First
Publishers on Ghost
Independent and professional publications that have outgrown a stock theme: structure, navigation, membership, and the tooling behind the writing. I run a Ghost publication myself, so I know the problems from the inside.
Independent product design & build
Figuring out with you what’s worth making, then making it.
I design and build digital products end to end — 30 years of product leadership, now building with AI. My focus is publishing.
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01
What I do
I’m a one-person product team. I work out what the product should be, design it, build it, and hand it over working.
Most work is a project: a defined thing, built well, and handed off with everything you need to run it yourself. When a product keeps evolving, I can stay on to keep shaping it. When almost anything can be built, the scarce skill is knowing what’s worth building. That part comes first.
02
Who it’s for
Also
Founders who need a first version
An idea and a reason to test it, but no team yet. A working first version to put in front of customers or investors.
Also
Product & innovation teams
A tested prototype in weeks, not a quarter: needs-finding, a working build, and what users actually did with it.
03 · Case study
Road & Reason
An automotive publication on Ghost I conceived, designed, built, and run.
Screenshot · Road & Reason home
For thirty years, my job as a product leader was mostly saying no. Engineering time was the scarcest thing in any company, and good product management meant protecting it — ruthless prioritization, careful specs, and a roadmap where most good ideas lived in “later,” which usually meant never.
When I started Road & Reason, those instincts came with me. The clearest example: a custom pipeline that prepares Notion content as Ghost drafts — formatting, images, tagging, duplicate prevention, and status sync handled automatically. Final publication happens by hand in Ghost Admin. My old self would have filed it as a distant roadmap item. With Claude Code, it was working in an afternoon. From there I improved it as I used it: [real roadblock + fix — to confirm]. When a job stalled silently, I added health checks, failure alerts, and automatic recovery. By the end it had the operational care a solo project rarely gets — a staging environment included.
The physics of building have changed. Trying something now often costs less than debating it, and using a thing teaches you what it should be faster than specifying it ever did. This makes judgment even more important: when almost anything can be built, the hard question is what’s worth building.
That’s the work I do now: figuring out with you what’s worth making, then making it.
Content model
Organized around big questions
Instead of a date-sorted feed, the archive is built around the strategic big questions relevant to each brand, so every piece has a place and a reason to exist.
Evidence trail
Claims you can check
Analysis is tied back to the evidence behind it, so readers can see how a conclusion was reached, not just what it is.
Screenshot · brand page & questions
The publishing pipeline
Notion to Ghost, with the operational care a solo project never gets
Write
Notion
Prepare
Formatting, images, tags, duplicate check
Stage
Ghost draft
Publish
In Ghost Admin
↺ Status syncs back to Notion at each step
Staging environment
Health checks
Failure alerts
Automatic recovery
04
How engagements work
01
Fixed scope
We agree on what’s being made and what it costs before work starts. Most of the value is in getting that definition right.
02
Built and tested
Working software, in staging first, checked against how it will actually be used.
03
Clean hand-off
Code, documentation, and access are yours. Staying involved is an option, not a dependency.
05
Background
I’ve spent thirty years in product and innovation leadership, including First Data’s Innovation Lab and ADP. Running through all of it is a thread in web publishing that goes back to the mid-’90s: a tutorial site and online proofing at Hobsons, an intranet, e-commerce and coverage mapping at Arch, and now Road & Reason.
Contact
Have something worth making?
Tell me what you’re working on. The first conversation is about whether there’s a good project here, not a sales call.
software@scottfrancis.com