Ymir Report #1 — Open startup
Heya friend!
Carl here. You signed up to receive updates about Ymir, the WordPress serverless DevOps platform that I’m building.
INTRO
Trying to get back in the beat of things. I mixed coding and marketing this week, but I plan on trying to do a more regular coding/marketing cycle. We'll see how it works out in practice!
Jon's journey with Bannerbear really inspired me, so I'm emulating a bit of what he did with this newsletter.
PRODUCT
Small product updates this week. Mostly around the Ymir CLI except for the new open dashboard on the marketing site.
- Improved WP-CLI usage — Doing WP-CLI commands was awkward. I didn't know you could do double dashes (--) to pass a secondary command. So with this change, you'll be more easily able to run WP-CLI commands on your environment.
- CLI out of date warning — The Ymir CLI is the primary way to use Ymir. I expect things to evolve pretty quickly at first. So I wanted to put it in a gentle nudge when you're using an out-of-date version.
- Open dashboard — Released the first version of the open dashboard on the marketing site.
MARKETING
The open dashboard is an important aspect of my marketing. I always admired companies like Buffer who tried to be as transparent as possible. It's something I'm striving to do with the dashboard and this newsletter.
I also always wanted to support causes with the company I'd build. That's why I joined Stripe Climate from day 1. I'm hoping to increase that contribution over time and support other initiatives. For example, I'd like to sponsor WordPress core developers who don't get paid by their work to contribute to the project.
BUSINESS
You can always view Ymir's up-to-date business metrics at ymirapp.com/open. They're updated every 10 minutes.
I have 3 customers! That's two more than expected considering I was my first customer lol. I think that's pretty amazing all things considered. I expected to still be at 1 when I sent this email.
I'm still not sure how I'll get to 10, but that's part of the journey. Whatever happens, I'm pretty excited to share it with you.
Ymir
Heya friend! Carl here. You signed up to receive updates about Ymir, the WordPress serverless DevOps platform that I’m building. INTRO Heya! I did it! I have my first case study 🥳 Otherwise, I had a good time at WordCamp Europe. I had some good discussions there about the state of the hosting industry. They make me feel good about the long-term viability of Ymir, but doesn't really help in the short run. There hasn't been a lot of movement on the product this month. I came from Europe with...
Heya friend! Carl here. You signed up to receive updates about Ymir, the WordPress serverless DevOps platform that I’m building. INTRO Heya! Ymir was a bit more in the back seat in May as I focused on consulting work. This is more important as I'm still losing customers. Ymir won't be a full-time endeavour any time soon. I still want to do reports every two weeks. That said, I might skip here and there if there's not much to talk about. Not my ideal scenario, but I'm running a marathon so I...
Heya friend! Carl here. You signed up to receive updates about Ymir, the WordPress serverless DevOps platform that I’m building. INTRO Heya! Quiet cycle. Now that I'm done with the maintenance work, I'm back to working on the product. I'm slowly working towards the project creation feature, but I wanted to work on something smaller first. I ended up deciding to work on an activity feed. It's not such a small feature that I could ship it in two weeks. But I was able to wrap up and ship the...