Heya friend!

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

INTRO

This has been another less than ideal cycle in terms of progress on the Ymir product itself. I spent all of product week working with a customer who hired me to do a migration. It's good because it's money for me, but not so great because I haven't touched the Ymir product itself.

It hasn't been all in vain because it's helped me figure out what features my current customers really need. So I've adjusted my backlog to reflect that. But I think product development will be slow for a bit longer. I have another migration that will kick off next month.

This week I've been traveling for the first time since the pandemic started. It's been a lot less productive because of that. But I still managed to do a bit on the marketing front, which is really more important than product development at this point.

PRODUCT

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

So, as I said, product development has stopped while I did that migration work. That said, it's helped me prioritize a few things, one of them I hope to accomplish in the coming week.

As part of migration, I've been working with some cool plugins like Nitropack which I pretty much got working on Ymir. The performance of Ymir + Nitropack is kinda nuts.

Carl Alexander @twigpress Getting @getnitropack working with @YmirApp 🚀🚀🚀 pic.twitter.com/UK5HFSHB2W November 9th 2021 0 Retweets 2 Likes

I'm really impressed with the Nitropack product. There's a lot of what it does that I'd like Ymir to do without having to use the product. (e.g. automatic image optimization/resizing) But there are some things I'm not sure if I'll ever have Ymir do. (e.g. completely rewrite the HTML to game Google page speed)

But it's not a plugin that does this like WP-Rocket or other optimization plugins. It does all the optimization and and HTML rewriting through an API. WordPress only caches the rewritten HTML and Nitropack hosts the optimized assets.

But they're running on AWS with CloudFront as their CDN like Ymir. So it's all possible for me to do!

MARKETING

As I mentioned, I was traveling most of this week for the first time since COVID started. I got to hang out with friends I haven't seen in two years, so I didn't work a ton. But I went into it with one goal in mind, finishing my alternative pages, which I managed to do!

Carl Alexander @twigpress This whole @YmirApp cycle has been kind of a write off, but I'm happy I kinda powered through and finally published the alternative pages I'd been working on. I still think they're kinda 💩, but better than nothing I guess? lol pic.twitter.com/bXj2AgFTap November 12th 2021 0 Retweets 1 Likes

I don't know if I like them. I had a really specific idea in mind for them. I wanted them to come off as honest. I think Ymir is a great product, but it's not without flaws.

I had some initial feedback which was that I was maybe too balanced. I had pros and cons for everything, as opposed to just the cons of the current hosting solution and pros for Ymir. It wasn't necessary to do that since people viewing these pages are closer to the purchase decision.

That said, even with the feedback, I kept the long format text below the pros and cons the same. This is my honest opinion of why I think Ymir might be right for you. I do talk about the pros of your current hosting solution. But I also talk about where it falls short and where Ymir can help.

Anyway, if you're a marketer and have feedback, I'd love to hear it :)

Otherwise, I wrote a thread on Twitter to Corey Quinn (he's hilarious and worth a follow) who writes Last week in AWS a really good newsletter if you work with AWS. He wrote about the unfulfilled promise of serverless. It's a good article, but I created Ymir to solve most of the issues he mentions in the article so I wanted to let him know about it.

Carl Alexander @twigpress @QuinnyPig if you ever want to troll @mike_julian with serverless WordPress, I'll be there for the memes. That's literally what I built 🤣 ymirapp.com pic.twitter.com/wWbG7OPp9Z November 10th 2021 0 Retweets 1 Likes

Sadly, he didn't reply. I don't know if he's read it either. But I'd be curious to hear what you think if you have any opinions on what he's written vs what I've talked about. Maybe do it on Twitter so we get his attention haha

BUSINESS

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

Not a lot of news on the business front. There aren't any new trials. It's been so slow on my side these past few weeks that I'm not too surprised.

If you weren't aware, Pagely was acquired by GoDaddy this week. There was this great Post Status interview with Josh which I really resonated with.

I started Ymir with similar goals as Josh and Sally. I didn't want to go the VC route or get financing. I've already said no a few times to people for seed money.

They did things their own way, on their own terms and invented the managed WordPress hosting category. That's huge. And it's hard to not look at it and look at what I'm trying to do right now with serverless.

He also talks about how you have to keep your doors open and talk to people. Already I know that I've had collaboration opportunities because I keep doors open and I'm always willing to talk. This is how business works and it's how you can get people that believe in you to help. Keep talking.

I'm already so grateful to people that have helped me. Especially in the last few months, as growth stalled.

Carl