Heya friend!

Carl here. You signed up to receive updates about Ymir, the WordPress serverless DevOps platform that I’m building.

INTRO

We're finally here!

Yesterday, I used the World Cup final as a cover to perform the migration of Ymir off of Laravel Vapor. (Shows you how invested I was in it 😅) I'd been working on this for the past few weeks, so everything went smoothly, including the MySQL to PostgreSQL migration.

It's a bittersweet ending for me. Ymir only exists because Taylor built Laravel Vapor. I always thought it would be a product that would co-exists with mine. Much like SpinupWP and Laravel Forge.

The future still feels kind of uncertain. Paul's passing is still fresh. Business is still declining.

That said, I'm happy I can finally move on from being a WordPress platform. I plan on working on rebranding and repositioning the product. That's the next big milestone.

PRODUCT

You can always view the history of Ymir's product development at https://ymirapp.com/changelog.

Now that Ymir deploys itself, I'm terrified of bricking the platform! 🤣 Before it didn't matter since Vapor deployed the platform. Now, if something breaks, there's no one to save me! 😅

That's why I love having such an extensive test suite! But a test suite only goes so far. Something could still slip through the cracks.

That's why I plan on adding more safeguards and better deployment health checks to the platform. It's not a top priority versus the marketing. But that's what I plan on working on when I work on the product.

MARKETING

It's marketing time, and I'm not sure what to do. 🙃

I've been pushing this off until l'd moved off Vapor. That's done now. There's no excuse now not to focus on marketing.

Some of it, like rebranding to a PHP platform, has been a long time coming. But I think I need to do more than that. I'm thinking I need to move out of the B2C space.

I really thought Ymir could be a B2C product, but I just don't think it makes sense anymore. B2C marketing and distribution are harder than ever. I don't really have the appetite to fight for attention against Taylor and Laravel Cloud. (Or some other VC-funded company.)

The place I consistently see value for Ymir is in B2B. Most of my customers are businesses using Ymir for the critical part of their business that needs to scale and stay secure. Getting best-in-class cloud infrastructure without hiring someone to do it for you is valuable. I also hope I can do B2B marketing better than B2C.

Anyway, doing that means rethinking my pricing again. All of that will be part of the rebranding effort.

BUSINESS

You can always view Ymir's up-to-date business metrics at ymirapp.com/open. They're updated every 10 minutes.

Lost two customers last month. Getting close to going under $1000 MRR 🥲 Combined with Paul's passing, it hit me pretty hard.

But you pick yourself back up and you continue. 💪

Carl