Happy Halloween friend!

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

INTRO

This is going to be a quick update. Just been too busy with consulting and preparing for LonghornPHP this cycle. I'll be in Austin from Wednesday night to Sunday morning.

Rough month, as I alluded in the previous report. From anecdotal evidence, it seems October was pretty brutal for a lot of SaaS businesses. We'll see how November gears up.

Overall, I'm not really bummed up by the situation. I'm a bit frustrated with how much time it took to prepare the LonghornPHP talk. But it's an investment as I'll be able to reuse it in the future.

PRODUCT

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

Product work this cycle consisted mainly of upgrading an AWS API behind the scene. I fixed a nasty oversight on my part with S3 and private networks. I got a bit of time to continue on the create project flow.

Making new HTML components like that select box is really time-consuming! I think this took me a good day of work even if it's just a component from Tailwind UI. The challenge is always the accessibility aspect and making it work with the keyboard. Tailwind UI doesn't do that for you.

MARKETING

No major story for marketing this cycle. Continued to work on the article for the LonghornPHP talk. It's not quite done yet, but it's over 3,000 words long.

I had to put it aside and start working on the slides. I'm not sure if I'll get to publish it before the talk. We'll see.

I'm probably inverting the weeks of this coming cycle. I'll do marketing this week and try to get everything for the LonghornPHP talk done. I'll focus on the product when I come back.

BUSINESS

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

As I said, it's been a really rough month. I might have churned all my growth for 2022. There's only two months left to the year too. 😬

I remember a while back where a set back like this would have REALLY bummed me out. But I'm honestly so fired up since WordCamp US. Just wish Ymir could pay me to work on it full time and not have two jobs essentially 🤣

I recently discovered Simon Wardley on Twitter. He's some former UK CEO and speaker in the global tech circuit. I found he articulates the business environment around serverless really well.

Here's a thread where he talks about the cost of managing data centers and where serverless fits in.

Carl Alexander @twigpress I think the tone of the thread might put off people. But the substance of it discussing all the additional costs of managing your own data centers is really spot on. twitter.com/swardley/statu… Simon Wardley ❤️🇺🇦 @swardley X : Did you see "Why we're leaving the cloud" - world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-… Me : Nope. X : And? Me : Why are you talking infrastructure clouds to me? This is 2022. You should have migrated to severless years ago. I'm not interested in niche edge cases. October 24th 2022 0 Retweets 1 Likes

He also talks about delay in adoption curves. The evolution of technology vs its diffusion in the market. There's a lag because it can years or decades for technology to diffuse in the market (e.g. 3D printing and VR invented in 1968 🤯) because of previous adoption.

Simon Wardley ❤️🇺🇦 @swardley .... when you ask what the future is, the majority who are in the product space will say "the product space" (hence private cloud, virtualised data centres) whilst the more "evolved" space is seen as startups / niches (early adopters) ... they are, of course, precisely wrong ... pic.twitter.com/zXEeG7I1Xa Simon Wardley ❤️🇺🇦 @swardley This can cause a real headache, as the majority of the market will be in the product space whilst the more evolved form of the market starts with early adopters (think cloud i.e. compute as a utility and the early adopter) ... October 30th 2022 0 Retweets 3 Likes

Anyways, I always knew I was in an innovator's dilemma. I don't think it'll take decades for serverless to diffuse. It's already here if you use Cloudflare workers, Vercel, etc. We're just at the bottom of the diffusion because most of the market is still on the older tech. (Cloud and data centers)

Carl