If you’re setup as a non-profit and you reinvest all profit, what do you do if you get to the point that you are making more profit than you can reasonably reinvest? Build up a large cash reserve?
Fantastic question. So the obvious answer is grow the company, right? That's pretty much what Amazon did for 20 years. Eschew profit in favour of reinvesting in building the company as big as possible. Not really our style, we'd rather keep the company small, but there's definitely still room to grow quite a lot from where we are now.
Beyond that point, we can spend money on anything which reasonably furthers the mission of the organisation - which has many aspects but the main ones in our case revolve around creation and education for journalism and open source software.
Some pipedream ideas we throw around from time to time:
- M&A (boring/obvious answer, but valuable)
- Create either grant-funding, or sensible investment funding (like indie.vc) for other open source projects and publishers.
- Create an independent media company, reporting on issues and stories we care about (running on Ghost)
- Buy some land and build a collaborative space for us and for others to work on open source, journalism and social good projects
Great work and writeup at Ghost. I bookmarked it as an example to give to others wanting to do business and good things at same time. Far as ideas for reinvestment, two things come to mind:
1. Build more tools that solve people's problems created by others vendors. As in, move sideways a bit diversifying your operation. Even better if the tools/apps complement each other where you can increase benefit per customer while cross-selling. Although not endorsing them (not a customer), Zoho seems like a good example of this where they keep developing additional products that might benefit their customers on top of their original ones. Enough FOSS-oriented non-profits doing that in enough sectors can stop a lot of lock-in and abusive practices over time via the alternatives they provide.
2. Invest in maintenance or security improvements of dependencies, esp libraries or infrastructure. These are often treated as externalities leading to a lot of problems we see like in report below [1]. Ghost could deliver its good products/services on top of taking some responsibility for infrastructure it depends on. People buying Ghost get the immediate value plus knowledge they're supporting those things as well.
Just some ideas for you. Keep up the great work over there and good luck to you all! :)
How is the company governed? Have you considered becoming a worker cooperative and creating a democratic governance structure? Does the non-profit structure allow for that?
Not part of Ghost, but as a general answer, it's always feasible to invest in anything that serves the mission.
Besides actually just reducing prices for services to not get profit, Ghost could create a foundation and give grants to any deserving work that serves the Ghost mission, such as supporting the FSF or EFF or funding other upstream or aligned stuff such as working to get more of their tools to be 100% free/libre/open…
Beyond that point, we can spend money on anything which reasonably furthers the mission of the organisation - which has many aspects but the main ones in our case revolve around creation and education for journalism and open source software.
Some pipedream ideas we throw around from time to time:
- M&A (boring/obvious answer, but valuable)
- Create either grant-funding, or sensible investment funding (like indie.vc) for other open source projects and publishers.
- Create an independent media company, reporting on issues and stories we care about (running on Ghost)
- Buy some land and build a collaborative space for us and for others to work on open source, journalism and social good projects