Heya friend!

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

INTRO

Big update today!

I recorded the podcast with Jason Cohen last week. (It's not out yet since there's a backlog.) It wasn't a pleasant experience, but we came out of the 3h session with a game plan!

That game plan is: Ymir for Agencies​

The old pricing page is now gone. The $39/month plan is gone. I've removed all the self-serve ways to upgrade your plan.

I'll dig into it more in the marketing section.

PRODUCT

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

As I mentioned last update, I'm focusing on marketing in the near term. I'm still slowly working on temporary security credentials.

Some of the preliminary work for it has already shipped. That said, the feature isn't live yet.

MARKETING

Alright, let's talk a bit about what came out of the podcast with Jason!

We all knew the $39/month plan was no good. My problem was that I didn't know what I should replace it with. While I feel I tried pretty hard to find agencies for Ymir, Jason felt I didn't present a cohesive story and I wasn't charging enough.

The new "Ymir for Agencies" is very different. It's closer to another take on "Carl-as-a-Service". But instead of being a bit of a joke, it's now a very productized offering that matches the experience I gave to my most successful customers.

The offering follows a clear purchase path:

1. An optional $500 strategy session to review the agency's current infrastructure setup, the problems they're having, and make recommendations for their team.
2. If they decide to proceed with Ymir, we'll scope a custom implementation and team training project. The goal is to move one application to Ymir and train the agency to use Ymir for other projects. This creates a proper handoff, so I'm not embedding myself in the agency.
3. Once the project wraps up, they're on the Ymir agency plan at $999/month. The requirement is a one-year commitment.

I'm still tweaking a few things on the page based on the feedback I've been getting. (Feel free to reply with your own!) But it's a big change from before.

I'm clearly doing B2B now. This is also a 25x price increase versus the $39/month plan.

Another thing we discuss in the podcast is that this is more aligned with my strengths as a teacher. I'll be able to do content for this. Speaking at conferences (but the right ones!) is a valid channel. There's also an opportunity to brand myself as the expert more.

So yeah, that's the short of it. I'll have more to talk about as I work on the offering more. I literally did this over the weekend. 😅

I do plan on doing a "Ymir for Hosting" page as well to have some marketing for Vector and BuiltFast as well.

BUSINESS

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

On the business side, there's two main immediate things.

The first one is I'm going to raise prices on existing customers. So I'm going to have to have these uncomfortable discussions. I still haven't started thinking through how to handle that, but I'll be working on that this week.

The other thing is I need to find and sell this new offering to agencies. I need to find prospects, sell, and do all that stuff. Not quite sure where to start with that, but that's also part of what I need working on.

Carl