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 Monday!

I'm a bit delayed sending this report out. (It's also not really edited 😅) I got back home at midnight from WordCamp Phoenix. I gave the serverless WordPress talk I gave at WordCamp Asia last year.

The talk went great and the WordCamp itself was surprisingly good. I didn't expect to network as well as at a flagship WordCamp. But I did so it feels good!

I also managed to get a lot of work done on Ymir. I was talking about it at WordCamp. I'm more productive when I'm travelling. It's weird! 😅 Also why I'm looking forward to another long stay in Tokyo. I have big plans for my time there.

On the business side, everything is flat. No trials, no cancellations.

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PRODUCT

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

In the last report, I mentioned that I found a lot of small issues with Ymir and ElastiCache. I managed to tackle most of them. You can now:

• Modify a Redis cache cluster using the Ymir CLI tool.
• Create or modify a Redis cache cluster to use cheaper Graviton instances.
• Newly created (not retroactive) Redis cache clusters come with a custom parameter group. They also use allkeys-lru as their eviction policy which caused some issues before.

I also created a new warning system when validating project configuration files. This is the first step to handling the evolution of the ymir.yml configuration file. For now, I just want to be able to say when there are things in the configuration file you could remove.

I have a few other changes I didn't manage to finish up this cycle like PHP 8.3 support. This should be out next cycle.

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MARKETING

In terms of marketing, WordCamp Phoenix felt really good. I had a lot of good conversations. Not sure if that converts to sales.

I worked on the documentation some while I was in Phoenix. I wrote a guide on how to install the GD extension if a plugin needs it.

There are some other documentation changes that I didn't manage to wrap up as well.

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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.

As I mentioned earlier, everything is flat. I talked a lot with two hosting companies at WordCamp Phoenix. It's so clear I'm still super early, but it's on their radar more and more.

I'm still thinking about pricing a lot. I don't like it. It's going to change. I'm just not sure to what.

On the flight back home, I listened to this podcast on ONCE. It was a really insightful discussion. But one thing they discuss that I'm realizing and thinking about is that SaaS needs volume. Especially when selling to SMB or prosumers.

I want to offer something to SMB and prosumers. But it's clear (and I mentioned it in my year in review) that I can't get the volume from the $39/month plan to make a business of Ymir right now or maybe ever.

I want to keep the $39/month plan. But I need to figure out what to do so that most of my customers want the middle tier plan. That way, I don't need as much volume to succeed.

Carl