing site to Ghost, have a look at magicpages.co. Sviatoslav and I will be happy to answer any questions, to be the bridge, to be the translator for you and to get you set up. So have a lovely rest of your day. I don't know how to end podcast episodes. You say, see you soon, speak to you soon, listen to you soon.

Mariia: Well, you definitely say thank you for spending the time with us. Yes. To be in that space on the same wavelengths together again.

Jannis: Absolutely. So thank you and goodbye.

Mariia: Bye.

Sviatoslav: Bye bye, guys.