Heya friend!

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

INTRO

Slightly delayed report since it was a holiday in Canada and the USA yesterday. I decided to push it to Tuesday. The end of August was quite busy!

Most of the product development this cycle was dictated by customer requests and support tickets. This isn't a bad place to be! It's pretty exciting to see more and more people using Ymir.

PRODUCT

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

As I mentioned, most of the product development was reactive this cycle. It's been mostly changes to the CLI. First, I fixed a few issues for customers:

• ​Dynamically adjust wp command timeout​
• ​Allow wp-cli commands to run asynchronously​
• ​Use concurrent requests to get signed asset requests​
• ​Allow the project:delete command to delete other projects​

I also added my first Easter egg to the CLI. This is a fun little thing to do to breathe life into the product. I'm sure I'll add more in the future lol

I also worked on surfacing usage metrics from your AWS account. In the long term, you'll be able to see graphs of these metrics on the dashboard like you can with Laravel Vapor. But for now, you can see them using the environment:metrics command.

Here's what it shows for my personal site:

While Ymir will never be able to do a full cost estimate of your AWS infrastructure costs, I still think it's good to have the ability to get some insight. I plan on adding other metric commands for the database and cache.

MARKETING

Marketing week continues to be a bit of a struggle. I'm still debating wether I should do a bit of cold emails or not. For now, I'm continuing to do my usual documentation push writing guides.

​How to configure your environment for Lambda scaling >>​

This is a pretty important guide. More and more customers are signing up because of WooCommerce scaling issues. I've done a lot of testing with my friend Julien. But I hadn't written down everything that we found.

This guide resumes all the things we found out scaling WooCommerce to handle thousands of carts at the same time. So if someone needs to set up a project to handle situations like this, the guide will walk them through the entire process, including how to select the correct database size.

I also did a Q&A video explaining what serverless is. I discuss what serverless is, what it means, the name, the fact there are still servers, but why there's still a difference.

This was in response to a Twitter thread I saw two weeks ago. I will probably write an article that goes into more detail. But I felt it was a good question for a video.

BUSINESS

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

August was definitely the most chaotic month to date! I tweeted the stats for the month.

Carl Alexander @twigpress Not the best month for @YmirApp, (especially compared to last month!) but I'm grateful there's been some growth almost every month. :D pic.twitter.com/7p8Tpeh9nW August 31st 2021 0 Retweets 8 Likes

I got up to 16 customers at some point, which had me really excited. But I had a cancellation at the end of the month so the total subscribers ended up being 15. It's still a net gain of one customer for the month.

I'm nervous to see how September plays out. I'd feel better if I averaged 3 or more net subscribers per month. Right now, I still feel like this is a house of cards that might collapse at any time.

I also remind myself a lot that this is a marathon and not a race. I can only go as fast as the market allows me to. So I just gotta keep running :)

Carl