John O'Nolan

John O'Nolan is the founder and CEO of Ghost, an open source publishing platform for independent writers and media businesses. Before Ghost he was deputy lead of the WordPress user interface team. In November 2012 he published a concept post describing a simpler blogging platform; the response was strong enough that he and long-time friend Hannah Wolfe built a prototype.

In 2013 Ghost raised about £196,000 on Kickstarter, hitting its £25,000 goal in 11 hours, and the first public version shipped that autumn. John has written that Ghost applied to Y Combinator twice and was rejected, so it bootstrapped instead. Ghost is run by the Ghost Foundation, a non-profit whose constitution means it can never be bought or sold; revenue from the managed Ghost(Pro) service funds development of the free MIT-licensed software, and the team has been fully remote since 2013.

Under John, Ghost evolved from a clean blogging tool into a full creator platform with memberships, paid subscriptions and newsletters, first sketched in 2016, and later added ActivityPub support so Ghost sites can join the social web. Ghost publishes its revenue openly; John reported in 2025 that the ecosystem had generated over $136M, including $36M in hosting revenue and $100M earned by independent publishers on the platform.

John describes himself as geographically restless and writes about publishing, open source and independent business. In late 2025 he started Alcove, an RSS reader side project he builds in public.