Heya friend!

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

INTRO

I'm currently travelling around the USA for WordCamp US. I probably won't send a report until I get back mid-September.

I'm continuing to work on the dashboard. You can now create some AWS resources from there! Marketing isn't going well still.

Business continues to be hard. I did almost break through 1k MRR, but alas it'll elude me for a while longer. More below!

PRODUCT

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

As I said, I'm continuing to put all my product emphasis on the dashboard. I created a simple dropdown (similar to the one on DigitalOcean) to let you create some AWS resources.

Carl Alexander @twigpress Just launched what I worked on for @YmirApp last week. You can now create some AWS resources straight from the dashboard without using the CLI. 🎉 More dashboard improvements to come! 💅 pic.twitter.com/AxzdmIcPB3 August 22nd 2022 2 Retweets 3 Likes

There's still DNS zones left to do. Then I think I'll try to tackle creating a project from the dashboard. This is going to be a more complex endeavour.

The goal is to get all the pieces in place so I can create a better onboarding flow. I want you to be able to sign up and get to a deployed project without using the CLI. I'm hoping that'll help make the product less intimidating and more approachable.

MARKETING

Marketing week was a writeoff. I didn't get to really touch anything with traveling and consulting work. Motivation is a problem. (More on that below.) I'm going to try to get another course video out during my travels.

I was also accepted to speak about serverless at Longhorn PHP. So that's also good news! I don't expect it to drive a lot of sales. But it just adds more backlinks and SEO content in the long run.

BUSINESS

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

If you look at the dashboard, August was a great month! I had five new subscribers and only one cancellation. The dashboard even shows that I hit 1k MRR!

The reason the report title isn't blasting the milestone is because it's not real. There's a retrying payment in there. I assume it'll fail (they almost always do) and bring me back under.

Then I have 3 cancellations next month. So this will bring me further away from the milestone. So no 1k MRR milestone yet 🙁

I'll be honest (that's the point of these reports anyhow!) that this hit me pretty hard. I love working on Ymir. I actually think it's a legitimate product. (I also hear it often from other smart people.)

But it feels like I'm swimming against the current right now. I've been thinking a lot about the "Physics of the Business". (Something I heard on a podcast. Justin talks about it a lot.) With its current momentum, it'll take years before Ymir can pay me to work on it fulltime.

That's a long time! I live a pretty thrifty life because I don't deal with financial anxiety well. But that's a lot of what I'm dealing with right now.

Juggling 3-5 different consulting engagements and working on Ymir every day is just a lot of stress. It isn't something I can see myself doing for years. I just have to figure out a solution.

Right now, it's not an immediate problem. I'll go to WordCamp US, do some networking and see what comes out of it.

That said, I'll probably have to evaluate things in the fall. It might require that I work on Ymir in a more part-time capacity so I can pick up something more stable consulting/work wise.

Carl