Heya friend!

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

INTRO

I ended last cycle feeling very overwhelmed. This continued into the first week of this cycle. I took a conscious decision to try to take it easier since I felt I was walking into a burnout.

Carl Alexander @twigpress I haven't had one of these in a while. But I think this week might be a "Fuck everything, I'm playing some games" week. July 19th 2022 0 Retweets 10 Likes

Still felt guilty if I didn't work on Ymir a bit. 🤣 So I started work on the refresh of the dashboard. I also edited another course video.

PRODUCT

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

I talked about my frustration trying to design the dashboard of Ymir last update. I went ahead and tested Shuffle to help me design the dashboard.

It ended up being a good recommendation. (Especially after reading how someone paid $46k to redesign three pages. 😬) It's not a perfect solution, but it helped me try to setup a few screens and make them all work together as a whole.

For now, I'm still working on main dashboard screen.

Carl Alexander @twigpress So @magicroundabout suggestion of @ShuffleEditor wasn't bad. It's given me some more good templates that allow for a more consistent feel. I started working on the updated design last week. I just need to find some good examples of tables/lists with Tailwind. pic.twitter.com/qfgZ8hjXeh twitter.com/twigpress/stat… Carl Alexander @twigpress Are there any product designers that generate HTML mockups with tailwind? (Kinda like TailwindUI) I'd love to have 2-3 nice screens for @YmirApp that I can use as a baseline. Everyone seems to be a kick ass product designer except me 🥲 Also not sure how much it costs lol July 25th 2022 0 Retweets 5 Likes

MARKETING

Continued working on the Ymir video course. I'm still editing and breaking down my huge 30 minute recording into smaller videos. I finished editing and published a small one that discusses why you'd want to use Ymir.

I think I might have spent too much time trying to find memes and make it a bit less dry. Not sure if it was worth the extra 3-4 hours I spent editing it. But it's an experiment.

BUSINESS

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

Finishing the month down one subscriber. Still stuck in this plateau of 22-23 customers. It's definitely a bummer that I've only net gained three customers since my second year started.

Somehow it still doesn't feel as dire as the plateau I had last year. Some people would debate whether to pivot to something else or wind things down. That's what Peter Suhm and Matt Wensing were discussing in their podcast this week.

I still love working on Ymir. I think I can get it to a point where it can pay me.

That said, I'm not there now. So I'm still stuck in this difficult bootstrapping period where I have to balance consulting to make money and working on Ymir. It also doesn't look like I'll get out of it any time soon.

That said, it still leads to rewarding work.

Carl Alexander @twigpress I don't take on a lot of consulting clients. But always makes me happy to get message like this from a new client 💗 pic.twitter.com/JOZiIuX0Qx July 29th 2022 0 Retweets 10 Likes

But anyone who's bootstrapped through this period will tell you it's definitely mentally draining. It's hard to not feel like every instant not spent working is a moment not spent earning some more runway money or making the product better. However, that leads to burnout which is an even worse place to be in.

I have to constantly remind myself that this is a marathon and not a race. 🤣

Carl