Heya friend!

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

INTRO

Thank you to everyone who reached out after the report. Talking to a few people about doing a bit of consulting. I spent some time during the cycle on talking to people about that.

I've continued to have a decent amount of meetings during product week. So this kinda put a damper on product development this cycle. I'm starting to be a bit wary about meeting overload. I might have to start thinking more seriously about when people can schedule meetings with me if this continues.

Marketing week was better. I got a decent amount of things done. Wrote an article and did a Q&A video. I also had an idea of a marketing channel to try out. More on that in the marketing section.

PRODUCT

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

As I mentioned, this wasn't the most productive product cycle. The whole week, I worked on the Relay object cache for the Ymir plugin. I finished and committed it.

I didn't release the new plugin version yet though. I still need to do a bit more work to make sure I can test the code on GitHub. I also want to do some more testing to make sure there aren't any major issues.

MARKETING

For marketing week, most of my focus was on writing another article. Usually I try to do smaller articles so I can write them quickly. This one ended up being longer, and I joked about it on Twitter.

Carl Alexander @twigpress Me: This should be a nice short article Also me: Guess this is a how-to guide now October 26th 2021 0 Retweets 8 Likes

The article wasn't on serverless for a change! Instead, I talked about page caching with a CDN. This is something Ymir does, but I noticed that not a lot of hosting companies or plugins did this. So I figured it'd be an interesting topic to talk about.

​A look at WordPress page caching with a CDN >>​

Outside of that, I recorded my Do the Woo podcast. Me and Till talked WooCommerce performance. It was really great conversation.

Do the Woo 🎙️ WooCommerce Builder Community @DotheWoo If you want to get into some serious dev talk around WooCommerce performance, listen in as we chat with @tillkruss and @twigpress dothewoo.io/developers-dri… pic.twitter.com/f2W4BpAMa6 October 26th 2021 2 Retweets 2 Likes

Bob liked it so much that he asked us if we'd like to come on once a month. We both said yes, so that's great! It's a lot of work to produce a podcast. I'm really glad I can piggyback on someone else's as a marketing channel lol

I also did a Q&A video about CarlBoard. I'm surprised it took so long for someone to ask why I had that in the background haha

I didn't do any cold outreach this cycle. I hope to do some next cycle.

That said, I had an epiphany about a marketing channel I could use. It's doing webinars. I'm doing a Twitter poll for a week to see if there's any interest.

Carl Alexander @twigpress So I don't know why I didn't have this idea sooner, but thinking of doing a webinar for @YmirApp. Doing a poll to check interest. Since I'm talking about it a lot lately, I'm thinking, "How to scale #WooCommerce with #serverless" Open to another topic tho, reply to let me know! October 29th 2021 3 Retweets 1 Likes

I'm not sure how many responses I expect to get. But I don't want to spend a month or more working on it to only have no one show up. So the poll is step 1. Then I'll probably do a sign up form.

I'm aiming to do the webinar last week of November or first week of December. Not sure if it'll happen. But definitely want to try doing one this year.

BUSINESS

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

Everything is still pretty flat. I got one trial this cycle. It'll convert some time next cycle if all goes well. This would put me at 15 subscribers.

Otherwise, it's still pretty quiet. I had the most sign ups ever this month, so that's good. But I need to get more people to start a trial.

I've also had a few sales calls. I enjoy doing then, but it's a slow process. People seem eager and ready to start. But then they ghost for a few months lol

We'll see if I can finally convert someone with them.

Carl