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

It's been a busy two weeks, but also a lot of holidays here in Canada. (Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day and Canada Day!) Summer weather is here finally! Feels great!

While I was pretty busy with Ymir, I'm going to keep this update shorter. Nothing has drastically changed with the product or business. Most of what I have to share has to do with marketing (thus the email title!) where I was really productive this cycle.

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PRODUCT

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

I was really hoping to move back to the frontend this cycle, but it didn't happen. Most of the cycle was consumed with miscellaneous things. Some bug fixing, some support issues.

The one big change is the Ymir runtime dropped the PHP Redis extension. Instead of it, the runtime now uses Relay, which is a next generation PHP Redis extension. I've also dropped support for DynamoDB for object caching.

There's a larger story around this change, but I plan on writing it all up as my next article. So stay tuned!

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MARKETING

Really happy with how marketing went this cycle. I finished up my article discussing another good use case for Ymir.

​Why serverless is the perfect hosting solution for an EDD licensing server >>​

This was something people discussed with me at WordCamp Europe. If you self host a licensing server (usually with EDD), this licensing server often has to deal with issues that serverless is great at dealing with. I don't think it'll be a huge driver in sign ups or customer, but I felt it added legitimacy to serverless as a technology.

I also mentioned in the last report that I started working on a video course for YouTube. Here's the first one!

I thought I could do 1-2 videos per cycle. I think two videos might be a bit ambitious on my part at the moment 🤣

This video took me probably 15-20 hours to make in all. One reason for that is I added a new video tool to my belt called Descript. It did an amazing job making my voice sound good without having to buy a ton of recording equipment. (It's just the 2021 MacBook Pro microphone.)

And the way it can generate my voice with AI is pretty mind blowing. It's more obvious in some places, but in others, it's very hard to tell. I only gave it 30 minutes of audio, but it gets better the more it has.

Anyway, there was a learning curve with Descript. I hope I can drop the time to create a 10 minute course video in half. I don't plan on using it as extensively for Q&A videos since I enjoy being able to record them and upload them right away.

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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.

June ended as a flat month. It's a bit disappointing because I had a lot of trials and the highest number of sign-ups ever this month. Also, a new first is I had a few people start a trial without cancelling (hope!), but then the card just ends up being declined and retried until it fails. (sad!)

We'll see how July goes. July 2021 was my best month ever, so maybe it will be again. But it's hard to imagine that with vacations starting.

We'll see!

Carl