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

I lost a lot of time fighting xcode during the product development week. But otherwise, Just a kind of business as usual for this cycle. Some product development and trying to figure out my next move for marketing.

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PRODUCT

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

I started the week wrapping up Redis support. There was still the Ymir plugin object cache that didn't have Redis support. So I managed to get that done. I also added the tunnel command so you could connect to your Redis cluster locally.

The last thing I did as I switched over to work on Docker was igbinary and zstd support for PhpRedis. These are two PHP extensions that drastically improve PhpRedis performance. I saw about a 40% request time drop from the switch.

Whenever I do work with Docker, I tend to do maintenance work on the Ymir PHP runtime. So I used the time to update to the latest PHP versions. I also hopefully fixed the issue me and Julien found load testing WooCommerce with 3000 concurrent carts.

I spent the rest of the week re-architecting the Ymir PHP runtime Docker image. Before, I only used the image to compile the runtime. It wasn't meant to be used as a base Docker image.

However, that's what I need for Docker support. So I reworked the image build and now there's an official Ymir PHP runtime image! This week, I'm going to try to do the second part of the puzzle which is Docker image deployment.

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MARKETING

I had a bit of motivation issues during marketing week. I tried to be productive so I did a good amount of documentation writing. I added a second testimonial to the marketing site. I also started writing the next Ymir blog article on how serverless helps with security.

I also did more Q&A. A reader suggested I do individual videos for each questions so I tried that and I liked it a lot! So going to do that from this point forward. Here are the two questions I answered this cycle:

• ​What's the difference between headless and serverless?​
• ​What made me choose AWS for Ymir?​

As usual, if you have questions, feel free to let me know and I'll do more videos next cycle :)

During development week, I also had a free call with Rhys who's a SaaS marketing consultant. He didn't have anything bad to say about the Ymir marketing site, which is good! We talked mainly marketing channels.

His opinion is I should try cold email. So I spent some time this cycle learning about cold email and prospecting good candidates. Right now, I'm looking at developers in small agencies that do WordPress and Laravel.

That's about as far as I got. I'm slowly warming up to why cold email can be good when done right. It's the same as with marketing. We only see the shitty cold emails so we assume it's just all shitty. But good cold emails are like good marketing, you don't think of them as cold emails.

I'll probably spend the next cycle doing more research about it. There's a lot of scary stuff with cold emails too. You need a different domain, warm up your inbox, check spam laws, etc.

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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.

Business is growing still! I have 2 new customers this month, which means I have 10 customers! (Double digits baby!) But also one is due to cancel so I'll be back to 9.

Still it's progress!

Carl