“We run this spot like a Chinese sweatshop. Don’t stop, work a worker ‘til chest pop.”

— Run The Jewels, Oh My Darling (Don’t Cry)

It’s been exactly one year since posting an update for Hypermatic’s 3rd birthday (From Two to Three), so here’s another annual recap to celebrate Hypermatic turning 4 years old today!

Some numbers to celebrate from 2023

• 0 investors and $0 funding (still happily bootstrapped/default alive)
• 1 brand new product shipped (Weblify)
• 30 free Emailify-ready Figma templates published
• 97 new YouTube tutorials recorded
• 639 new product updates and improvements shipped
• 1,029,000 users (up from 570,000 a year ago)

Some new feature highlights shipped in the last 6 months (since July 2023)

Besides the usual bug fixes, customer requests, and other smaller enhancements, these were some of the other new features that made their way into the @hypermatic feed on X (which is mainly used to keep a record of these changes) over the last 6 months:

• Responsive borders to Emailify
• Custom Font settings to Emailify
• Chart Builder feature to Pitchdeck
• PDF Image Downscaling to TinyImage
• Image Fills Downsizer to Pitchdeck
• GIF Transition Effects to TinyImage
• Blueshift integration to Emailify
• Klaviyo Product Feeds to Emailify
• SVG support for Spreadsheet Syncing to CopyDoc
• Campaign Monitor integration to Emailify
• Automatic Slide Tidying to Pitchdeck
• Slide Layouts to Pitchdeck
• PowerPoint Master Slides to Pitchdeck
• Hover Fade Transitions to Bannerify
• XD Component States to Convertify
• Spreadsheet Row Sync Overrides to CopyDoc
• 30+ Video Design Tutorials for Emailify
• Emailify Templates to Emailify
• Selzy integration to Emailify
• Wrap and Min/Max Width support to Weblify
• Localized Frame Layouts to CopyDoc
• Versioned Review Links to Commentful
• OneSignal integration to Emailify
• Feedback Activity Overview to Commentful
• Slack Integration to Commentful
• Masked Animations to Bannerify
• Figma Variables content library integration to CopyDoc
• Markdown support for Content Snippets to CopyDoc
• Review Thread Replies to Commentful
• Custom Downscale sizes to TinyImage
• Airtable Content Library integration to CopyDoc
• Google Sheets Content Library integration to CopyDoc
• CSV Imports/Exports for Content Snippets to CopyDoc
• Placeholder Content to CopyDoc
• Text Expander Snippets to CopyDoc
• SendPulse integration to Emailify
• Masonry Image Grids to Emailify
• Tailwind support to Weblify
• Dev Mode support to Weblify

New feature videos for all plugin pages

Earlier this month, I wanted to make an effort to replace all of the screenshots of the Figma plugins on this website with short video screencaps instead.

This was partly to do a complete overhaul of all these images, as many of them were visually outdated since the Figma plugins had been updated quite a lot since they were first taken, and also to provide a way to show off each feature with more detail by using video.

The product pages for all our Figma plugins have been updated with new short feature videos as of today, along with a brand new 60-second overview video with all of our 12 plugins, which you can watch at the top of the home (or Pro Bundle) page of this website now.

Security docs for all of our plugins

Our Figma plugins have always been designed to do as much as possible inside of the Figma file itself, without needing to upload, process or store anything outside of the plugin; ensuring that as much as possible stays inside your Figma page and any exports are downloaded directly to your local computer.

To help make this more clear, there are a two additional resources that are now available to reference:

Every Figma plugin has its official Figma Network Access permissions displayed in the Figma Community, which shows what domains each plugin can access.

There is also a dedicated security page for every Figma plugin, which goes into detail about exactly how they work, and what they can and can’t do.

DesignOps Melbourne talk

In August, I gave my first talk in 3 years at DesignOps Melbourne; the talk was called Take the Pink Pill (why Best Practices™ are dead ends), where I was making the case that we’ve slid way too far into following “best practices” and accepting the dogma of how things have always been done, instead of thinking of more innovative ideas and trying new things.

I gave some thoughts into why I think this happens, the challenges that make it hard to break out of, and also offer a way forward, where AI and automation will serve as an uncomfortable forcing function to help get us out of this stagnation over the coming years.

I think that many parts of the talk will become more obvious when we look backwards at this very early AI stage in the coming years, as we see more automation and AI become a normal part of our workflows, which is going to raise lots of questions as to what a designer (or developer) really is, if lots of the “pixel pushing” type work is no longer a large part of the role anymore.

Optimistic (and mindful) about AI for design

The points that I wrote about on AI (for Hypermatic, specifically) in the July 2023 update have held up over the last 6 months.

While I remain even more optimistic and excited about the developments (I also think we should be accelerating, not pre-regulating or stopping it) and future potential of AI for our workflows, based on the reasons I mentioned in that update, I still don’t think it’s the right time to be jumping head first into prioritizing adding AI into our Figma plugins.

The plan is to continue building all of the plugins in a way that will lend itself to adding AI as a compliment them where it actually makes sense in the future; as impressive as some of the AI services already are, I think the best results will still come from coupling AI to automate parts of different workflows, rather than trying to replace them entirely (eg. just having a ChatGPT-like prompt to create an entire presentation or website design without any human input).

This is the space I have personally been tracking the most closely for the last few years, so I’ll continue to watch all of these developments and identify ways that these could be used to add value (not just for the sake of it) in our Figma plugins and products.

In the meantime, with Figma expanding their own AI team, I expect that many of the more obvious that ways AI can help with design will be shipped as native features to Figma over the next few years; so again, I don’t think it’s useful to double up the work on these features here, so I’m happy to wait and add Hypermatic specific AI enhancements when the time feels right.

Four seven day work weeks

I personally haven’t taken a single full day off for working on Hypermatic in the last 4 years, since founding the startup back in December 2019.

Since the lockdowns and surge in work from home (WFH) of 2020-2022, there has been lots of debate over the ideal number of days, hours and locations to work from for the optimal amount of productivity, freedom and happiness.

I think these are interesting questions that we should be studying the effects of, with all different companies pursuing their own approaches of full time office work, full time remote work, or more commonly some kind of hybrid between the two.

Closer to home here in Melbourne, there are active trials of 4 day work weeks at some companies, where:

Beginning this month, the experiment will be based on the 100:80:100 model, whereby employees maintain 100% of their pay, reduce their working hours to 80%, while maintaining 100% productivity.

I’m still not sure how that formula is supposed to work, and I think a better formula in almost all companies would be to maintain 100%+ of their pay, reduce their meeting hours by 90%+, while boosting 200%+ productivity, but I am interested to see how these experiments play out.

I can relate to John Carmack (lead programmer on the video game DOOM) talking about work, where he mentions the obvious (but somehow controversial) statement that “working longer gets more done”, even discounting that you are less effective after working a certain number of hours straight in a day.

I still work on Hypermatic every day (including weekends) because there’s nothing else I would rather be doing, and I think having an (admitedly, extreme) consistent habit of showing up every single morning (no matter what) helps maintain momentum and compounds into something much bigger after keeping it up for a long time.

I think that as long as you are doing work that is interesting and enjoyable, while saying “no” to as many things that aren’t enjoyable or interesting, you can get a really good days worth of work in and feel totally refreshed and excited each morning, as long as you can also get a solid ~8 hours of sleep each night and still make time for other important (non-work) aspects as life.

Momentum and drive are really hard to get back after you lose it, so I think one way of avoiding that is to default to applying much shorter time frames to tasks than might be estimated in a “normal” company. Not only does this help get things shipped to customers much faster, it also avoids projects or tasks dragging on way longer than they need to, which is a total motivation and momentum killer.

I also think it’s good to be overly optimistic and try to overshoot what you can get done in 6-12 months; it’s easy to lose momentum and have things that used to take a few days early on in a startup end up taking a few weeks, due to just have less sense of urgency as things become less uncertain and stable over time.

Looking ahead to 2024 for Hypermatic

The reason I mention the importance of keeping momentum and a strong sense of urgency is that in 2024, I really want to make a huge dent in my plans for developing Weblify into something really special and useful, while also exploring and developing brand new ideas that I haven’t really seen tried or executed well before.

Doing that kind of work is both very exciting and challenging, because nothing is certain and things don’t always work the way you think they will; which is to say that some days will feel like nothing is going to work, while other days will feel like you’re on top of the world (as Marc Andreessen put perfectly in Why not to do a startup).

Besides the top priority of delivering extreme customer service, and improving/maintaining all of our existing Figma plugins, the next year (and beyond) will be very focused on experimenting, designing/building, and iterating with real customers on getting Weblify to become a really valueable product for helping Figma users to design and build useful things for the web, in a way that is at least 10x easier and more compelling than any “best practices” to do that today.

I’m really excited about getting a fresh start on this next month to kick-off 2024, and I’m sure that I’ll have lots more to share in the next big mid-year update post in July 2024.