Heya friend!

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

INTRO

Heya!

I hope you had a wonderful summer! I've been slowly getting back into the spin of things. I think taking a bit of time away from Ymir was helpful. I'm excited to get back to working on it.

The business itself is still not doing that great. I think I'm near the subscriber floor. That said, I'm not getting any new trials, so there's no growth at the moment.

Also I'll be at WordCamp US next week. Come say hi if you're around! 💖

PRODUCT

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

August was a pretty busy month! Lots of small changes in the changelog. There are a few other ones I didn't mention in the changelog as well.

There are some other things in the pipeline based on some client needs. I'd like to wrap up the activity log as well. I think, for the near future, my main focus for the product will be to just work on things that excite me.

MARKETING

I started brainstorming a "Why serverless?" page where I can talk more about the benefits. I had a story from one customer whose client is a huge corporation with a $200 million AWS discount. (That's right! A discount haha) They sent their security team at Ymir and the only thing they found was that WordPress was out of date. 😅
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They're really cool stories and I don't have anywhere to highlight them. So I'm thinking a page highlighting the benefits of serverless would be good.

BUSINESS

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

So yeah, things aren't super great for the business at the moment. No trials and I'm getting really close to going back under $1,000 MRR. I do think I'm close to the floor subscriber wise. Over half of my customers deploy each month at the moment.

Laracon was the other week, and I was waiting to see what Taylor would announce since he was going to talk about his next hosting product. He ended up announcing Laravel Cloud.

I've started to think Ymir might not work as just as an infrastructure management solution. I don't think the WordPress market has a strong need for something like this. Although I still think there might be something for hosting companies as a white label solution. (Part of the reason I want to go to CloudFest next year.)

I've come to accept I might need to do hosting, although I don't think I have the appetite for it. So I was curious how Taylor would handle that as a scrappy bootstrapper. However, a few days after Laracon, Taylor also announced he took funding to build Laravel Cloud. 🙃

Taylor Otwell ☁️ 🦹 @taylorotwell I'm excited to announce that Laravel has raised a $57M Series A in partnership with Accel. I believe that Laravel is the most productive way to build full-stack web applications, and Laravel Cloud will be the platform for shipping those applications that this community deserves. 8:21 AM • Sep 5, 2024 662 Retweets 4073 Likes Read 332 replies

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I love working with PHP and Laravel. I wish I could do that full-time! So I'm excited to see what Taylor does with the money to take on Vercel and Next.js.

That said, it highlights that making a hosting platform around Ymir is going to be super hard. There are some exceptions, like Kinsta, which was mostly bootstrapped.

Anyhow, these are some of my thoughts at the moment!

Carl