Heya friend!

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

INTRO

I hope everyone in the USA had a great Thanksgiving! 🦃

Well, if October was busy, November was even more so! I had a lot of contract work. I was also lucky that some clients postponed some of it until this month or next year.

One difference with October is that some of my consulting work was Ymir related! This allowed me to get some bug fixes in, as well as start planning for some upcoming features. 🥳

I've also had some real great data about how serverless WooCommerce works during Black Friday. The data is amazing and makes me so excited about the technology. The client is over the moon as well.

Business is still slow. I added one customer. (Although it's someone I've been trying to get to try the product for a little while!) I don't have any trials currently.

PRODUCT

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

As I said, I've had some consulting work related to Ymir. This has given me the opportunity to work on some things. Right now, the only visible changes are small bug fixes to the CLI and PHP runtime.

That said, there's a larger change coming to the CLI (hopefully) this week. I'd been having a lot of support issues around the database import and export commands. I was just unhappy with how it worked. The commands were just wrappers around mysqldump and mysql commands.

I've now reworked both commands to perform the database import and export in PHP. No more relying on other command line tools! I expected the performance to be worse, but it's faster to do the export in PHP! 🤯 Meanwhile, the import takes the same time. So that's great news!

The other larger change that's currently in early planning is support for Radicle. This is a hybrid project type that lets you use WordPress and Laravel together. This is something coming from my newest customer, Tom McFarlin! We've been working on a project together. Currently it's using Bedrock, but we'd like to use Radicle.

To me, Radicle support is a great opportunity to step my toes into supporting other PHP projects. It'll probably need another integration layer to handle the Laravel code. So it's not a small undertaking, but I think it's a great opportunity.

MARKETING

I plan to sit down with 40Q this month to get the case study started. There's a strong desire by everyone to write something. I just have to find the time! 😅

I'm also working on getting a case study with my client who had their first Black Friday using Ymir. The results are already so crazy. I really hope they let me share some financial figures. But at a high level, their hosting costs went from mid four figures to high three figures. A huge drop. Meanwhile, they had no downtime and the ops team had a great worry free holiday.

As I told them, this is the magic that I've always seen in serverless. You get true peace of mind for these high traffic scenarios. Everything scales and performs well. It feels like magic. 🪄✨

BUSINESS

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

Business is unchanged. Not a lot of trials. Tom was my only new customer.

With 40Q and, now, some Black Friday data, I feel more confident about the product. It still needs a very technical team to work well. But I feel less crazy.

The one thing I find very difficult still is pricing. I don't know how to price the product so that it's both financially accessible, but also so I capture more of the value.

Carl