Heya friend!

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

INTRO

Greetings from Japan!

I've been here for the past two weeks after going to WordCamp Asia. This is probably my last trip to Asia for the foreseeable future. I will probably go to CloudFest instead of WordCamp Asia next year. I can't afford to do both.

There has been little work done on Ymir because I had friends visiting Tokyo until last week. I've also been struggling with the time zone. There have been a lot of late night calls and meetings to accommodate people in North America. (I had a 3am meeting during WordCamp Asia. 🫠)

I had the same issue in March last year. And, like last year, my sleep hygiene took a dive because of it. This made me fall sick last week and I'm still recovering.

I was able to push a small logging feature as well as write a logging guide. March was another brutal month for subscriber churn. More thoughts about it in the business section.

PRODUCT

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

I added the ability to disable CloudWatch logging via a configuration option. This serves at least two purposes.

First, you can disable CloudWatch logging to reduce your AWS cost if you don't use them. (For example, you could just use Sentry and no logging.) CloudWatch can get quite expensive if you have a lot of traffic. (You can read about an example here.)

Second, you might also want to disable them if you want to use another logging service. Other logging services are usually cheaper and have better features than CloudWatch. As an example, I wrote a guide on how to use Axiom instead of CloudWatch for logging.

MARKETING

I hope to write my first case study soon! One of my earliest customers just finished migrating all his properties to serverless. He shared it on LinkedIn.

I really hope to have more case studies like this in the future, especially around WooCommerce.

BUSINESS

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

As I mentioned last month, I expected this month to be brutal. And it was! I'm almost back to where I was in April last year. So this past year has been flat essentially.

I have my first serious enterprise lead. So that's good, but it won't be a big contract if it happens. However, I think it'll be a really great case study if the whole thing works out!

WordCamp Asia was great in terms of discussion and networking. I was able to talk to a lot of Bluehost executives at the launch party of Bluehost Cloud. Bluehost Cloud was really interesting because they used WP Cloud's infrastructure instead of theirs.

I think WP Cloud is the closest product to Ymir. I really wanted Ymir to be more akin to SpinupWP and Laravel Vapor. But I don't think that'll be.

As I talk to more executives at hosting companies and agencies, I'm more and more convinced that Ymir will have to become a white labelled enterprise product. Much like WP Cloud, they would use Ymir to create their own serverless hosting products. I'd just be the infrastructure product that lets them do that instead of building it all from scratch, which most don't have the expertise for.

I'm still digesting a lot of that information. But that's where I'm thinking the product and business will have to go. This isn't what I had in mind when I started Ymir and I'm not sure how I feel about it yet.

Carl