Heya friend!

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

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INTRO

Happy New Year!

I hope you had a wonderful holiday. My goal was to take some time off and disconnect. I'm happy to say I was quite successful at it.

In fact, I'm struggling a bit to get back into things. My time off has made me think a lot about how I need to fix my relationship with work. Also not helping is that I've been sick twice in the past month.

Otherwise, things have been going well. I've had some promising sales calls, shipped a feature and some bug fixes. I'm also getting ready for WordCamp Asia next month.

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PRODUCT

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

I'm still not back to working on the "Create Project" flow. Instead, I'm working on some customer feature requests. This cycle I shipped support for Aurora serverless database clusters.

This was a requested feature by a few customers now. It's easier (and potentially cheaper) to just use Aurora serverless instead of a fixed size database server. I still need to test it in load testing scenarios, but I'll be doing that over the next month or two.

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MARKETING

I was sick and sleeping for a good part of marketing week so didn't do much. I started working on my WordCamp Asia slides. The content is going to be largely the same as what I spoke about at Longhorn PHP last year.

That said, still not super motivated by marketing right now. Twitter is continuing to spiral out with 3rd party apps getting banned. I think that channel isn't good for me at all anymore. I'm not seeing much engagement on it since last December. Not sure Mastodon is the answer.

I have to decide what I want to focus on marketing wise. I think content marketing is still probably the best choice. Although, the threat of AI generated content is there.

One thing I'm working on with a partner is doing more load testing and sharing the results. They're also sponsoring Ymir to be in Review Signal, which is a hosting review site. I'm not too optimistic that being on there will bring me a lot of leads, but I think it might add some legitimacy.

Otherwise, I'm still fielding quite a few sales calls. They haven't led anywhere yet, but it's still good to see interest.

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BUSINESS

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

I ended up losing a customer last month and going back under 1k MRR. But we're back over the bar again. January saw quite a few trials which is really nice.

Still incredibly far from being able to work on Ymir full time. Something I discussed in my year in review. Balancing Ymir and consulting work is a lot and I feel like I'm doing a poor job at both right now.

Carl