Heya friend!

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

INTRO

Heya!

A bit late sending this report again. The last two weeks have been challenging personally and I've just focused on myself more. I did manage to get some things done, but I mostly took time for myself. #selfcare

I got one product and one marketing change out. Business is still roughly in the same shape as before. I'm still thinking about things and talking to people a lot though.

PRODUCT

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

The product change this cycle is I wrapped up the PHP 8.3 support. Unlike PHP 8.2 which I didn't support for a while, PHP 8.3 doesn't seem to have a lot of issues with WordPress. So I didn't feel I had to wait until WordPress had better support for it.

If you can run your code on PHP 8.2, I would suggest upgrading as PHP 8.3 seems to have a lot of performance improvements. This is especially useful with Lambda since faster code means lower AWS bills. 🤑

MARKETING

I'm still feeling stuck on the marketing side. The good news is that WordCamp Asia is next week. That'll give me the opportunity to do what I do best which is network in person.

I'm trying to go back to working on the documentation site more. This cycle I did a major rewrite of the scaling guide. This is one of the most important pages in all the documentation site.

AWS made some significant changes to how Lambda scaling works. Before, you had to be in one of three specific regions to get the best scaling performance. Now, that's gone and scaling works the same across all regions on top of being 12x faster now!

BUSINESS

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

February is ending slightly better than I expected. I'm up one subscriber. That said, March looks like it'll be churn heavy so probably will go down still or be flat.

I'm still processing and following up on conversations I had in Phoenix. I think more people in hosting companies are starting to understand that serverless is coming. This makes me optimistic about the product in the long term if I can figure out how to price and package it correctly.

At the same time, I'm also a bit sombre about the business. This mostly comes from reading Brad's year in review for SpinupWP.

I really appreciate him putting this out there. I always had this idea that SpinupWP was a slam dunk product. Server management makes sense to people and isn't a new hosting paradigm like serverless is.

Yet they're struggling. They're going to have to do layoffs. If it's rough for an obviously great product like them, what does that mean for me with this even more technologically complicated product?

That was tough to hear. But again, I don't know how many customers they have. I don't need as many, thankfully. I also can price Ymir higher than they can.

Even if they're similar product in my mind, Ymir and SpinupWP won't be the same businesses.

Carl