Heya friend!

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

INTRO

I'm back from 2 months of pretty intense travelling. If we add the other life events that I discussed in the previous report, it's been quite busy for me personally. I worked on Ymir some, but I didn't have the time to sit down to write my report.

That said, there's a good chance I'm done travelling for the year. I was just at WCEU, but I don't plan on going to WCUS. If I go to anything, it might be CloudFest USA in November. The landscape around WordPress events is changing quickly and I don't know if I'll go to WordCamps anymore besides WordCamp Europe.

I lost two customers since my last report. One was someone not using the product anymore. The other one hit harder because they decided to not use Ymir because I was solo. I mentioned it briefly last update too.

I've been processing how I feel about that for a bit.

PRODUCT

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

All my energy is on Laravel support for Ymir. The reception to Laravel Cloud hasn't been very good. There was a huge thread on Reddit about it. The feedback was so negative that they locked it. (I noticed too late to post anything. 🫠)

I don't think supporting Laravel will change my fortunes overnight. That said, it gave the motivation I needed to move away from just supporting WordPress. I think I have to do this for my long-term survival.

The problem is that I made the core assumption that I'd only need to support WordPress when I designed Ymir. Refactoring away from that decision involves touching a lot of the deployment code. It's a delicate process which will require multiple phases.

I plan on taking a slow approach and deploy each phases of the refactor with some gaps between them. Right now, I'm close to wrapping up phase one which involved thousands of lines of code. I'm still working on some failing tests. If all goes well, I should be able to deploy it this week or the next.

I have some backlog of small bug fixes I also need to tackle

MARKETING

I did some livestreams while I was in Brazil. I had a few people come up and tell me they liked the one I did with my friend Toby. That felt good to hear because I enjoy doing them! I have some guest ideas and Toby wants to do more together as well.

When I came back home, there was construction in front of my building. Being in the basement, it added a lot of vibrations, which made it impossible for me to record anything. Luckily, it's over now, but my weekends have been busy. I'm thinking of just recording myself whenever I feel like instead of just doing a fixed time like Sunday. That works well in the Canadian winter, but it's trickier in the summer because I'm out enjoying the weather in the afternoon 😅

Otherwise, I had a bit more success talking about Ymir at WordCamp Europe. But I'm beyond thinking I'll find customers there. I did try to come up with some quick non-technical ways to explain what Ymir does. The best one so far has been something along the lines of:

But it's just one aspect of the product. It's hard to find something that punches for non-technical people for every aspect of the product.

BUSINESS

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

Diversification. That's probably the best word I can think of to explain the state of the WordPress ecosystem after WordCamp Europe. Everyone going to other conferences besides WordCamps. The most talked about conferences aren't WordCamps anymore. I heard more about CloudFest than WordCamp at WordCamp Europe.

The same goes for companies. Agencies branching into other markets, some plugin companies are developing Shopify apps or Laravel products. No one seems to believe WordPress and Automattic are reliable partners anymore on top of the WordPress market not looking great. That means that many people are hedging their bets and diversifying.

I'm in the same boat. I bet there was a big enough niche in the WordPress market to support me. There doesn't seem to be. And I also don't feel the same way about the WordPress market as I did when I started working on Ymir. So I'm working on supporting Laravel as my first non-WordPress project type.

I also lost two customers. I'm onboarding a returning one so it's only one person hopefully. What stung about one of them is that they moved on because they knew I was a solo enterprise. I tried to get them to use the enterprise tier so I could charge them for what they needed so they wouldn't worry about me being solo. But no luck. They moved on to one of the top WordPress agencies with WP Engine.

It's the first time that the fact that I build in public hurt me significantly. (I'm sure it's not the first time, but it's just the first time I'm aware of it.) It's not a fun experience. Especially when you know it would have probably been at least $1,000 a month in revenue. (A huge amount for me at this stage.)

So I wonder how much does writing these reports help or hurt me? How much does the dashboard help or hurt me? Maybe it's worth not disclosing it and avoid the negative reaction to the information.

The build in public made more sense when I thought the product marketing was for developers. But the more it's not working out, the more everything is more enterprise-y. Maybe it's not a good idea to have that out.

So yeah, I'm still thinking about it. I enjoy building in public. It's really something I wanted to do. But the question is it worth the whole thing failing just because I wanted to build in public.

I'm probably overthinking it 😅

Carl