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.

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.

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!

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.