Heya friend!

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

INTRO

Another quick update. Back from Longhorn PHP and the talk went great! Really thankful for the opportunity PHP people I've only seen through their Twitter posts. 😅

I had a lot of travel issues on this trip on top of getting sick. (Negative for COVID. Probably an old fashion cold.) So I'm running pretty low on energy. Getting a bit more worried that I'm heading for a burnout based on my previous experiences with burnout.

Needless to say, there hasn't been too much product development or marketing. That said, business is doing well. I might regain all the customers I lost last month, and I got my first "Carl-as-a-Service" client!

Let's dive in!

PRODUCT

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

Product work this week was mainly some boring (but important!) maintenance work. Fixing some broken tests, upgrading libraries, etc. It's a constant debate in bootstrapper circles whether it's worth doing it, but I promote this to consulting client would be weird to not listen to my own advice 🙃

Outside this, I added support for PHP 8.1. So you can now start using it! I held off for a long time because of WordPress compatibility issues. But it seems WordPress is stable enough to use it now!

MARKETING

I need to edit and publish the article for the Longhorn PHP talk. Was too tired to do it this week. I'll get it done next marketing week.

Preparing for a talk is really time-consuming. I'm glad it's over.

That said, I got accepted to speak again early next year on serverless. Can't announce it yet, but it means more talk prepping. So not out of the woods with that.

BUSINESS

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

After a terrible October, November looking great. Looking to add 4-5 customers and only losing one. Still not 1k MRR, but close!

Bigger news is that I got my first Carl-as-a-Service client. This is great news to help make my work sustainable. I'm also really excited to work with them as we have big ideas and cool things we want to show off. Also, we both want to win 🤣

I made some updates to the dashboard to add Carl-as-a-Service revenue. I'm putting it under a different section. That's because, at least for now, Carl-as-a-Service revenue is going to me directly. I'm treating it as consulting revenue.

That said, over time, I expect Ymir to have a few other sources of revenue besides just SaaS revenue. So I'm breaking it up now. But I'm still using it to determine my total revenue, which I use to calculate my Journey achievements.

Carl