Easy Units and FigPug
In 2020 04 we created our first Figma plugin, called easy units, which lets you resize objects by using units other than px. For the first 2-3 months, we had almost no traffic and did little promotion. Then we started getting small bursts of traffic and leveled off at 3-4 downloads a week. This was small but rather gratifying to have a tiny trickling of passive income. Every few purchases we would get a ticket about a verification code not working correctly. Which we thought was caused by how the key was stored on the web app version of Figma. But it ended up turning out that all verifications to our server had been failing and most people just didn't reach out. We are still unclear what the root of this was but today we resubmitted the plug as Figpug Units and will grandfather in all the existing members.
A few learnings from this:
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We built Easy Units with a team member which we ended up parting ways with, and there is a small part of me that doesn't think they tested the past build they pushed. So it was a great reminder to always have other team members verify patches before they are pushed.
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Many of the members were very kind and understanding as we updated the plugin o fix the issue. But we did refund one order from an explicit and rather irrational customer. It felt good to realize that refunding was easy and lead to both parties separating peacefully.
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We need to work on setting up more systems to report things when they are breaking. I'm still unsure of how we might have done this but want to design for this in mind in the future.