From Four to Five

“Keep your head down and work like I do, but understand everybody ain’t gon’ like you.”

— Kendrick Lamar, wacced out murals

It’s been exactly one year since posting an update for Hypermatic’s 4th birthday (From Three to Four), so here’s another annual recap to celebrate Hypermatic turning 5 years old today!

Some numbers to celebrate from 2024

• 0 investors and $0 funding (still happily bootstrapped/default alive)
• 72 new free Emailify-ready Figma templates published
• 30 new YouTube tutorials recorded
• 639 new product updates and improvements shipped
• 1,450,000+ users (up from 1,029,000 a year ago)

Some new feature highlights shipped in the last 6 months (since July 2024)

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:

• New Email Templates to Emailify
• Popup Scrollable Text Overlays to Bannerify
• Expandable “Quick Add” Layers to Emailify
• Scrollable Anchor Links to Emailify
• New Google Fonts Support to Emailify
• Custom Crop/Bleed Units to TinyImage
• Sendwithus Integration to Emailify
• Markdown Support for Localizations to CopyDoc
• Resizable Mobile Preview Exports to Emailify
• Smart Localization Styles to Emailify
• PPTX Imports for Figma Slides to Pitchdeck
• Klaviyo Abandoned Cart Components to Emailify
• Auto-Repeat Sync Layer Naming Support to CopyDoc
• HTML Rich Text Support to Bannerify
• Google Slides Imports to Pitchdeck
• Text Outline and Text Opacity Support to Pitchdeck
• PDF Bleed & Crop Marks to TinyImage
• Crowdin Integration to Emailify
• Amazon SES Integration to Emailify
• Editable Text Feedback to Commentful
• Multiple URL Environments Support to Pixelay
• Marketo Integration to Emailify
• PPTX Text Links Support to Pitchdeck
• List Item Spacing Support to Emailify

Learnings from 5 years running a self-funded startup

Hypermatic is my first attempt at running a startup, so there are many things I had to learn along the way. It’s easy to read many business books or hear common advice and think you know what to do or expect, but you don’t really understand it until you’ve been through it; “beware of unearned wisdom” comes to mind. I think it’s more important to use those resources for learning how to avoid the biggest common mistakes, but all happy companies are different, so it’s not possible to just run a pre-defined playbook.

Before starting Hypermatic, I worked in digital agencies for a decade as both a designer and developer, so I was mostly shielded from the business side of things and realities of running a company. It’s only after you make the jump to the other side that you appreciate that both sides need to work; you can’t just focus on the most beautiful product design or cleanest code without at least equal focus on how you’re going to distribute, market and iterate on it to find product/market fit and actually become sustainable as a business. From experience, the designers/developers on a team are living in a bit of a bubble, because they are so sheltered from customers, clients and the people who they are actually designing or developing things for.

After 5 years of doing this and learning new insights along the way, these are a few of the things that come to mind, split between maker mode (building products) and manager mode (running a business and working with companies):

Maker Mode

• The end user doesn’t care what trendy technologies you’re using behind the scenes, I think you just use whatever you personally enjoy working with and makes you the most productive and happy over the long term.
• Similarly, whatever the most simple, stable and reliable technology or infrastructure solution you can implement (eg. whatever makes it easiest to sleep well at night) is ideal, even if it’s boring or isn’t the hottest thing in the wider community.
• It’s way easier to iterate and make changes in the very beginning of a product’s life than it is once it has a larger base of customers who are already used to it, so it’s good to make rapid changes early on when 99.99% of the people who are going to eventually use the product haven’t even seen it yet.
• Focus is probably the single most important thing for product development; doing one thing at a time and saying “no” to everything else that’s begging for your attention or doesn’t align with the product vision.
• It’s always a mistake to add a feature that only one or two users are asking for, and doesn’t really fit into the vision of the overall product, so you need to push back on these requests even if it means losing a potential large customer (who are the most likely to ask for these bespoke features or updates).
• People are hiring your product to solve a real problem that they have, so it’s best to make it exceptionally easy and obvious for them to see their problem solved with a minimal time investment using your product for the first time.
• If you’re getting the same question/feedback about the interface or usability of a product over and over again, it’s almost always worth just making an update inside the product itself (even if it’s in your documentation) to address and resolve it.
• It’s good to own as much of your infrastructure as you can, but there is basically always some layer of “platform risk” where you don’t have total control; you need to minimize these while also realising there are some really positive trade-offs there between risk and upside.
• Going from working for someone else at an agency/company, where there are a myriad of overheads like recurring meetings, Slack channels, emails, Agile “rituals”, Zoom calls, and general disruptions; it’s amazing to go from that to removing all of these things and personally getting a 10x productivity boost, where you can literally get more than a normal week’s worth of work done in a single undisrupted day of pure productivity. The numbers from a study by Microsoft seeems to back this up by showing that “57% of the average employee’s time is spent in meetings, email, and chat”, “43% is spent creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations”, “The heaviest meeting users spend 7.5 hours a week in meetings” and “The heaviest email users spend 8.8 hours a week on email”.

Manager Mode

• It can often take 6-18 months for some larger companies to get a new tool approved to trial internally, and then work through all the red tape to actually be able to purchase it. I had a vague sense of this before I started, but I still totally underestimated how hard it can be for some companies to actually trial and (maybe, eventually) purchase software.
• Most people and teams are doing their best to figure out how to get their work done in the best way possible, but there is usually an entrenched bureaucracy that breeds a sense of helplessness and conspires to prevent much from changing.
• Despite many companies claiming to be innovative and forward thinking (even if they truly desire to do things differently), the reality is that most companies still mainly run on an undercurrent of Excel spreadsheets, emails, PowerPoint presentations, PDF files and Word docs; especially because there is a weird lock-in “network effect” here, where each company has to keep using these things because every other company does.
• There isn’t a single company that I’m aware of that has everything figured out (even the best ones that we may idolise from the outside), all of them have their own problems, and almost all of the real problems are people problems.
• There are a handful of companies or users who will never be satisfied (and will demand a huge amount of your time), no matter how much you go above and beyond to help them; learning to detect this small group and politely saying “no” early on will save lots of future headaches.
• Many “requirements” that companies have (particularly bigger ones) are very often negotiable, especially when there is an additional cost associated to cover the costs of complying with them.
• It’s good to think very carefully before implementing one-way door decisions, like making a non-standard contract with a customer that will require ongoing mind-share and effort.
• Customers have such an extremely low bar for customer service, and are delighted when they actually get timely assistance from a real person to resolve their issue, it’s a relatively easy thing to do that makes a big difference (especially as a small startup competing with larger ones that have bad support).

The UX Bubble Popped

After foreshadowing that a “vibe shift” was coming at the end of 2023, fast-forwarding one year later to the end of 2024 and it’s pretty clear that the bubble has popped. Looking at the state of UX for 2025, it’s striking how filled it is with grievances, before throwing in the towel on the whole project, and ends with advocating that the article itself “is the nudge you need to jump ship entirely”. In retrospect, the signs were obvious, and I think the bubble peaked somewhere around the end of 2021.

Similar to the the MBA bubble, it’s no secret that the “UX design” space became totally over-saturated, and attracted a flood of people driven by the crazy promises of UX bootcamps that the field was so highly specialised and had an infinite demand that it commanded high salaries, while at the same time claiming that anyone, coming from any background or field (design or otherwise) could also become “job ready” with a 6-week course. The field had the mania of a ponzi-scheme, coupled with a perpetual existential crisis that was more concerned with trying to define and justify itself, rather than a real focus on the underlying discipline.

In terms of what’s next, I think that in the same way we saw people pivoting their entire careers into becoming UX Designers within a very short period of time (eg. a 6-week bootcamp) and re-branding themselves as “Senior UX Designers” (weirdly, there’s not really such a thing as a “Junior UX Designer”), I think that we’re going to start seeing lots of designers who didn’t know what “A.I” stood for 2 minutes ago, now rebranding themselves as some kind of expert on the vague notions of “AI Design Ethics” and “Responsible AI”, or some variation of this.

The Post-AGI World

As I mentioned 2 years ago, I do think AI is going to be a huge forcing function for us to rethink the “best practices” we have clung onto for so long, and I’m very optimistic about the benefits it’s going to bring broadly (to research, science and biotech, etc) and to our design/development workflows, but as I also mentioned in my learnings above, I think the culture will always lag behind the technology by many years, so my position remains the same as it did back then; I just want to work on solving real long-time problems that exist for designers, developers and marketers in this space (which I also understand the inefficiencies as deeply as they do) which very few other people or startups seem to be working on. If there are ways that AI can help do that, and it makes sense to add those because it’s 5-10x better than without it, then I’ll be happy to do that. I also think that it’s very important to make sure the relationship between AI and designers/developers is one that’s collaborative, where you get the AI to do all the things that it’s better at doing (eg. generating code, handling vast amounts of data, etc), and still have the human handle the rest (eg. taste, strategy, specific brand knowledge, etc).

As we reach AGI in a few thousand days, if OpenAI’s estimates are accurate, that list of what humans are uniquely better at is going to shrink dramatically, so I think it’s important to focus on what will still be true and valuable in a world where AGI is widely available and work towards creating tools and products that will only benefit even more if you keep adding extra intelligence to them, rather than become obsolete.

This is largely true of all the products that rushed to add AI features into their apps, like text summaries/drafts (via a ChatGPT API call), which is now just a default feature in the browser or easily available via one of the hundreds of tools and APIs that can help do this for you. To this day, I still haven’t personally had a single customer say “we just wish there was AI in your products”; they might request features that AI could help with, but they haven’t mentioned AI itself and if anything, most companies are very suspicious if you do have some kind of AI features, as they’re worried about what data might be collected or if they’re accidentally infringing on copyright with the outputs (eg. with image generators, etc).

Looking ahead to 2025 for Hypermatic

In the last 2024 mid-year update, I mentioned that I thought the priority should be to stabalise and improve without imposing unnecessary changes in the UI for the sake of adding more features that may or may not need to be there. This is mainly to over-correct for the fact that lots of software tends to get worse over time as the default.

If you look at the list of list of updates posted at the top of this article, you’ll notice that many of them make improvements behind the scenes, without jamming a brand new set of UI elements into the user’s existing interface that they’re used to and trying to shift as much as possible to either the Figma UI itself or just handle behind the scenes with an additional dropdown option (eg. new email platform integrations).

I want to keep doing more of that where it’s useful throughout 2025, and also start publishing more free design resources to help add more value to the plugin users as well (similar to shipping 100+ free email templates this year, which work with Emailify out of the box). This will also be coupled with more free video tutorials to try and help existing and new users get even more value from the plugin by doing things they may not have been aware of without diving deeper into the documentation or knowing was possible to achieve.

I’d also like to spend some time migrating this main marketing website to a new framework (as the current one is no longer supported, and may eventually run into deployment issues). Similar to completely re-doing the docs site in the first half of this year, it was a great chance to audit everything and remove anything that doesn’t need to be there any more and add anything extra that should be there, too. There are also a few backend systems and tools behind the scenes that are due for some maintenance and improvements as well.

In terms of new products, the one that I keep coming back to (literally every year) and can’t get out of my head is a simple, yet powerful and extensible tool to help designers, developers and marketers create beautiful and customizable marketing/landing pages, portfolios or small websites (and probably basic web apps in the future) that can automatically be exported to production ready code that they own and can deploy on their own platform of choice (which they also own, eg. AWS, Vercel, Netlify, GitHub etc), which the plugin would help them to do as well.

As mentioned above, regarding platform risk, there is always the chance that something native comes along in the future (eg. “Figma Sites”) that would wipe out much of the value created by something like this, but I still think it’s worth trying to build as something that I wish that I could have had in my previous career, and just assume that there is at least one other team who will resonate with how I’d like to go about solving these problems. As with all the other Figma plugins, the aim is to make something that is 10x better than the current manual workflow most teams are dealing with.

I also want to get out of my own comfort zone and focus on using LinkedIn to help market the Figma plugins, as I think there are lots of people in my network who could benefit from them but literally haven’t seen or heard of them; I was made acutely aware of this after talking to former co-workers at my previous company who were running into problems generating HTML emails and had never tried using Emailify before. Why LinkedIn? I think it’s super underrated and less crowded, where very little people actually post on there, and I might as well take advantage of communicating with the thousands of connections in the design, development and marketing space that I’ve made over the last decade and see if it resonates with them at all.

That’s it for another year! It feels like the last 5 years have been a total blur, I still remember sitting down at my kitchen table on December 21st 2019 as the first day I went all-in to start working on Hypermatic for the first time like it was yesterday. I thought that maybe I would have a bunch of digital/advertising agencies that I talked to (just in Melbourne) be interested in using these Figma plugins, and totally underestimated that teams in almost every country all over the world also wanted these problems solved, and would choose Hypermatic Figma plugins as the way to help them do that. It’s pretty unreal to have had over 1.4 million users across all of the 12 Figma plugins in the last 5 years, and I’m looking forward to seeing how that continues over the next 5 years, too.

Finally, I just want to say thank you to everyone who has tried out or purchased any of our Figma plugins. Having you put your trust in Hypermatic to become a part of your workflow is what allows us to be able to continue working on solving these real problems for you every single day here, it’s awesome and much appreciated!

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