Hello there! I'm back to work after a little time away.

I was busy securing a new job as a product engineer and had to go through quite a few interviews and technical challenges. Finally, I found one I’m happy with, so now I can get back to this during my in-between holidays 😎.

In my last blog post, I defined my core hypotheses and how I’d test them. Since then, I’ve had a small update (I still need to reflect it there).

I noticed some interest online around content links on Ghost blogs. For example, a Reddit user on r/Ghost mentioned having 100+ posts and not wanting to add links manually. That made me rethink priorities:

• Writers probably need a better way to manage internal links
• My original “Cursor-like editing experience” might be more of a nice-to-have

So, I’ll explore both options in my market research — but contextual linking is now higher on my radar.

Competitors

I’ve been digging into what’s already out there. To make this easier to follow, I grouped competitors into four buckets:

1. Ghost-Specific Tools

• Ghost Marketplace → No AI-related integrations yet.
• RewriteMe (discontinued) → External platform that rewrote posts and published them to Ghost or Notion. Dead now, but interesting to see someone tried.

2. Blogging Platforms with AI Features

• Seio → Generates SEO-optimized blog posts from keywords, publishes to Ghost + other CMSs. Starts at $29/mo, up to $79/mo.
• Beehiiv → Ghost competitor with built-in AI editing and a Notion-like UX. Not something I’d copy, but it shows blogging platforms are starting to integrate AI directly — partly a risk for me.
• Writesonic → Bigger platform aimed at professional writers and content teams. They do AI-powered article generation and internal linking, but it’s all external. Interesting product, but not directly a competitor.

3. AI Writing & SEO Platforms

Jasper, LongShot, Junia, Frase, Surfer
These are full-featured marketing tools — not Ghost-native, but worth noting:

• Jasper → Starts at $59/seat/mo, then jumps to value-based pricing through sales. Marketing-focused ICP.
• LongShot & Junia → Start around $30/mo, Junia goes up to $50/mo. Both limit article counts. LongShot also offers annual discounts (~$19/mo) and even one-off pricing, which is an interesting idea.
• Surfer & Frase → SEO and research-focused, CMS-agnostic platforms.
  • Surfer: $79/mo
  • Frase: $49/mo
    Both do a better job of segmenting by role (e.g. SEO specialist, in-house marketing team).

Takeaway: There’s clear demand for AI-powered writing tools, but most force you to leave your writing environment — something Ghost users might dislike.

4. Consumer & Niche Tools

• Grammarly → Probably the closest thing to my original vision:
  • Browser extension
  • Inline editing
  • AI assistance
  • Works anywhere
    Free tier + paid plans from $12/mo. Likely plenty of overlap with Ghost users, so there’s an opportunity to differentiate by going Ghost-native.
• SEOJuice → Focused purely on automatic internal linking for SEO. Starts at €34/mo for 1,000 pages. Their demo looks very close to what I envisioned, so it’s worth studying their UX closely.

A Quick UX Lesson

I found Lex.page and thought it was close to what I wanted, but as an external platform.

If you watch their brevity check demo, the UX around accepting separate suggestions feels a little weird.

For example, take this sentence (bold shows suggested edits):

They don't love what they've got, but they don't know to fix it.

Lex suggests:

• “what they’ve got” → “what they have”
• “but they don’t” → “but don’t”

Which would make the final sentence:

They don’t love what they have, but don’t know how to fix it.

The suggestion is good, but the way Lex presents it forces the user to mentally compare multiple versions:

• Original
• Partial edits
• Final sentence

Even the founder reviewing it in the demo seemed to double-check both suggestions before understanding the result.

Two UX ideas I like better, inspired by Cursor and PyCharm’s Copilot:

1. Inline chat over selected text
2. A broader chat with document context

Opportunities

• Ghost-native focus → Most tools require jumping to an external platform. A native integration could be a big differentiator.
• UX improvements → Many current tools feel clunky. Validating better UX with early users could be an edge.
• Subscription pricing → Lower-to-mid double-digit monthly pricing (~$12–$39/mo) with a yearly discount seems expected.
• Decent market size → While niche, Ghost isn’t small:
  • 100M+ blog installations
  • ~27K active customers
  • ~16K r/Ghost users
  • 10K–53K active sites (BuiltWith/Wappalyzer)
  • ~7K leads available for outreach

Lastly, Ghost users aren’t blindly excited about AI. I’ve seen feature requests on the forum, but the community is wary of AI-generated, low-quality content. They seem more focused on things like ActivityPub, which lowers the risk of Ghost building these features natively anytime soon.

Niching down on building for Ghost specifically could cover a gap in the industry.

Most solutions I've seen require moving to an external platform and maybe publishing in Ghost through them, so having a product work almost natively with it could be an advantage.

UX in most apps I've seen is not really what I'd like. I could validate this with early users and figure out an improvement over the existing solutions.

Subscription pricing seems to be the standard and charging a lower-to-mid double digit amount monthly (with a yearly discount) would probably be expected.

And, even though quite niche, the total market seems relatively big. According to Ghost.org, they've got more than 100m blog installations, 27k active customers, 16k users in r/Ghost.

Pages like BuiltWith and Wappalyzer give you ranges between 10k and 53k active sites and even sell lead lists of at least 7k websites. GhostHunt, Ghost ShowCase and Forum are other sites I could use to get in touch with writers that match my ICP.

Last, but not least. There have been feature requests in Ghost's forum to integrate AI, but the community seems reluctant because they understandable don't want the product to be associated with low-quality, AI generated content.

They seem more focused on ActivityPub for example, which lowers the risk of the product incorporating AI in the near future.

Next Steps

So now that I know more about what's out there in the market, I feel I need to start getting demand validation.

There's also another thing bugging me that I'd like to address while reaching out to people: I recently had an eye-opening experience building a dead simple browser extension.

If the complexity of enhancing the Ghost editor via an extension turns out to be too high — so much so that it would hinder my ability to release an MVP on time — then I'd probably have to reconsider what I want to focus on.

So, first and most importantly, I'll need to make (or buy) a list of leads and get in touch with willing Ghost users to run interviews and obtain the demand validation I'm looking for.

Second, I'll use my spare time to experiment and test if what I envisioned as a first MVP would be technically viable.

I've got enough to work on until my next post in the series.

If you've read this far, thank you.

Until next time ;)