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

As mentioned in the previous report, I'm currently in Tokyo for the next five weeks. (It's my 40th birthday gift to myself.) I came here after going to Thailand for WordCamp Asia.

My talk at WordCamp Asia was probably the best talk I've ever given if I base myself on the feedback I got. It also got me talking to a lot of people from the WordPress ecosystem. I've had meetings with plugin company and agency CEOs, hosting companies and a core WordPress developers.

I want to hope it was a watershed moment. But I don't want to get my hopes up too much. Business isn't growing any faster. In fact, probably losing net subscribers this month.

Being in Tokyo has reminded me how much I've sacrificed financially trying to bring this to life. I started working on serverless WordPress in 2019, and still can't live off of it after four years. It's never fun to have these thoughts, but it happens from time to time.

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PRODUCT

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

Support for tags is almost done. It's been a monumental task affecting a large part of the application. I've had a few more customers asking for it since I started working for it. A lot of them need a more granular way to track cost and tags are the way to do that.

I'm hoping I can wrap it up this coming week.

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MARKETING

I always think that giving a conference talk will be a mediocre marketing effort at best. But not this time. This talk really did incredibly well. I'm not sure how to carry the momentum from that. I can't speak at every major WordCamp about it.

For now, I've been doing a lot of follow-ups from conversations at WordCamp Asia. I have more of them this week with two agencies. I also have dinner with a VP in Tokyo as well.

My load testing video also did a lot of work. I'm glad that I did it in the end. It definitely got some conversations started.

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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.

February had some good growth. March isn't looking too good. Will probably have a net loss of customers. There haven't been many sign ups either.

Like I mentioned, it's becoming financially harder for me to sustain this. I don't have as much consulting income and I don't have as much bandwidth for it either. I'm really hoping I can get 2-3 more Carl-as-a-Service customers with the leads of WordCamp Asia.

Let's see how the next two weeks shape up!

Carl