Heya friend!
Carl here. You signed up to receive updates about Ymir, the WordPress serverless DevOps platform that I’m building.
INTRO
Hello again! I'm back from my month long travel to the USA for WordCamp US. It's been a really busy time trying to catch up on everything.
Being able to connect in person always energizes me. I spoke to so many people about Ymir, but I also I pitched other's product a lot. In fact, the joke was I was a better salesman for other products than my own. 🤣
A lot of hosting executives were at WordCamp US. I think I managed to speak to all of them. I'm more convinced than ever that serverless is something that the whole hosting industry will need over the next decade. But it made me also think that certain plugin businesses need it as well.
That said, business is still hard. Still hovering just below $1k MRR. I'm feeling very overextended trying to juggle Ymir and consulting work. I've been trying to find ways to bridge the income gap between now and when Ymir can pay me.
I'll expand more on this in the business section.
PRODUCT
You can always view the history of Ymir's product development at https://ymirapp.com/changelog.
Product development is very sporadic at the moment. During my time in the USA, I made time to work on the dashboard. You can now create DNS zones from the dashboard. I still want to add a wizard to import DNS records as well, but that's for the next phase.
I also started working on the larger featuring of allowing you to create projects from the dashboard. This feature is complex with a bunch of moving parts. For example, GitHub integration isn't that straightforward and there are a lot of design decisions around it. I was trending in one direction, but, while discussing with a friend, they suggested going in another, which will require more work.
And, since my return, I haven't had a chance to go back to it. I still consider improving the dashboard to be the most important product development task at the moment. I've just had to fix some things with the PHP runtime for a customer.
That said, this "Create Project" feature highlights my current struggles in product development. I need some quality undisturbed engineering time since it's pretty complex. It's been incredibly hard to get some lately as I context switch constantly between all my consulting work, Ymir development and Ymir support.
MARKETING
Some work happened on the marketing front, but still not enough. I think working on the video course is going to be put on hold for the next month or so. I have a few things I want to write about and I'm not sure I'll have more time than that with everything else going on.
So what did I do for marketing?
First, there was this post on Reddit about high performance WordPress on AWS. I gave a pretty detailed answer with my thoughts on it. Also tweeted a small excerpt:
September 14th 2022
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This Reddit answer encapsulates a lot of what I figured out talking to executives and other developers at WordCamp US. I plan on doing more writing and marketing about WordPress Applications. Ironically, as I was developing this thesis, Syed Balkhi tweeted a huge thread, essentially discussing the things I was talking and thinking about.
September 22nd 2022
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The rest of my marketing time went to preparing for my talk at Longhorn PHP next month.
September 29th 2022
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The way I prepare talks is always the same. I write an article on the topic of the talk. I then convert the article to slides. It's time consuming, but it's what makes me the most comfortable when giving a talk.
Right now, I'm in the writing phase. I think I'm probably over a third of the way through writing the article. The goal is to wrap it up next marketing cycle and start the slides.
I don't plan on focusing on much else marketing wise until I'm done preparing the talk. It'll just stress me out too much otherwise.
BUSINESS
You can always view Ymir's up-to-date business metrics at ymirapp.com/open. They're updated every 10 minutes.
Still sitting at 25 customers. That's just one customer shy of $1k MRR milestone. But like last month, I have a lot of cancellations and failed payments at the moment. So it's hard to imagine I'll get over this milestone in October.
As I said earlier, this current situation of maintaining 3-5 consulting clients while working on Ymir is just not something that can work long term. I'm doing ok financially, but the context switching between everything has been overwhelming me cognitively.
WordCamp US continued the trend of people asking me if they could write me a check. It would solve my current problems, but it would create others. People who invest in you expect you to turn your company into something large enough to get a good exit. That's not what I want for Ymir.
September 23rd 2022
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Other people asked me about an acqui-hire scenario. (e.g. Would you sell for $5M and work there for X years?) They weren't serious discussions, and, frankly, I'm not sure that's what I want either. Although my lawyer friend and another friend who sold his WordPress business said I should have a term sheet, so I might eventually do that. 🤷♂️
Someone suggested I start a GitHub sponsor since most of Ymir's intellectual property is actually open source. I asked around and people generally said I had nothing to lose by doing it, which is true.
So I now have a GitHub Sponsor page >>
I'm especially proud of my copy! I had a whole Twitter thread ready for it as well, but I'm holding off until my next marketing week to post it. I felt it was a bit insensitive with hurricane Ian. I've also had feedback on the draft and I want to fix it up.
Realistically, I don't expect to get a few hundred dollars a month from it. It won't replace consulting work. The only way I see it supporting me is if I manage to get hosting companies to buy into the idea that they should help me work on this. I’m essentially doing hundreds of thousand of dollars worth of free R&D for them. But having talked to a few friends who work for them, it's unlikely that they'll sponsor me.
The other angle that might get me out of this situation is partnerships. This ties to all the work I want to do around WordPress Applications. There's going to be a lot of opportunity there. If I could close someone for a significant sum per year, that would really help me financially, but also give Ymir more legitimacy.
That's why I plan to spend a decent amount of marketing time on it.
Carl
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...