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

This cycle was again predominantly consulting work. It's definitely nice to make money. Most of it is being squirrelled away into my runway fund! 🐿️

Work continues on the ARM runtimes. I was hoping to be done this cycle, but hit some snags. I'm also in the final editing process of my serverless for WordPress agency article I wrote with ChatGPT.

Business was good this month so far. Hope I don't jinx it! I also wrote a rare "Real Talk" section where I talk about how I'm feeling right now.

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PRODUCT

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

Still working on the support for arm64 processors. I finished 90% of it, but ran into an issue with building the images with GitHub Actions. Essentially, building the arm64 runtimes is incredibly slow with GitHub Actions and I'm running into the 6h limit.

Bref switched to using Depot to build its runtimes. It's an expensive service, and I was trying not to use it. I asked them if they'd let me use it for free as an open source project, and they said yes. 😃

So I'm going to rework the build to use Depot this cycle. Hopefully, I'll be done with that!

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MARKETING

In the final editing phase of my article about serverless for WordPress agencies. It's been interesting to write with ChatGPT. I think it's faster for me overall, but it's still a decent amount of work if you want something good.

Looking forward to seeing what people think about it once I publish it!

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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.

While things might still change, May was almost my best month ever. If all goes well, I should have a net gain of four subscribers. I might have jinxed myself already by saying it, though! 😅

The new potential partnership is still moving quite fast. It's giving me consulting work at the same time, which is nice. I'd really like to have one reach a point where I can publicly talk about it. Would be some nice social proof and it would also force me to work on the Ymir platform marketing page so I can start competing against WP Cloud. (Ymir is a much better product. 😎)

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REAL TALK

I know some people read these reports to see the behind the scenes of bootstrapping a business. I don't always have a lot to say about it. But I have a bit more this time, so broke it out into another section.

I won't lie that making money from consulting this month feels really nice. I've been living on shoestring budgets and slowly going through my rainy day fund for so long. I kinda forget what it's like to make actual money.

The first year Laravel Vapor (the product that inspired Ymir) was in business, I estimated it made around 500k ARR. I didn't expect Ymir to do that well, but it's wild that I'm at 15k ARR after two years. I was off by over a factor of 30. 🤣

Putting Laravel Vapor in context, sometimes I feel impatient about how slowly Ymir is growing. It's been worse this year because there's been a lot of changes in my life outside the business. I've also started travelling again, and it's harder to travel cheaply like I used to.

As everyone knows, everything is more expensive now. All these costs add up. Meanwhile, I make 40k a year instead of an engineering salary.

Whenever I bring all this up, the first question I get is always, "Are you looking for any investment?" I always politely decline. Sometimes, I feel crazy for not taking any. I might still change my mind eventually, but it seems more unlikely with each passing month.

The WordPress business community changed a lot in the last few years. More money, more investments, more acquisitions. The point of Ymir was always to build the lifestyle business that fits my needs, not the needs of investors to make a return. (Although, some say they don't expect returns.)

Sometimes, it feels lonely to want to do things differently like I'm doing. I don't really know anyone else doing things this way in the WordPress community.

When I start doubting myself, I often ask, "What else are you going to do?" The answer is always, "Nothing." I'm where I want to be. I love working on Ymir. I think it's a great product that solves a real need.

Meanwhile, I'm really put off by the idea of having a regular 40h/week job. That's even if it pays me five times more. So I get back to work.

This cycle I read this book, "Braving the Wilderness". (It was so good I read it twice!) It's reminded me that, even if things aren't ideal right now, I'm walking my path and it's ok to be alone doing it. It's a great book if you find yourself second guessing your values and what you're doing in your life.

So was this was just a really long winded way for me to recommend this book? You bet! 🤣

Carl