Building Ghostable & Finding Ideas by Listening Well

Source: Dev.to

It was an honor to join Matt Stauffer on the The Business of Laravel podcast to talk about my journey: from building a startup on Laravel, to selling it, and now launching Ghostable — a zero‑knowledge environment‑management platform for teams that scale.

If you want the full conversation, check out the episode. Here’s a written recap of what I shared, how Laravel shaped my path, and why env/secrets management matters more than most devs realize.

From Skateboards to SaaS

My co‑founder and I go way back — kindergarten friends, turned co‑founders.

Our first “company” was literally a skateboard deck brand we made in high school: hand‑painted boards, a rudimentary website, and a DIY hustle. That early taste of branding, marketing, and web dev stuck.

Years later, when he pitched me a security‑training idea (now known as Curricula), I was on board as the builder: drawing designs by day, coding the platform by night.

That experience — creative + code + grit — taught me that software doesn’t need a perfect launch: just momentum, iteration, and willingness to build.

Why Laravel Was the Right Move

When Curricula started (around the Laravel 4 era), I picked Laravel because the docs were clear, the community solid, and the day‑to‑day developer experience felt sustainable.

For much of Curricula’s life I was the only engineer — yet we ran a real product: hosting servers, workers, load balancing, billing, users, customer onboarding. Laravel + a lean, competent team allowed us to scale without bloat.

Even during fundraising and acquisition, when some asked “Why PHP?” — what mattered was stability, team confidence, and execution. In hindsight, Laravel was possibly my smartest tech decision.

How Ghostable Was Born

Here’s the simple but painful truth: managing .env files, secrets, API keys, and environment configs scales badly as soon as you go beyond solo‑dev.

With a growing team or multiple services, you quickly face problems:

• Secret sharing – Slack or Google Docs become the default “secret sharing” tool — risky and messy.
• Key rotation – Granting/revoking access and keeping everyone in sync becomes a pain.
• Compliance – Audit trails (who changed what and when) become a hard requirement if you want to stay serious as you grow.

Ghostable is built to solve exactly that. It’s a zero‑knowledge platform: you get E2E encryption, versioning, access control, auditing — while keeping secrets private.

Ghostable: What It Is (and How It Works)

• Zero‑knowledge by design — Secrets are encrypted locally before they leave your machine. On the backend you only store ciphertext + minimal metadata.
• Multi‑stack friendly — The backend is Laravel, but the client/CLI is TypeScript. Works across PHP, Node, any tech stack.
• Env validation & safe deploys — Validate your .env before deploy (required keys, correct types, etc.). Prevent live‑site breakages caused by misconfigurations.
• Audit trail & teamwork ready — Know who changed what, when; rotate keys; share securely with teammates — all without accidental leaks.

TL;DR — If You Care About DevOps and Secrets for Real Apps

If you’re beyond “solo dev with a .env file,” and now you’re dealing with teams, deploys, rotated keys, or compliance headaches — Ghostable might be worth a look.

If nothing else: check out the podcast episode. Or drop me a line if you want to talk about secrets, Laravel, or building SaaS as a lean founder.

Listen to the episode: The Business of Laravel – Building Ghostable & Finding Ideas by Listening Well