Heya friend!

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

INTRO

A bit of a delay for this report. My dad was in the hospital last week, and I spent a lot of time there. Luckily, he's doing a lot better now. 🙏

It did impact things. I didn't work on Ymir as much, even though it's the only thing I have going right now.

That said, this created enough of a delay that the podcast I recorded with Jason Cohen is out now! This report will be my thoughts on it as well as sharing where I'm at with the price increases.

Let's dive in!

First, let's begin with the podcast itself:

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It was 3h, and he trimmed it to under 2h. From the comments, it seems he cut a bit too much, and it's noticeable. No hard feelings, as I'm a chatty person and he felt that was the right thing to do.

I don't have it in me to listen to it. Everything is a bit of a blur anyway. I'm not even sure I'd be able to tell what he cut out. I have a lot of verbal tics, so I'm sure he cut those out. 😅

It was very intense emotionally leading up to the recording. (I know talking to other guests that I wasn't the only one feeling that way!) Afterwards I felt quite drained for a few days. It's impressive that I made all the Ymir for Agencies changes right after. Proud that I acted fast and decisively with that.

I'm still so grateful to Jason for the opportunity. It was so nice to just have someone care about my business a bit. I don't really get much of that. Few people really understand what I built or how it works, so they can't really help me sell it or build a business around it.

That's why this journey feels so lonely. I don't have advisors, mentors, anyone really. That's why Paul's passing was so hard. Having him dismiss the whole BuiltFast adventure with, "Shit happens" (Not sure if it's in the podcast or if he cut it out) really stung me. It's still the most visceral thing I remember from it.

I don't mean this as a reproach to Jason. You don't get to where he is without a certain "matter-of-factness" to you. This stuff happens, and you have to roll with the punches. He's right, but it also doesn't make it hurt less.

I don't want to dwell on it more than that.

The fact is that I'm so happy I did this. It's given me another chance to make something out of Ymir. We don't know if Ymir for Agencies will actually work. There's so much we didn't get to cover, like how to actually sell it. But it's an attempt to make something cohesive as opposed to what I was doing before.

So far, I have one customer on the new $999/month plan. I'm still working on a second one. I think those are the only two existing customers where that makes sense. For everyone else, I'm negotiating individually.

The good news is that I should go from $1,000 MRR to 2,500-3,000 MRR in the coming month. That's a pretty big jump. I know I'm already quite lucky to have a business making that much. Most people don't reach that milestone.

That said, it's not enough to allow me to work on Ymir full-time. I really wish it had put me there. Consulting has dried up a lot on my side. I have some leads, but I might also need a job. We'll see.

Now that Ymir makes quite a bit more, it can supplement my income more. But I should really reinvest the money into the business. I really need help to do sales, I think.

I'm also working on a redesign for Ymir as well. (You can see the work in progress here.) But I'll talk more about it when it's live. The open dashboard will probably go when that happens.

I think I'll leave it at that. This is all very overwhelming to me still. There's all the stuff for Ymir, but, like I said, I'm not on Ymir full time either, and that also needs my attention right now.

Carl