Heya friend!

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

INTRO

Well, we did it, fam! I finally reached $1k MRR. Ymir can officially pay my rent. (That's in theory! I still don't pay myself any money from Ymir.)

Otherwise, it's been a quiet December so far. I took last weekend off completely for the first time in months. (Binge watched Andor and played some games!) That was both a good and bad thing.

It was good because I didn't have my usual guilt whenever I take any sort of break. (Not a healthy mindset btw!) It was bad because I really feel a dam broke and I think I need to slow down a bit.

I'm also planning to take (or try to 😅) some time completely off for the holidays. (More gaming and resting.) I don't know if I'll pull it off, but I'll try! I'm going to set an out of office message and everything.

PRODUCT

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

No progress on the create project flow this cycle. I had a customer find a bunch of issues with the CloudFront image CDN that I fixed. This was good as I want the image CDN to be a feature people are really excited about.

It also gave me the opportunity to work more on it and a new feature. When you use the image CDN, WordPress won't generate any other image sizes anymore. You upload the original image and then the image CDN will take care of doing all the resizes.

MARKETING

Marketing week was pretty quiet. It was after my weekend off and I just struggled to find the motivation for it. I did write another thread on open source sustainability because Ymir now donates every 20th subscription to an open source project. 🎉

Carl Alexander @twigpress One thing I always wanted to do with @YmirApp is to use it as a vehicle to support various causes. Almost from the start, I started donating part of every subscription fee to Stripe Climate. I started with 2% and then bumped it up to 5%. But that was also step one. December 7th 2022 2 Retweets 9 Likes

Otherwise, I've started working on my year in review. This is an important exercise for me, even if it's not marketing Ymir directly. I talk about Ymir a lot because it's a large part of my life.

And much like writing these reports, these year in reviews are a journaling tool for me. There are larger arcing thoughts that I have that don't really fit well in these reports. I also use it to journal my personal life, which is also good for me.

Besides that, I can officially say that I'll be speaking at the first WordCamp Asia next year! I missed the announcement in November! 😅 It'll be another serverless talk, but I'm not sure I'll need to write an article for it.

I'll need to look into it after the holidays.

BUSINESS

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

As I said in the intro, I officially hit my $1k MRR milestone. I shared the news on Twitter which always feels good!

Carl Alexander @twigpress We're Dec 1st and I can officially say that @YmirApp made 1k MRR for the first time! 🎉 Not sure if it'll last this month, but it's a milestone either way. The next one is when I can switch to working on it full time! Who knows when that'll be 😅 Stats: ymirapp.com/open pic.twitter.com/3MN0RZowql December 1st 2022 3 Retweets 34 Likes

That said, it's more of a psychological milestone than a practical one. The only milestone that counts is when I'll be able to work on Ymir full time. That's still a FAR way off.

I honestly don't think I'll hit it next year. But those are thoughts better left for my year in review!

Carl