Heya friend!

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

INTRO

Happy New Year!

I hope you had a wonderful holiday. COVID is wrecking through Canada. Quebec has been lockdown, and we also had a curfew for two weeks.

I didn't end up being able to take two weeks. Only the first week of January. This isn't ideal as I still feel overstretched, but it'll do for now.

Outside of that, it's back to work as usual. I ramped things back up pretty quickly.

PRODUCT

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

I've spent most of this cycle working on the Ymir CLI. I did some quality of life changes. I still have some more that I didn't get to finish during the cycle.

Beyond that, I'm starting to think about larger features I want to work on. I'm struggling a bit with them because they're large and require a decent amount of research and discovery. They don't fit well in the current two-week cycle. I discussed it on Twitter:

Carl Alexander @twigpress I really think having 1 week development/1 week marketing has been good for @YmirApp. As @dagorenouf harps a lot about. Marketing is important! But really starting to wonder how I can work on larger features for @YmirApp. January 20th 2022 0 Retweets 5 Likes

For now, I'm sticking with the two-week cycle. I'm working on another paid migration, so it doesn't quite make sense to go full time on larger features yet. I also need more time to think about how I want to restructure things.

MARKETING

I published the huge CloudFront guide I worked on last month! It did well and I'm still happy with my overall content marketing strategy. I also tweeted about the article a bit.

Carl Alexander @twigpress Last year, I wrote about using a CDN to do #WordPress page caching. It lets you have 20ms response times worldwide. I think everyone should have the ability to have that. That's why @YmirApp has it as a default. January 18th 2022 1 Retweets 4 Likes

I don't have larger marketing plans at the moment. I don't think I can take on doing a webinar at the moment. If anything, I'd like to maybe do more YouTube videos.

I've also applied to two conferences: Dutch PHP Conference and WordCamp Europe. I really miss conferences as a marketing channel. So I'm excited to see some coming back for the summer. I just hope it'll be safe to be together again by then. 🤞

BUSINESS

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

Business continues to grow. I have 3 active trials currently and I'm feeling confident that most will convert. I haven't had cancellations either which feels good! This means that I should hit 20 subscribers soon.

I'm still far from Ymir paying much of anything. In fact, I make so little my new accountant (last one ghosted...) said I didn't have to pay taxes lol! But it's still progress 😃

I'm thinking a lot about how I want Ymir to fit my life. I discussed it in my year in review. For now, with COVID, I don't need to worry too much about it. But long term I want Ymir to be my garden. But for that, it needs to keep growing to a point where it can support me.

Carl