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

A bit delayed sending this update out since, as the title says, I caught COVID. It was pretty mild overall. I'm ok and negative now, but it threw a wrench in my last two weeks. I didn't really feel well enough to prep the update like I normally do.

Before testing positive, I felt very tired. I mentioned exhaustion last update. Maybe it was all COVID related, but I'm still monitoring myself for a potential burnout. I haven't felt especially great since I came down from the high of WCUS.

On the business side, it's been a really brutal month. I had my worst month since October last year. It's looking like I'm going to lose all my gains from the last three months. Also, it's looking like my Carl-as-a-Service contract might be over.

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PRODUCT

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

Did some work on the CLI this cycle. I had these ideas for commands around logs I really wanted to do. So I used COVID as an excuse to work on them 😅

There's two new commands to check logs from your Lambda function. One of them is a query command. It displays the most recent log entries, similar to just using the tail command.

The other command continuously monitors and retrieves the most recent log entries. It's a lot like doing the tail -f command. The main difference is that it polls every 30 seconds instead of doing a live feed.

I also added the ability to debug project builds. This allows you to look at how Ymir built the project. You can also edit files (to add traces and such) before the CLI packages everything and ships it to AWS.

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MARKETING

I'm having a bit of an existential crisis around marketing. First, I just haven't been doing a good job at it. That's on me.

The larger issue is that I'm not sure what I should do for marketing. I don't think educating WordPress developers is the way to go anymore. The skill gap is just too big. Like even being the "Vercel for WordPress", how many WordPress developers are actually comfortable with Next.js or Vercel? I don't even think there are that many.

I also switched my pricing to target more enterprise-y customers like large agencies and hosting companies. I don't know how to market to them besides just doing networking and good old sales.

Do cold email? I'm not even sure how many of these agencies there are to target. I feel I know most of them already and I'm already talking to them.

I think there's maybe the product angle part I could explore. Using Ymir to build a WordPress based hosted product. Maybe I could build a sample product project like I did for the headless site.

That's why I think I might focus back on improving the documentation and doing videos. This is good evergreen content. It works for both the smaller and larger customers.

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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.

Yeah, so it didn't take too long to hit that low! 🤣

As I said in the intro, absolutely brutal month. Lots of churned customers. Still not a lot of trials. Might be losing my CaaS customer.

I feel like I'm just waiting for these partnerships to either work or not work out. I guess that's the enterprise sales life. Still talking with this hosting company that sounds like a car. They still seem excited and that's good! But it's probably a 12 month process with a company that size if it works out at all.

Bottom line. My need for consulting isn't going away anytime soon!

Carl