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:
Jatan Mehta
Transcript
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.
