Heya friend!

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

I licensed Ymir to a hosting company.

These aren't words I would've ever expected to write a few months ago.

It still doesn't feel real to me, if I'm honest. It doesn't matter that there's an actual press release. Or that there's a picture of me at CloudFest USA showing a new serverless ecosystem that didn't even exist two weeks ago.

I keep thinking of the Hemingway quote, "Gradually, then suddenly."

We're almost at the five-year anniversary of the first report I ever sent. Five years of me building Ymir in public slowly, of me talking to anyone who would listen (like you now!) about serverless, of me wondering if I was crazy. (Still not sure about that 😅)

I thought I was crazy because I'd found this technology that made hosting so much more carefree. I saw a world where you deployed code, and it just worked and scaled when it needed to. You could just go on and focus on the important things, like your business. (Or writing more code! 🤓)

This is the vision I had of where hosting should go, and I didn't know if it mattered to anyone.

Part of working on something that fits the innovator's dilemma is that timing matters. Right idea, wrong time is a thing. So I waited, hoping there would be a time when my vision might matter to anyone.

Well, it mattered to Paul, Justin and Josh, the three founders of BuiltFast and the rest of their team. They see the power that serverless offers and the problem that Ymir solves. They also shared my vision of productizing Ymir to sell it to hosting companies like WP Cloud does.

That's what the diagram I was showing at CloudFest was about. It showed a new ecosystem where you have a:

• Retail product for everyone (Vector)
• White-label product for hosting companies and agencies (Vector Pro API)
• Self-serve product for developers (Ymir)

With all that said, it's still one thing to share a vision with someone and another thing to partner with them. I always hoped that not only I'd find people who shared my vision, but they'd be wonderful humans too. This is how I feel about the BuiltFast team, and I was happy to see my feelings reinforced by the massive endorsement of Aaron Campbell as our negotiations were unfolding.

Now, this partnership is a huge deal! But that's not why this all feels sudden to me. The reason I feel this way and why I'm saying the moment is here is because, in the last month, people have been responding to my vision in ways I've never experienced before.

• I've given my talk twice. Both times I had so many questions I had to stop early or go over by 10+ minutes.
• I had young developers nod so hard their heads would fall off when I said, "I wanted the Vercel experience."
• Hosting executives are seeing that customers are expecting their website to behave like a SaaS and always be up. (You never have to wonder about downtime with Wix or Shopify.)
• Hosting executives are starting to realize that they can't keep up with the cloud providers. They have procurement issues, and they're seeing significant performance gains from using the cloud. (One of them told me they saw a 2x performance gain.)
• I'm getting interest from outside WordPress like Acquia and Upsun.

These signals are why I feel like the moment might be here. But it's taken me by surprise, and part of me doesn't believe it either.

It's not that I think things will be easy from this point on. I just thought I'd still have a hard time selling my vision even with the announcement. But people were responding to it even before I could talk about the BuiltFast partnership.

We also didn't expect to have so much interest from hosts about the white-label product. Like I said, the executive mindset is changing. And I think we showed up at the right time for that.

You might wonder what's going to change with this partnership. The self-serve product will continue to exist as is. The terms of service already prevented anyone from using Ymir to build hosting already.

My primary focus outside the partnership continues to be finishing up Laravel support. Once that's done, my goal is still to move away from being a WordPress platform. Instead, Ymir will become the serverless platform for modern PHP.

As far as the "build in public" goes, things will change there. I'd already planned on changing the public dashboard anyway. There won't be any partnership data displayed on it. I plan on fixing the language to clarify that it's showing data for the self-serve business.

As far as these reports go, I will continue doing them. They're a valuable tool for me. They keep me accountable, and I like that I documented my journey like I've done for my year in reviews.

Thank you again for being part of it 💖

Carl