As with the last mid-year update, this strictly business update also falls on July 4th. Even though Hypermatic is based in Australia, and not the United States (or Japan, as some seem to think, based on the design of this website), I do like the idea of doing these mid-year updates on Independence Day, and re-focusing it on continuing to declare our independence from legacy design/development workflows.
First half of 2022 — tl;dr
The first half of the year has been pretty full on, starting with the first couple of months being very focused on shipping our brand new Commentful Figma plugin.
Just weeks later after the new plugin was released, we were taken by surprise and went through a very rapid and intensive full rebrand across every aspect of the business and codebase from Figmatic to Hypermatic.
After that, we had to deal with the fallout of the sanctions put on Russia, which meant that all of our Russian customers were cut off from using our products overnight, due to their credit card payments being blocked and cancelled. It also meant that many of our customers from Ukraine were also wanting to pause their use of the products while things were so uncertain.
Shortly after taking care of those customers, we faced a new Figma bug related to image loading that caused some major speed issues for many of our plugins for over a month, and worked with customers to support them and help with workarounds, while manage expectations around when to expect a proper resolution for the core issue.
After these first 6 months of hard work shipping plugin updates and dealing with a the curveballs mentioned above, it feels like things are in a great place right now to get back at it like a crack addict and really double down and focus on building and shipping all of the other exciting updates planned for our Figma plugins for the second half of 2022.
Plugin update highlights in 2022 (so far)
There are multiple updates and small fixes shipped to multiple Figma plugins on a daily basis, but here are some cool highlights from the first half of 2022:
- Added new e-commerce, table and social components for Emailify
- Shipped localization to Emailify and CopyDoc
- Rebuilt the Bannerify animation timeline to be scrubbable
- Shipped LottieFile animations support to Bannerify
- Added SendGrid integration to Emailify
- Added support for embedding videos into Bannerify banners
- Shipped hover state support for Bannerify animations
- Added microphone support to Crypto video recordings
- Added a way to ignore Lorem Ipsum from CopyDoc spellcheck
- Added support for YouTube Shorts to Pitchdeck presentations
- Shipped a feature to add elements via context selections to Emailify
- Added support for background images/gradients to Emailify
- Added custom PDF metadata to Pitchdeck exports
- Added support for individual borders to Emailify elements
- Added image carousel components to Emailify
Changes to how Figma plugins are installed
Over the last week, there has also been a new fundamental change to the way Figma plugins are installed, which has (so far) led to an 80-90% decrease in the number of installs for our plugins compared to pre-Figma update installations. These stats seem consistent with global stats, which shows ~120,000 new plugin installs on June 25th, which dropped to ~6,700 new installs across all plugins on July 4th (today), almost a week after the new Figma Community update was launched.
Figma plugins can now be “Run” without being installed, so it’s possible this will offset that net loss of “Installs”, but it remains to be seen what positive or negative effects this update will have from here on in, once the initial confusion and muscle memory around how Figma users are used to working with plugins until now. Putting together a video walkthrough on how to install plugins in 2022, and communicating directly with our own customers who have some confusion around this have been the main focus to help them adjust to this transition in the meantime.
Removing live chat from the site
After having live chat as a support feature for the last 2.5 years, it has been removed from the Hypermatic site as of a few weeks ago, and has been replaced by email-only support instead.
The main reason for this is related to time zones; being based down here in Australia means that most of our customers are awake while we’re asleep, which means that “live chat” messages aren’t as live as they should be for much of the time. Live chat has been wonderful when it happens to sync up directly with other timezones, but other times these messages can be difficult to follow up the next day if the customer hasn’t also left their email address in the prompt to receive any notifications.
Weirdly, switching to a purely asynchronous way of doing support (purely via email) has been working out well so far. The async nature of email itself sets an expectation that it won’t be replied to right away, yet it is still treated as if it’s live chat here either way, which leads to us having very fast response and resolution times compared with what would usually be anticipated for email support.
As with anything, there are always trade offs, but I believe that consolidating all support into one method is the right way to go ahead, and reduce any confusion and potential lost messages that can occur with the live chat approach.
Emails are all promptly replied to during the day, and processed first thing in the morning the following day, which means that the response/resolution time still ranges from a few minutes (during the day here) to a maximum of ~12-15 hours (if the email is processed in the morning here).
Building a startup (in a recession)
In April 2020, 3 months after quitting my job and starting this company as a self-funded founder, I gave a talk called Building a startup (in a pandemic).
I gave the talk remotely via video during the second week of our “2 weeks to flatten the curve” 263 day Melbourne lockdown, and one of the main themes of the talk was my strategy for how to start a startup that would be profitable by relentlessly focusing on customers and building products to help them become more successful.
I think that many of things I talked about in that talk relating to running a startup during a downturn are also very relevant to the weakened economic climate we are in right now, which will be realised more broadly over the coming months. In that way, the approach of relentlessly focusing on delivering real value to customers and generating profit to have enough runway to continue the company over the long term has not changed.
To the surprise of everyone who seemed to love MMT (and total lack of surprise to everyone else), “2 weeks to flatten the curve” turned into “2 years to flatten the economy”; with “transitory” inflation caused by rates artificially kept at zero and inflating the money supply by printing a tonne of it.
Just like “transitory inflation” was always a lie, I think this is also true of “peak inflation” and any talk of a “soft landing”. I believe that we are (officially) about to recognise that we’ve been in a recession since January 2022, so I thought it would be worth very briefly reflecting on the sustainability of Hypermatic and re-assure anyone who cares (probably nobody) that we are in an excellent position to weather any storm that lays ahead of us over the next 12-24 months, and beyond.
Hypermatic is proudly self-funded, default alive and default investible (however, there are still no plans to take any funding), with high enough free cash flow and a low enough burn-rate to allow the business to continue indefinitely creating value for all of our customers over the long term.
We have never taken any funding, have never spent outside of our means, and as a result have often been dismissed by some VCs as being little more than a “lifestyle business”. However, with the “everything bubble” and irrational inflated startup valuations of the last 2 years in the rear view mirror, the party is now coming to an end; and I am more confident than ever that the decision to remain self-funded and focus on creating real value for our customers and being profitable remains the correct one.
Some would say that this means that we’ve sacrificed speed, but I don’t agree with that at all; having more funding or throwing more people at a business does not automatically guarantee velocity, and in many cases can lead to complacency, lack of focus or productive pursuits being traded for more bureaucratic things like meetings or slower decision making and action.
Looking ahead
I’m writing this update at the end of a dedicated 2 day business “retreat” to take a more focused pause from the day-to-day activities of running Hypermatic, which I personally still work on every single day as a “7 days per week” or “~70 hours per week” startup.
Amongst other things, one of the super helpful activities was going through and answering all of the excellent questions from Jason Cohen’s excellent long form post about asking extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas, which really did clarify some of the shorter-term (next 6 months) and longer-term (next few years) decisions and product directions for Hypermatic. It was also very generative for other aspects of the business that aren’t directly related to the products themselves, so I’m excited to experiment with some of those ideas in the future, too.
The next 6 months will be focused on shipping the most impactful updates/features to our existing Figma plugins, and get them all in an ever more solid spot than they are right now, while also continuing R&D work on the next brand new Figma plugin that will ship in 2023. The groundwork for other more future-focused ideas that will come later (post-2023) is also being laid down now to ensure that future vision for some of our products can be properly realised over time, too.
As I’ve said from day one, the focus always remains on creating value over the long-term, and that can only be done if we’re able to survive and thrive during any downturns or uncertainty that comes along (as it is right now). and the long-term trajectory remains strong, hyper focused and most importantly, still around to see our mission through to the end (which we will be).
I’m still as excited about the business and future of it as I was on day one of starting it, back in 2019, and also having just as much fun working on it as ever. Momentum still feels super strong, which I think is really important, and I have a renewed sense of optimism about the months and years ahead, as we continue with the overarching mission of reducing the distance between design and production to zero.
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