Heya friend!

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

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INTRO

Slow return to work last week. August is a generally slow month, so kinda going along with it. I remind myself that this is a marathon and not a race.

I think how you frame things is really important when starting a business. Psychology is as much your enemy as market forces.

And speaking of framing, there's been a lot of small milestones since we last spoke! They're little things, but they make me optimistic about the product. I'll talk about them in business section.

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PRODUCT

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

During the last product cycle about a month ago, I added support for a web application firewall. A web application firewall is useful if you want some extra DDoS security for your project.

By default, AWS will offer some protection with AWS Shield Standard. But it doesn't protect your WordPress site (known as layer 7 attacks). So if you want to protect yourself against those, you need a web application firewall.

There are different configuration options you can use. By default, it'll protect your application against known threats such as injection attacks, WordPress attacks, known bad data centers and more. You can also configure it to protect you against bots. Or you can do rate limiting, which is useful if you're under a DDoS attack.

You can learn more about it in the guide.

The rest of the product cycle I spent on the web dashboard. This part of the product I hadn't touched in over 8 months. There were bugs and a lot left to build out.

So I fixed known bugs. I started polishing it some more. There's still a lot to do and features I'd like to add. That'll probably what I'll work on this August.

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MARKETING

Marketing week was my first week back. Was kinda slow, but did a few things. First, there was the firewall guide and documentation I linked earlier.

I also published a new article. It was mostly done already, but I had a lot of editing and polishing left to do. Did that and published it.

​The serverless revolution is alive and well in the PHP world >>

This was an article with a headline designed for hacker news and /r/PHP. Unfortunately, it didn't do well on either. I thought it might at least do well on Reddit.

I also did a Q&A video:

• ​What would you tell your younger self?​

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BUSINESS

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

It's been a while since we talked business! July was a great month. I got 4 subscribers and lost none. I'm up to 14 subscribers, which is more than halfway towards paying my rent.

For August, there was a weird bug with Stripe that made it seem like someone cancelled and resubscribed. Was just someone changing their credit card lol. I do have an upcoming cancellation which puts me at net 1 lost for the month currently.

I also had a couple of milestones. First, I passed 1,000 commits for the Ymir application. Not business related, but it's a fun milestone for me.

Second, Ymir passed the 1,000 deployment milestone during my time off. This one was really fantastic to me because it shows people are using the product. I'm probably 80% of those 1,000 deployments. But I'm probably 20% of those last 100 which is great.

Another cool thing came from the PHP developer survey JetBrains (they make PHPStorm) did. 9% of developers now use serverless to host PHP applications.

I think 1/10 developers is amazing! Especially considering that it's not a well known hosting method still. I'm sure it'll go up as more people learn about it and the benefits.

Carl