🗞 What's New: John O'Nolan describes how Ghost will avoid WordPress-like drama

Here's what you'll find in this issue:

• Ghost's CEO outlines how the company will use decentralization to avoid drama.
• Want to boost your brand on social media? Create a rival.
• $10K+ MRR with a tech note-taking tool. Takuya Matsuyama views business as art.

This issue is sponsored by dofollow.com, the B2B SaaS link building specialists. These guys help founders secure hard-to-get backlinks from the most authoritative sites in their verticals; think HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and Canva. If you want to boost traffic and leads in 2025 through organic search, check them out!

Following weeks of drama plaguing WordPress, John O'Nolan, CEO of Ghost, has written a blog post on how Ghost will avoid similar problems.

John was once a WordPress core contributor. He loved the open source ethos of WordPress, but became disenchanted by the “office politics, drama, and conflicts of interest” that seemed to constantly arise. In 2013, he founded Ghost.

Here's how he says his company will "ghost" the drama facing WordPress.

Worried about mentioning competitor brands in your marketing? Don't be.

Research shows that social media posts that mention other brands can create engagement, and even improve perception of your own brand. One way to do this is by positioning yourself as a rival to another well-known company in your space.

"Rivalry transforms ordinary communication into captivating stories."

SaaS Watch is a roundup of all the latest micro-SaaS acquisition opportunities. Here are the top three for this week!

1. Text extraction extension for images, videos, PDFs, etc.: 11K users, $5.9K asking price.
2. Calendly integration with refundable deposits: $1K MRR, 10-100 users, $9K asking price.
3. iOS chatbot that aggregates LLMs: $1K MRR, 100-1K users, $19.2K asking price.

Takuya Matsuyama has spent the last eight years growing a SaaS, while building his following as a YouTube influencer. All it took was a few viral posts, a heavy focus on branding, and time.

Today, he's making $10K+ MRR with Inkdrop, a tech note-taking tool. Additionally, his YouTube channel, devaslife, has over 201K subscribers.

His advice? View your business as art.

People don't just want information that is accurate and efficient. They also want information that's human.

I think one of the biggest trends we'll see in the coming years is a backlash to AI slop in favor of technologies that help us feel more connected with actual people. —@channingallen

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Stephen Flanders, Katie Hignett, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing