Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career: An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire)

00:00:00 - 00:30:00

Claire Butler, the first marketing hire at Figma, discusses the company's growth strategy. Figma focuses on getting individual contributors to love their product and then enabling them to spread it within their organizations. The podcast also touches on the challenges and decision-making process during the early stages of the company. The go-to-market motion of Figma is described as a bottom-up approach focused on individual contributors, particularly designers, who become advocates and drive adoption within their organizations.

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00:30:00 - 01:00:00

The podcast discusses the strategies used by Figma to gain credibility and build relationships with their audience. They emphasize the importance of authenticity and technical content in marketing to designers. The four main areas they focused on were credibility, building the product with users, finding a channel for relationship-building, and being transparent and honest. The podcast also highlights the role of advocates in driving adoption and building relationships, as well as the challenges faced by Figma, including downtime and negative user feedback. They emphasize the importance of transparency and accountability in addressing these issues.

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01:00:00 - 01:30:00

This podcast episode provides an inside look at Figma's go-to-market motion. It discusses four key strategies: making the product easy to try and share, utilizing designer advocates in the sales process, implementing design systems for scalability, and maintaining connections with internal champions. The podcast also emphasizes the importance of allowing users to try the tool for free before introducing payment options, and highlights the impact of changing the pricing structure on the product's growth.

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01:30:00 - 01:31:25

The podcast episode discusses the topic of preparing for parental leave and being present during that time. The hosts mention a guest post by Tamara on setting up a leave guide and advice from Noah Weiss about not overthinking things. The episode concludes with gratitude for the guest and a call to subscribe and leave a review.

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We had Koda, they were our first user, and they were based in Palo Alto.

Dylan and I drove down and demoed the product to them, and they were the

first ones, their designer Jeremy was like, yes, we'll take this on full time.

And I remember we were both like, what, really?

He will get that was like the first person who said yes to us.

And so we were like, so excited.

This was like a huge milestone.

We were just so stoked.

And then we got back to the office and I think Dylan gets a text from

Jeremy being like, Oh yeah, I tried this chance with Philippe, my engineer,

and he can't get the file to open.

So I guess we can't use it.

And we're like, what has happened?

This is fine.

They got someone and I remember Dylan was like, everybody drop everything.

We have to fix this.

And after some, you know, looking at the servers and things, they were like,

nothing's wrong.

And then they realized his problem with Philippe's MacBook and Evan, Evan down

had a car.

So Dylan had to drive Evan down to Palo Alto to fix the MacBook of Philippe

just to get them to use the product.

Welcome to Lenny's podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders

and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences, building and

growing today's most successful products.

Today, my guest is Claire Butler.

Claire started at Figma while they were still in stealth as their 10th employee

and their first ever marketing hire.

She led their original launch and go to market and also their branding and

positioning and messaging work.

And eight years in, she continues to lead their go to market and bottom up

growth motion, along with community, events, social advocacy and Figma for

education.

In our conversation, we get the first ever in depth glimpse into how Figma grew

and continues to grow.

Claire shares her two-part go to market strategy, which involves getting

ICs at a company to love you and then enabling them to spread the product

within the organization.

She shares tons of amazing stories and examples and lessons from how the

Figma team executed the strategy and how you can apply it to your own product.

This is an incredible episode with so many gold nuggets of wisdom.

You'll probably want to listen to it more than once.

With that, I bring you Claire Butler after a short word from our sponsors.

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Claire, thank you so much for being here.

Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks Lenny.

I'm excited to be here.

You've been on my wish list of guests for a long time.

And so I'm really excited to be finally chatting.

You were the 10th employee at Figma, which is now worth tens of billions of

dollars, depending on which valuation you look at.

And probably thousands of employees.

I don't even know, but many, many.

And you joined before the product even launched.

And so I have a million questions I want to ask about how Figma grew and all

the things that went into it.

I'm curious what it was like to be early days at Figma.

Is there a memory that comes to mind that's zany, funny, fun, tangible of just

like what it was like to work at Figma in the early days?

Yeah, totally.

No, that's a true question.

We were right downtown on New Montgomery and Minna.

And I think the thing that sticks out to me is actually two competing stories

that talk about just how much at that time, you'd oscillate between these

like really high level strategic decisions.

And then like total current work, right?

So like my first day of Figma, I come into the office and, you know, we're

going through some stuff, like 10 of us in the office were chatting and I look

at some of the plans, some of the things they're working on.

And I see that they were actually had some branding and positioning and

things that the product Figma was going to be named Summit.

That was the name.

So the company was going to be Figma and then the product suite, the product

design tool, right, was going to be Summit with the idea that, you know,

eventually we'll have other tools and that could be like Mountaintop or I

don't know what the real, they had a whole thing around the different things

that could be for the future product set.

And I remember my first day, I had an immediate reaction of like,

we can not name this thing Summit, that's not going to work.

We can't have two brands, Summit's not ownable.

Like we can't build equity and like multiple things.

Like that's just never going to work.

We kind of have to just stick with one.

And I think Figma is ownable and makes sense.

And we should just go with Figma.

So we kind of should probably kill the Summit thing.

Until instead to me, he was like, Oh, that's interesting.

How about you make a presentation and present it to everyone tomorrow?

And so I did that as like, Oh, okay.

I guess this is what I'm doing the rest of the day.

So I went and made a little presentation about, you know, like how we couldn't

build all this equity into places and all of the things.

And then the next day we decided to kill that name.

And so we went with Figma for the name of the product instead of Summit.

And that's how fast things moved, right?

And how much you just kind of ran with it and had ownership.

I compare that to the first meetup we had, which was probably just like 10

people in the office, honestly.

But I remember I was like, you know, I was in charge of that.

So I was like, had to get all the food and everything there.

And I just instacarded some things and ordered some pizza, but I'd forgotten ice.

And so I had to go walk down to the nearest corner store, which was like

three blocks away or something and get ice.

And I got like four bags.

And I remember I was walking down the street down probably third street

with like three bags of ice.

And it was really heavy.

And I remember thinking, this is so hard.

This is so heavy.

I can't carry all this ice.

And it's just like that's that I did that too.

Like probably like the next week.

And so I think it was just this oscillation between like, Oh, we're making

these high-level strategic decisions and someone also has to go by the ice.

That's what it was like at Figma in the early days.

That's incredible.

That's almost a metaphor.

Someone's got to go carry the ice.

So it's got to ice for the meetup.

Yep.

That's it.

So interesting about Summit.

I had no idea that was.

That was another name.

So if you like that better, I'm sorry, because I killed that.

Like, who could like it better now that everyone loves Figma?

And that's just what it is.

Do you think Figma would have been as successful with that name looking back?

I think we probably would have changed it later.

You know, I think we just we just saved ourselves some time and without having to

change it.

And then how many days or weeks into your tenure was that happening?

The name change or the first day?

No, that was literally my first day.

No, no, no.

That was my first day in my second day.

Like not even kidding.

My first day I made the recommendation the second day of the presentation and the

decision was made.

Well, I was going to ask you what the most stressful memory of early days Figma was.

I'm guessing it's the same story.

It's not actually.

So I think the most stressful thing I was thinking about this was when we launched

out of stealth.

So like I couldn't get to Figma.

I had lots of experience.

I'd been another started before that I launched stuff, but I was still kind of

junior, you know, like I had done these things, but I didn't have a ton of a ton

of ton of cycles and I never like run the whole thing from like, OK, like messaging

and positioning like we this was a forcing function for us to do our messaging

and positioning.

And I remember they were like, there was like more than one day where like we locked

ourselves in a conference room and it made Dylan and show at the time have this

position up on the big screen and like made them agree on it word for word.

Because we just never done that before.

But then I'd also like never run PR press.

And all of a sudden I have to run press and PR.

And I think the hardest part there and the most stressful part was like, I

didn't want to talk to you.

It was just me, right?

And I didn't at the time have enough cycles to have the confidence that like the

decisions I was making were the right ones.

And so I like, you know, it was hard not to second guess myself sometimes in that

position. And I think that's some of the hardest times of being at a startup,

especially when you're the only marketer, the only go to market person is you

don't want to talk to to like gut check stuff with.

And so it does take this like immense confidence in yourself.

But like that's stressful when you don't have the cycles, right?

And so that was very stressful for me, for sure.

How did you overcome that?

Did you find people to work with and run ideas by?

Did you just do it and figure it out?

I just, I mean, Dylan, but we just did it, right?

Especially in those early days, I remember there were a couple of freak

out moments where I would like try to get our VCs to help us.

I remember Greylock was helpful, at least over there.

But ultimately, like they don't know that, you know, they help a lot,

but they don't know your businesses as intimately as you do.

So at the end of the day, you know, that's something Dylan's really good at

is trusting his intuition and gut.

And so he was helpful on the decision making.

But then also, you just got to go for it.

And I think that that's something that I learned at that time that's helped

me throughout the rest of my career is like building that confidence or that

trust in yourself, because it wasn't something that I necessarily immediately had.

Next question I wanted to get into briefly is you joined Figma really early,

became one of the most successful, loved companies in history.

What did you see early on that convinced you that Figma was the company

to join and ask because a lot of people today are looking for places to join

and decide what to do.

Clearly, you made a good choice.

What did you see?

So I had been another startup before Figma, a little bit bigger.

I think I joined at Series B and then got through on acquisition.

And I had a sense that I wanted to do something early.

So I'd already kind of made that decision that I wanted to go early stage.

So I'll take the decision making part out.

But then from there, I was talking to a couple of different companies.

And when I went to Figma, there were kind of three, three areas

that stood out the most to me.

The first was it logically made sense.

And I know maybe that sounds basic, but like I was talking to like a drone

company or like a SaaS, like tech, like ad tech company.

And I just didn't get it, honestly.

Like it didn't intuitively make sense to me or I didn't understand

the technology or something.

But at Figma, the basic premise, like immediately logically clips for me.

Like, oh, yeah, I use Google Docs.

I use Asana.

I use all these online tools.

Like that's so weird that design's not online.

Like, why isn't it?

And as a marketer, I'd worked with designers and sent feedback and emails.

And that's really inefficient.

And it made a ton of sense to me that, yes, that should be online and collaborative.

So like the first thing that I was like, check the box.

And the next one was I knew people who believed in it.

So I got introduced to Dylan via index.

They were an investor at the last company I was at, and Danny Reimer

specifically, and my old boss, Greg Smearin, who was an EIR there.

And I trusted them a lot and they invested in it.

I also met John Lilly.

I didn't know who he was.

I had to Google him, but he seemed really smart.

And when they Googled in, he was very impressive and he believed in it.

So that was great.

And then I think the third thing was I remember when I was trying to decide

Dylan really didn't take no for answer.

He's very persuasive.

And I remember like he'd call me and text me and then I'd have all these

like concerns or things and he would just like pick them apart one by one.

Like of reasons why they weren't concerns or things to get over them.

And so I think that that was the third thing is like, that's just kind

of who he was and that's how he's with everything.

And so that's how he's with me.

That's how he is with any obstacle that he has.

And so when I looked at that, I was just like, all right, let's give this a go.

And, and I didn't know, right?

Like I didn't know that I had no idea it would be as big as it is today.

So some of it was locked to for sure.

But those are the three things that like how I made my decision.

So what I took away there is when I just believe in the, in the idea, obviously,

like make, make sure you actually think this could be really big too, is some

social proof people you trust really believe in it.

In this case, it was really smart investors.

They knew.

And then the third is just sounds like you were also just impressed with Dylan.

Yeah, totally.

I believed in him.

So you joined Figma before you even launched.

It was still in stealth.

You joined as the first go-to-market hire.

You helped launch Figma.

You continue to lead go-to-market at Figma.

And so that's a good segue to where I want to spend most of our conversation.

I essentially want to try to unpack what worked to build Figma into the

business that it is today from beginning to even now.

You're also there for eight years.

So you saw a lot of what worked and didn't work.

And so let's start with the beginnings of Figma and the go-to-market motion that

you developed and how you actually implemented it.

So maybe to start, if you could just talk about just what is a bottom-up go-to-market

motion, and then you also shared somewhere that Figma has a very unique bottom-up

go-to-market motion.

So maybe just those two areas, just like broadly, what is bottom-up go-to-market

motion and then two, what is unique about Figma's approach?

I've reflected back to get to some of these answers.

I think in the moment, so much of what we were doing was influenced by, like,

got it, by, like, trying to connect with people, listening to them.

But when I look back is when I'm like, oh, this is like a repeatable motion.

So when I look back at it, I would say that if I were to define and think about

how I define go-to-market or go-to-market motion, and we've said it, we've

called it a lot of things over time, right?

We called it product-led, called it community-led.

The way I think about it now is this bottom-up motion that really is focused

on ICs, right?

So it's all focused on, like, okay, so you have this core audience.

For us, it was designers, and they're largely individual contributors, right?

So they're people who are practitioners, who are using your tool.

For us, it's like eight hours a day.

If you're a designer, you're an infant all the time.

And they, they love you, right?

And you build this relationship with them, within the product, but it's beyond

the product, right?

It's also believing what the product can be and the company and the brand.

And they just, they love you so much that they're willing to put their social

capital and themselves in the line and spread the product throughout their,

whatever their, you know, communities are.

And the one that's connected the most to revenue is companies.

And so that's where the revenue model really kind of clicks in, is you have

all these individual contributors who love you, but then they also work with

these big companies and these big orgs, and they become these internal

champions whose spearhead adoption within their organizations and eventually

turn into large amounts of revenue.

And I think of that as our bottoms up motion.

And that's different from tops down.

And a lot of SaaS is tops down where you go straight to like a VP or buy

like an executive buyer.

They then like kind of like agree to doing a tool to find a tool.

And then that kind of goes down to their organization.

I think with technical tools, especially like this becomes really important.

The practitioners have to love it, right?

Um, and also sometimes I wondered, is an executive care, you know what it

means, like what tools people are using.

And so for Figma, what that looks like and why this is like so efficient

of a go-to-market motion for us is we actually didn't have a sales team

for the first three years.

So all of our revenue, we did have, we did have it, it was paid, but

it was all self-serve.

And so we, we worked with these and we weren't worried about things like, I

mean, you cared about security, but all of the org features that people

need and want when you're working with procurement.

Um, we were just focused on technical features for users mostly.

And then the, the individual contributor or maybe the manager would

just put Figma on their credit card.

That was the way that things grew.

And so there was no sales team for a long time.

We did have one eventually and I'll talk about what that looked like.

But then the second thing was we also, once we did have a sales team and even

up until now, so much of our, our revenue and our sales and our like MQLs

or marketing qualified leads come from our free tier, right?

So it's people, they're using it and maybe they use it for free.

We have a very robust free tier.

Maybe they use it for pro, which is on your credit card.

And then once it's widespread and they've gained the confidence, then

they're ready to bring in sales, work with procurement.

And they actually come to us and they're like, Hey, I work at this company.

I really want to get my whole company to use it, but like security's not letting me.

Can you help me unblock it with them?

Right.

And so we didn't spend that much money, any money really programmatically on

paid or programmatic marketing, because all of our leads for sales would come in

through like a form on our website, which was current users either free or pro

wanting to upgrade.

And at that point, it's a very different sales conversation to unblock someone

or to, you know, just help them implement Sigma when they've already already

have an internal champion who's bought in, and they're really the one leading

and driving the sale within their organization.

So I think that that's what's made us really efficient as like a, this is a

really efficient model and has really powered so much of our growth over time.

Somebody listening to this that has saying a SaaS B2B SaaS company is like, Oh,

okay, I just need to get people to love my product and it's going to be great.

And so I want to unpack that just like what you did because it wasn't obviously

an accident that people loved Sigma.

But before we get there, you talked about that there's something, there's a unique

approach to the way you did bottom up.

What do you see as what the typical bottom up?

Got a market motion is that other companies try to play that you think

Sigma did differently.

Is it this like obsession with ICs on teams or is there some other element of it?

I think there are other people who do bottoms up and who do it do it well.

I think for us, it's unique because the individual contributors spend so much

time in the tool and it's so important to them.

I think about things that we focus on where it might take like one click off

of someone's workflow.

And that seems to be like a really small update, right?

Like you have to click one time instead of twice to do something.

When you're a designer and you're in a tool eight hours a day, saving that one

click is huge, right?

And so I think the obsession with quality and with craft within the editor, right?

For us, for Sigma is maybe the difference.

And I think about other go-to-market tools that maybe focus so much on the

collaboration side or like the product led of the expansion.

And that is a huge part.

So don't get me wrong, but the tool itself, right?

Like the editor, that's where it all starts.

And that's what these people love.

And then the collaboration is kind of like, yes, it's the thing that's

like our differentiator, but it's actually like you stay for the collaboration.

You don't want to talk about it or like learn about it or nobody wants to

have a collaboration.

You just want it to work, right?

You care about the tool and that the tool is working well.

And so I think that maybe that's the difference is the obsession with the tool itself.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Something I learned recently is that multiplayer wasn't even a part of

Figma at launch a year later.

I know we can talk about that.

And we want to know like what, like making a decision of when to go to self

because we almost didn't because it didn't have multiplayer.

Oh, yeah.

Let's talk about that for differentiator.

And we can't not have it, but then, you know, we did anyway.

So yeah, let's take attention there, actually, just that decision to go from

stealth.

So Figma was in stealth three years or four years before.

Gosh, three, I guess.

I think is 2020, 2012 that we that they started and then we launched in at the

end of 2015.

So between around there, yeah, around three or four.

Cool.

And then you joined right before they launched.

We're going to come back to what we were talking about, but just what did you

see about that decision of like now's the time to launch?

Yeah, I think that's a couple of things.

So I think the first thing is that the team had been building quietly by

themselves in isolation for three years.

And that's heroin, right?

Like, I think that that was a very real part of the decision to get out of

stealth was that people had been building for such a long time.

We needed momentum.

We needed to like have a milestone that we were working towards.

And when we're just, we could have just kept building it quite for a long time

more, but it was very demotivating, right?

So that was like a very big part of this.

So there was a desire holistically to get out of stealth, but we didn't want to

do until we knew it at least be successful.

But that was a key thing for me.

Like I was working on that messaging positioning that I was telling you,

like we would have, they still have the dock, actually, where it was like on

the projected on the screen and Dylan and Joan, I picked apart every word of it.

And sharing with a link and multiplayer is the biggest thing.

Like that's the core differentiator.

Uh, it's really funny.

I remember Ivan from Notion was at Notion's early days, he stopped by and

was chatting and he's like, wait, you can't launch with that multiplier.

And I was like, I know.

So I was like, everybody was like, that was the core thing.

But the, the idea was that we had, we wanted to get out of stealth.

We talked to Evan, our CTO and knew would take about another year for him to

build it.

And for me, it was like, well, is there enough here to get people excited to

start and to get, uh, users, get more feedback?

Cause Evan was kind of building multiplayer.

I don't know enough about the engineering.

If he was doing it on his own or not, but he was the key person doing it.

Cause there are a lot of other things too that were being built,

could be built through that year.

And we wanted to get more feedback from people, right?

And to start to really get started.

And so to me, the things that I wanted to see before just deciding like, okay,

so we don't have our key feature can still launch where is this, is there not

fear for people to get excited.

And my first, you know, at least my first three months, especially before we got

that, get going for the, for the launch of the product.

And probably even after that, I would just go around with Dylan and pilot or

our demo Figma to companies.

That was like a lot of what we did, right?

So we'd go to these companies and we'd show them Figma and we'd get their

feedback and I would be kind of driving around on Palo Alto around the city,

doing that with Dylan.

And sometimes people didn't care, right?

Like they were just like, what is this?

You know, I don't, I don't, I don't want to design online, things like that.

But what we wanted to see, what I wanted to see was that designers were excited

when they saw the tool.

And once we got enough features, and I saw this pretty quickly actually when I

joined Figma, is that the people that we showed it to were really interested in

it and cared about it.

And I remember there were a, but I know after Vector Networks came out after

some of our other four features, there were enough things where people, I remember

they were like, take the laptop out of Dylan's hands when he would start showing

it because they wanted to play with it.

And to me, when I started seeing designers do that, even if I wasn't sure if

they'd use it as a team, even if I wasn't sure if like they'd buy it or they weren't

selling it yet, they wanted to try it and they were excited about it.

And that kind of emotional reaction of wanting to play with it in these demos

was really what gave me confidence that we were ready to launch.

And we had a couple teams, small numbers, and happen to talk about like metrics

and how hard it is to deal with metrics with this size.

But very small numbers, but we had teams who were using it full time.

So we knew that some people were using it full time and people who weren't were

really excited to try and were like very impressed with the technical

feat of it all and interested.

And to me, that was enough confidence that like, OK, it's worth it.

Let's get out of stuff.

That story of the potential customer pulling the laptop from Dylan is such

a good metaphor for product market fit, which people describe as you feel pull.

So it's literally pulling it from your hands.

You talked about metrics that you maybe could share.

What could you share there?

In these early days, especially with bottoms up and with all these things,

and people ask me all the time, like, how do you measure things in an early stage

situation? And I maybe have a controversial point of view here.

I don't think you can throw a metric side.

Like, your numbers are so small.

One of the quotes I always like to say, and I say this now too, when we're

doing stuff because we're launching new products, it comes up a lot, is like,

you can't optimize your way to product market fit, right?

Like, I don't care at the early stages of some things like optimized by five

percent from like an email, right?

That doesn't like fundamentally tell me if something's working or not.

So like, I think metrics are really hard and signals actually way more important.

Like, can you get a couple of people who love it, right?

Not like a slight improvement of a conversion of a landing page, right?

And so I think that metrics are really hard in that way.

They can like help you.

But when the numbers are so small, you kind of have to, again, trust

yourself a lot more and have more intuition, but then also find more signal

of the things that are working, whether it's anecdotal, talking to people,

examples, and that becomes much more useful than like hard metrics are sometimes.

I'm working on a post around product market fit and kind of a step by step

summit of our guide to help people down this path.

And the way you describe it as the way I'm kind of thinking about it is like

step one, get one company to use your product.

Yes.

One's not really one.

That's that was like step one, like, and then that's not easy, right?

That's not easy.

Right.

And then it's like, get them to continue using your product.

Yes.

And then it's get two companies to use your product.

Yes.

And then get someone to pay for your product.

Yeah.

So there's all these major milestones along the same lines.

I saw an interview with Dylan talking about product market fit, and he had

this interesting quote about how he realized first that they had product

market fit like a year later, which is when Microsoft, I think was like,

take our money.

We want to pay for Figma.

And he's like, okay, maybe this is going to work.

Is that does that sound about right?

Well, it's interesting, right?

And that goes up to the bottoms up model I could talk about.

So we would have, I think the difference, if you think about a company like

Microsoft and what this looks like, this is just a really good example of this

bottoms up market or motion and bottoms up motion in, in market, right?

So here's a funny story that I want to add.

Our first meeting with Microsoft actually came, and this is the scrappiness

of working in an early stage startup, because I slid into the DMs of my

friend's ex-boyfriend.

That's how we got our first meeting with Microsoft.

Well, then I know, I know.

And as you know, I saw, I saw that they had signed up for Figma.

And I was like, wait a minute, I think I know this person.

And that's how I, we, we chatted at them and first got feedback from them.

So that's just a funny anecdote.

It's going to be a new strategy if everyone's going to try to.

You literally do whatever, Uber driver, like shared lifts.

I can, we can talk more about that, but yeah, you got to do whatever you can

to get early people to talk to, to try your product out and get really scrappy.

But for Microsoft, so over time we would have, we had like a, I think it was,

what was the team that got acquired that went into Microsoft?

I'll have to remember the name, but it was like a small team within Microsoft.

And they were Xamarin, Xamarin, they were the ones who were using Figma first.

And we saw that.

And, you know, then, so they were that kind of patient zero Microsoft.

And then we had slowly over time, more pockets within Microsoft using the tool.

But again, we've never gone through like Microsoft procurement, Microsoft security.

It just started popping up throughout the organization.

And we have these really cool node graphs that show this too, where like you'd have

these like little pockets of people and then it would like jump to another, like

they'd have one more collaborator and then jump to another pocket.

And there are these really cool maps of how that spreads in the organization.

And eventually we got to the point where like, that was a very comprehensive

node graph, right?

That had this massive thing of all these people from Microsoft using the product.

But still, it was only on credit cards, right?

We, they weren't, I don't think we even had an enterprise product at this point, right?

And so there was no sales person for them to talk to.

And Microsoft was like, wait a minute, like we need to organize this.

We need security.

We need account management.

We need to fix your rent involved.

And I think that that's what it was.

It's like they wanted to pay for it, right?

And they wanted us to have this enterprise product because they had these

requirements and they wanted to have a better control over it because it was just

popping up within the organization without their control.

And so that's probably a good example of like what that looks like.

It has this bottoms up motion spread to a really large organization.

This node graph thing.

So is that a tool you built that's like showing help you visualize within a

company how it's all clustering or what is that?

Well, our data science team built it.

I don't, I don't know if it's like, yes, and I'm sure it's an internal tool.

I just remember we would have, there's like a, there was like a website in,

I got in node or something that we would use and you could type in an organization's

name, you still could do this.

It's like within our data analytics system.

You type in the name of an organization and it just pulls up everybody.

And it shows like, because Figma's, you know, spreads through new users,

but also gen one, gen two, right?

Like these people invite people and you can see these node graphs of like how

somebody started Figma, maybe the center, and then they invited someone else.

Right.

And so you can, and then it shows like how that spread.

And so you get these clusters and you can see the clusters are teens, but you

can see like someone, you know, invited someone in a different org to a file.

And then I started like a new center of a cluster, right?

And so you, they're really interesting and you can pull up, you really, yeah,

you can type in any org, any org at Figma and see what that node graph looks like.

But they're super interesting to see how those spread.

That is super cool.

And I imagine that's also a informs how you go to market by figuring out who

spreads to who and who's off.

Totally.

And that's when these internal champions, like that's what the key is.

And that's maybe the takeaway of like how important these internal champions

are because you just need to let someone to land there, right?

And then they'll be passionate enough and you can see, you can hover over and

see this person's at the center of this node graph and all of these people that

spread from this one person at the company.

And that I think was the unlock to be like, oh yeah, these internal champions,

they really, they're really the key to all of this.

I remember it spreading at Airbnb early on.

I think it was when it, Airbnb was one of the early customers and it was just

one designer, a few designers starting to spread to the product managers.

I was just like, remember on the team being like, cut dammit,

we just switched to Sketch or we're going to switch again to a new product.

That was the hardest thing.

I feel like I don't want to switch twice.

Yeah.

It was definitely so that we had to get over.

But it was a, it happened for good reasons.

Okay.

One last thing that you mentioned that I wanted to follow up on, you said

something about shared lifts and maybe that's a funny story of some sort.

Oh, I don't know specifically.

I should like Dylan specifically is like such a hustler, right?

Especially in those early days.

And he would just, really anyone that he would meet, he would talk about

figment with them.

I don't remember who it was, but there was definitely a situation where he

met someone in a lift and then they became one of our users.

So he used every, every angle he could to try to get introduced to new designers,

especially in his free launch days where we like didn't have connections as many

connections to just get people to try it out and get more feedback.

Okay.

Cool.

So let's, let's get back on track.

We were talking about the good market motion that you executed and modeled at

Figma.

And if there's kind of these two steps, right?

Step one is yet I see still love you.

And then step two is help it spread from that person.

Yeah.

Yep.

Okay.

Cool.

So let's start with step one.

Okay.

Like I said, obviously it'd be awesome if somebody loved your

product at a company.

What did you actually do to make that happen in the early?

Yeah.

And it's interesting when you think about the early days too, right?

Cause you're like, all right, we don't exist.

You get them to love you when like you literally like they've never heard of you

before.

Also, like you were saying in your situation, like, Oh, I use sketch.

I was maybe in Photoshop before that, right?

Something else.

I just made this switch over to this new tool.

We finally got it working.

Like I really don't want to move tools again.

So you have that inherent like thing against it there, especially like, so I thought

about this and like, I think there are like four main areas that we focused on to

make this start, right?

Like get it going.

And then we kind of still do this stuff today.

So the first thing is all about credibility.

And I think in that early days, especially credibility is so important in

establishing that initial credibility.

Again, especially with the technical audience, like designers.

Um, the second is actually building the product with your users.

And I know you had shown your podcast and he talked a lot about this too.

Um, just the customer obsession that we have the care of, especially that editor

tool, the third is finding a place where you can like, in a way that you can build

this relationship over time.

And like, maybe that's like specifically through a channel where they don't have

to come to you because they don't really care about you yet.

Right.

And like, they're probably not going to convert right away or like start using

you right away.

So how do you like get them to stick with you over time?

So find out the channel where you can do that and then continue to build that

relationship with them.

And then the four is like just being extremely transparent and honest to

build that relationship with people.

So I know those all sound really fuzzy.

So maybe we can go into them specifically because they sound really

fuzzy when you talk about them.

And I saw a lot of this stuff is hard like that where you're like, Oh,

that's just sounds like buzzwords.

We have reals now.

I can use some examples of these four things to maybe be a little bit more

to it.

So let's start the first one on credibility.

Okay.

So I was the first marketer of Figma.

I think one of the things I learned right away very quickly was

that designers don't want to hear from marketers.

They don't want to be marketed to and they have extremely high

bullshit meter, right?

They're like, you know, you use a word like, you know, efficiency,

collaboration, all of those buzzwords.

And they're just like, I don't want to hear in this, right?

Traditional product marketing kind of stuff like just doesn't work.

They wanted to hear technical features.

They wanted to understand how technical features work.

They want to hear, you know, how am I going to use this?

And then they'll see the benefits, but like they don't want to hear from

marketers and they don't want to be marketed to.

And so I think especially with our audience in the early days, one of the

things that I did was really try to like not market.

And that's so funny as a marketer to say that, but that was really

core to build authenticity with people, right?

And so the way that we did that in the early days was what we had was

the tool, right?

And that's pretty much what we had.

And we had a design team and an engineering team.

And so we did some cool stuff in the tool.

Like, first of all, like the tool itself was a technical feat.

Like it was the first time I was like, he's video game technology,

WebGL, Evan's Prodigy, let the Peppet got a design tool to work on the internet.

It was just amazing, right?

And so like, there was a lot of engineering interest there on credibility

building of like, how did you get this to work?

So I got him to like make technical content and that I think

what's number one on hyper news, right?

That people were just interested in him.

And then we had a design team and our design team was our target audience.

And so we talked a lot about how we chose to build features, all the things

that went into it and so many of the primitives of design tools have been

like that forever, right?

And so we changed these stuff.

So I'm one of them and be like, how we did grids or how we did vector networks.

And we'd go into these really deep details of how we chose, made those

product decisions, all the craft decisions that went into it.

And I remember one of my bars were deciding if something was like,

we'd hit this or not, if they would be interested was like, did I understand it?

You know, even if I understood it, it was probably too basic.

Or if I could have written it myself, it was probably too basic.

Like I remember we did one on grids in the early days and we went really deep on

Joseph Mueller Brockman and his influence on grids.

And now I very much know who Joseph Mueller Brockman is because I work with designers.

But at the time I had to Google it, I was like, who is this?

But that was one of my bars for if something would be good enough for our technical

content was, yeah, if I could have written it, it's not good enough.

And so that was key for us in building credibility because we had this design team.

And then when six months kind of after we launched and I, you know, I'm,

I actually got to hire someone to do marketing with me.

The first person I hired was actually a designer advocate.

So it was not a marketer.

It was someone who was a designer and we brought, you know, the designers and

the engineers that I was trying to get to help me with stuff like also had to design

and build the product.

So they didn't have a ton of time.

But this designer advocate was working full time with me on this stuff.

And he came from my user base.

He was one, you know, one of the very few people in the early days who just like

loved the product and was very passionate about it.

And that became his full time job was to represent, to meet with users, talk to them,

to write content and create content and to, you know, bring that back to the product.

And that was what he did.

And that designer advocacy positions actually scaled with Figma.

And we still have it today.

It's one of its extreme, I think it's kind of the magic dust.

You call it that we sprinkle on go to market to make a lot of our go to market

function work.

But yeah, we didn't focus on marketing or marketing, like traditional marketing,

right? We're very focused on the technical aspects.

There's so many little lessons there.

The designer advocate hire reminds me of something that Datadog did,

where they hired engineers to write their blog posts.

That's a great idea.

Yeah, exactly what we did.

Yes.

So ways you build credibility, just kind of mirroring back what you shared.

One is writing content, basically putting out blog posts that designers would be like,

Oh, wow, this is really interesting.

And starts to feel like, Oh, Figma keeps coming up and these really interesting

pieces of content.

Yeah, even though we're using it.

That was important.

So when we launched, people wanted to test it because it was cool and see what it is.

But then they might bounce, right?

They're like, All right, this isn't advanced stuff.

I'll come back later, which is why we're giving them reasons to come back.

Being like, Oh, yeah, but the pen tools always worked like this,

but we did it like that.

You should test that out.

And so we kept giving them these nuggets of reasons to come back in.

And remember, this is also before multiplayer.

And so we couldn't collaborate.

So I used the tool to do these things.

So that really helped people come back into the tool and spend a little bit more time in it.

How many posts would you say you put out like in that first six months,

just to give people a sense of like, here's how much?

Like it's probably not a ton, right?

It's probably some few really good ones.

They took a long time.

Also, like we were, you know, I got, I had to work with an engineer or designer to do every

single one, maybe like 10, like at most.

But those ones that went out, like, you know, we try to get on hyper news.

We try to get designer news at the time, Twitter, we can jump into that.

But it was also extremely big for us.

And so it was more about quality than it was about quantity.

Awesome.

Okay.

So one is put out great content.

People are like, oh, wow, Figma's got some new ideas and maybe I should pay attention.

The other is having someone that's that function actually talk to them.

Yes.

That was when we started accelerating this much, much more is when we brought in that

designer advocate to help us with this whole time.

Cool.

Okay.

Let's move to the next one, which I think is building with your customers.

So that one we, you know, I know you talked to show,

he talked a lot about this, right?

This idea of like customer obsession and of building with your customers.

And it also goes back to that whole decision that we talked about earlier about like when

to come out itself, like you can only build so much with your customers when you're

yourself because like you don't have that many that know about you.

But especially even in the early days, when you only had a couple of people,

we really did listen and back to also what you were saying earlier about those steps to

product market fit, like get one person to use it.

That's what we were focused on, especially in the very, very early days.

I remember the first one, I think I've told this story before, but was that we had Coda.

They were our first user and they were based in Palo Alto.

Dylan and I drove down and demoed the product to them and they were the first ones,

their designer Jeremy was like, yes, we'll take this on full time.

And I remember we were both like, what, really?

He will get that was like the first person who said yes to us.

And so we were like so excited.

This was like a huge milestone.

We went to Orange Hummus in Palo Alto on the way home or on the way back to the office to

like bring some back for the team to celebrate.

We were just so stoked.

And then we got back to the office and I think Dylan gets a text from Jeremy being like,

oh yeah, I tried this gym, just to leave my engineer and he can't get the file to open.

So I guess we can't use it.

And we're like, what is it?

What happened?

This is finally got someone.

And I remember Dylan was like, everybody drop everything.

We have to fix this.

And after some, you know, looking at the servers and things, they were like, nothing's wrong.

And then they realized this problem with Philippe's MacBook.

And so Evan down had a car.

So Dylan had to drive Evan down to Palo Alto to fix the MacBook of Philippe just to get them

to use the product.

So anyway, get them to stick around as the first one.

But that the building with people, the way that we did that was largely through just,

you know, each person we really cared and listened to their feedback,

especially when they're only a few people.

So one way we did that was I remember we implemented intercom back in the early days.

And there were so few users and so few of us that everybody was on intercom all day too.

And so we'd get a chat and like, I would jump in sometimes Dylan would jump in,

engineer would jump in, and you'd open up a chat with people.

And they'd like actually like debug the product with this live, right?

They'd be like, I have this bug.

And this engineer would be like, let me QA right now, right?

And so like that was one example.

We all did support back in that day.

And the engineers would talk to users directly, get their feedback,

and then go immediately fix things like bugs.

And so those are just examples of in the early days what that looks like.

And that, you know, just scales a lot over time as you're growing and you're talking to more people,

that advocate ended up helping us a ton when they came on board because,

you know, some of the stuff, I mean, none of this stuff seals, right?

That's your engineer, your engineers get to support forever.

And the early days that becomes really important.

But like when we brought that advocate in their whole job was talking to users,

getting them to try to use the product, but then taking the feedback back

when it wasn't something that, you know, wasn't working, that that helped us scale a lot.

So that became really essential.

And then telling people like, oh, we fixed this.

It made them feel more ownership of the tool to being like, oh, yeah.

I asked them to do this.

They did it, right?

And that that's like just another way where you just build a strong relationship with people

because they feel very invested in your journey with you.

Which goes back to building credibility.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

There's so many important lessons there.

You talked about scaling this.

But interestingly, this is very much doing things that don't scale,

driving to their office, fixing their Wi-Fi on their laptop.

Early days, nothing scales in the early days.

You just have to do that anywhere.

Just as a tangent, we're talking about getting people to love your product initially.

Why is love so important?

That's a really high bar.

And I imagine you have an interesting insight on just like why it needs to be that level of appreciation.

Yeah. And it doesn't happen over time.

But these are all things that like maybe they just use it first or they're interested.

But by the time you're getting to the organization level or you know,

the I'm spreading this to my other speakers and ones like my community, people I know,

you kind of put yourself on the line, right?

You're taking a risk when you're doing that, especially if it's your job, you're bringing

other people in.

And you're not going to do that unless you really believe in something.

And so just using it isn't enough to get someone over that stage of going from just like a user

to a champion, right?

And so I think it is this love thing becomes important because you don't,

you just don't get the scalability and spread of someone doing this, like doing this for you,

unless they have that level of passion.

That's an awesome lesson.

I hope people are taking that in.

You shared this story of Koda and Sho.

And actually he was on the podcast.

He wrote a newsletter and he shared all this stuff.

I read it.

Yes, yes, yes.

Yeah. People are often confused the two.

They assume it's kind of the same thing.

But he talked about how when he joined Figma,

this happened, Dylan's like, we need to fix this problem.

He's like, they're not even paying us.

Like, who's this?

Why do we need to, we have like real things to build.

Why do we have to hop on this bug?

And then later he realized why that was so important.

And that was a big lesson you learned from Dylan of just like,

this needs to be taken really seriously.

If someone's trying to use your product, help them actually be successful.

And we didn't have very many of them, right?

But it's like, yeah, back to what you were saying earlier,

like how do you get one person to actually use it?

And so we very much care that that one person stuff didn't bounce.

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So coming back to this good market model that we're talking about,

so we're kind of still talking about get ICs at a company to love you.

So step one was build credibility, step two,

I don't know if these are steps or just things you do in some sequence or not.

Step two is build with your users.

What come next?

Oh, the next one is, so this can take time, right?

I think that's a big one.

And also in the early days,

they're not going to necessarily use you right away, right?

And so it might take time.

And then also, when you do get a couple people who start to use your product,

they're going to also start wondering what other people think about your product.

And when you're at first, you're the first only marketing hire,

and this is what something marketers ask me a lot

when they're the only marketer in an organization is like,

how do you focus and prioritize?

Because there's so many things you could do, like,

how do you decide what to do?

And so the thing that I think about a lot in this early phase

in thinking about ICs is, how do you get to them?

And where can you go where they already are,

as opposed to making them come to you?

Because I'm a firm believer.

I think now we have spaces where people can come to us.

But in the early days, especially, like,

they're not going to come to your space.

Like, they don't know you.

They don't care about you.

They don't want to, like, go to your slack channel or something, right?

Like, you have to go to them.

And so for us, Dylan really identified immediately

that Twitter was the place where that existed.

And then we had nothing to do with us specifically,

like the design community existed on Twitter way before we did.

And that's something that they just did on their own

and that grew over time.

They had this large network on Twitter of influencers.

And that's also how people learned about things.

Also, like, you know, design's changing all the time.

And so people would share best practices,

things that they were doing, resources.

And that just became kind of a home for designers.

So we really went all in on Twitter.

That really became a key, our channel that we focused on

and really only focused on one, right?

That was it.

And we got pretty advanced on how we did this.

So Dylan is also a great engineer,

if you don't know that about him,

or a scrappy engineer who can figure things out.

And he had this idea and he built this tool or this scraper

where he identified a couple influencers in the design community,

like people he thought or like people he wanted to learn from

and to talk to.

And he inputted them into this scraper thing that he made.

And then back to this another node graph,

he figured out, like, who followed them

and who followed those people

and also the influence that these people had over other people.

It made this massive node graph of these pockets

of different topics of design.

And when he looked at it, you'd see a kind of cluster, right?

So you'd have the cluster of, like, iconographers,

graphic designers, product managers.

And you'd see them all there and you'd see

who the influencers were in those areas.

And what we did is we found who were most influential to start.

And that was another source back to, like,

using whatever you can to get people to try your product.

That's when we asked for feedback in the early days, too.

Just DM'd them.

We were like, hey, Raji, I love feedback.

Your feedback on Figma.

And that was one of the ways we got to people.

But it's also people who we followed,

people who we tried to build this connection with on Twitter.

And that's also where we pushed out

that technical content that I was talking about.

And then we tried to just, like,

drive and spur conversation about these things.

First, it was our launches,

but then later it was this technical content

or whatever it was that we were producing

so that we could go to people instead of making them come to us,

just, like, in their feet.

And that became super important to us.

We'd also interact with people, right?

So Dylan has a huge presence,

and especially in the early days,

and now even has a huge presence talking to users.

We all did show, too, like our engineering team.

And so it wasn't just the brand handle, it was the people.

And I think that that's really important

to, like, put a personal face behind things,

connect with people, answer questions for people,

live there.

And over time, we just built this very engaged group of people

on Twitter with Figma.

And that's still a huge place for us,

where the design community lives

and where we get a lot from our users, too.

And I think the focus on that,

and I think why it's so important,

is it allows people to passively follow you over time

without having to invest in you,

within the tool, you know?

So it was our way, especially because we do

take a while to build the product

and get to a place where people would switch full time

for them to follow along with us,

and build that confidence with us over time

and keep coming back to the tool.

That Twitter graph story is so legendary.

I think Dylan even shared the code online.

I'm going to try to find that tweet.

Yeah, it's so good.

We still use it.

Like, we use it again when we're launching another product,

because we're like,

oh, can we go pull that Twitter graph for, like, another audience?

I don't know how much we're going to be using it,

but I definitely looked at it, and I was like,

oh, this is so interesting to see for, like,

developers or whatever it was that we were looking at.

And also what you just mentioned

is really interesting that

he wasn't using it to go sell people on the product.

It was first get feedback on the product,

which ends up selling them.

Oh, no, we never heard sold the product.

Like, it was always about feedback.

And I think that that's so key to all of this,

is all about feedback.

Awesome.

There's so many lessons here.

There is a fourth bullet, I think,

around building relationships with users.

Oh, just transparency and authenticity.

So I think that that really comes into

when you get to the scale part.

Like, I'm talking about early days,

being transparent with your users.

And a lot of that does come down to the stuff

we talked about too, about downtime,

about what that looks like.

And we just did that naturally with people

one-on-one in those early days.

But I think where it gets harder,

and we stuff with it,

because it's like in our DNA and how we act,

is when you get to scale, right?

And you have to, like, still do that stuff

with a lot of people who care and who do these things with you.

But I think it's just so important that you are honest.

Also, you don't hide behind the brand, right?

That you're human and authentic

and transparent with people.

And we can follow with examples.

I think the better examples are probably at scale

than even in the early days,

because that's when it gets harder to do that.

So let's chat about that.

Just so this is about, like, getting started.

Yeah.

How do you do this at scale,

or does it change completely?

Do you continue doing this in a different way?

How do you approach it as the company grows?

You just totally still do it, right?

I think that that's just so important that that's how it stays, right?

In the early days, you do this stuff

and you kind of get the flywheel going.

You get these people.

You have these people who love you.

But today, that's still how things spread the most, right?

We're going into new markets.

We're going into new places.

We're launching a new tool.

And that becomes so important to how we still drive adoption.

And so some of those things,

the tactics look a little bit different,

but the themes are still the same

and what that looks like at scale.

A couple of just examples of that are those advocates, right?

That's, I think, a huge one.

When I was a marketer, that advocate was just my partner.

Like, he gut checked everything that I did.

He'd be like, no, that's too thirsty or, you know, like,

you're using a fluff word again.

Like, you know what I mean?

Also, he was how we pitched the company.

He was the people we talked to.

He'd go to lunch at Etsy or whatever

and just get feedback on things.

And that function has really grown with Figma.

So now, and that's a whole team at Figma.

So it's a large team and it's scaled with us,

with every product that we launched.

And now we have developer advocates,

state gym advocates, and regionally.

So like, we go into a new region

and they're part of the landing team.

Like, we're in Japan.

We need to find the Japan.

Now we have two of them.

The Japan designer advocate, right?

Because it's just so core to how we do things.

And we've scaled that.

So I think on the credibility side,

like, I think that those,

those advocates in scaling those advocates

are like the magic dust,

that I always call them magic dust,

that like make sure that we are able

to build those relationships

and stay authentic throughout everything we do.

And these advocates, again,

they're just like their background is designer

and then they end up being an advocate.

Or now developer, big jam person.

But they're passionate.

The profile is they're passionate users

who oftentimes they find us and we find them, right?

You couldn't just like post this job online

and go source for it.

It's like, these people kind of emerge

from the community.

And then they, they love it so much.

And they know the product so well.

They're technical experts.

But yes, they were for the designer ones.

They were all previously product designers.

Awesome.

Is there anything else you want to share

around kind of at scale, how these things change?

You mentioned transparency ends up being really important.

What else there do you think is really important?

I think there's two examples.

The one is building with users.

Because I think this is a good one that I like to get into

because you're like, how do you scale that?

Like, you're not, you don't have,

you get so many bug requests.

You go to like our future request page on reform

and it's just like so many.

But also like, as we build a product,

you're always like, oh, well, I can go do all of these

fixes and bug updates.

But I also have to go build new stuff, right?

To grow.

And that's always a tension with any company

as you're looking at a roadmap.

One of the ways that we saw like done that

and still continue to like focus on things

that people care about that's so related

to the craft and quality is through,

we did quality weeks with engineering.

And then we decided a couple of years ago,

we had this idea where we're like,

oh, when they package all of those quality updates up,

it's one thing and launch them together.

And we could even show like the tweet or the,

you know, form request that spurred us to do this.

And that was where idea of Little Big Updates came,

which is a launch that we do every year at Figma.

They come from these quality weeks that engineering does

where the engineers can just go and like,

look at Twitter, talk to our support team,

get all these small things that annoying people

to fix them.

And they just fix them all.

And they get so many done.

And then we launched them all together.

And that's so like one of our most popular launches

that we always, that we do because people are like,

yes, I care about this.

This improves my quality of life every single day.

That's that discussion of like two clicks

versus one click and things like that.

They're that small, but we still do it.

And I love that Little Big Updates one.

I think Airbnb did something like that too

with the 100 updates thing on their website.

Yeah, Airbnb has shifted fully to that,

which is only big launches just wait twice a year

and launch a bunch of stuff.

That's exactly, it's fully how they operate.

That's another way that we do like the building with.

And I think that even giving the engineers,

we give them the ability to pick them, right?

Like, so they're like, oh, yep, this tweet,

I want to fix this bug.

That's got to be so satisfying.

Yeah, exactly.

And like, in the marketing even, we'll pull,

we'll pull examples like, oh, okay,

that's the one that the person who said that.

So that one's big.

And then let's share transparency side.

You know, I think where this gets hard at scale is,

yeah, all of a sudden you have a lot of people

who care about your products.

And I think it's really easy as a brand,

because you are a brand at this point as you're getting bigger,

to be like, oh, I can hide behind my handle

or my, you know, the Sigma handle,

or they really have to say something about this, right?

And so just two examples of things like that,

where you just, you know, we've chosen to be transparent

when we didn't have to be or like, you know,

you might not are downtime.

Downtime is always a big deal.

And I remember there is a specific instance

I think it was last year, maybe two years ago,

where there was like this issue with these servers

and like an AWS cluster went down

and we couldn't, we didn't know what was going on.

And so we had downtime like multiple times in a week

and people were pissed, right?

Things were not going well.

Again, back on Twitter, we built,

the double-edged sword of Twitter is like,

we built a strong communication channel

of their users and they communicate right back to you.

They're not happy, right?

So it's, it's in them dating us.

And I remember we did a public postmortem

and we always do that.

If something happens or something goes wrong,

we're like, yeah, that was bad.

Here's what happened.

And here's the technical reason

and here's how we fixed it.

And then we like tweeted that and promoted it

and took just full accountability for it.

And, you know, we always choose to make those choices

when they're hard.

And that was just one example.

But I think the hardest example

and that's your question of like the most stressful days

at Figma, the true most stressful day at Figma for me

was the day that we announced the acquisition.

That was like probably one of the harder moments

of my career where I run social.

That's like my job is running social.

And all of a sudden you have this onslaught on social

and you have to figure out what to do.

And I remember the way that we announced it

was we just retweeted Dylan.

That was like all that we had said.

Raji on our team, I remember I was talking to him about it

and he was like, we've got to talk to our users.

Like we just have to talk to them directly.

We have to show we're the same company.

We just have to like not hide behind the brand.

And you know, he was totally right.

And so I remember we decided that day that the next day

we just had to have an open public forum

where we could talk directly with our users

and let them ask us any questions.

And so we'd help the Twitter space the next day

with Dylan and show Raji and Tom.

And we just had it open

and people could ask us anything they wanted.

And we were able to be just like really honest

and transparent with that about everything that we could.

And I think that that is just a really good example

of how even when it's really, really, really, really hard

you still have to just be transparent.

And I think that that's when the tide started to turn

of people giving us a chance to like prove

that everything would be great.

Even when it's like the highest stakes

and the hardest thing of still listening to people,

maintaining that connection

and not hiding behind the brand.

Feels like transparency is core to the values of Figma.

Is that have you codified your values?

Is that one of them?

And is there anything that's true there?

Interesting. We have codified our values.

It isn't explicitly listed out, which is interesting.

But I think of it as our value,

especially with our users, right?

We think about our value a lot.

It's like fun with it.

Build community.

Love your craft.

And all of those definitely come through play.

Maybe this should be one

because I think it's so core to how we make decisions

and our framework of when we have a decision,

you know, which way we're going to go.

And also just we mentioned show a couple of times,

but on Twitter, he's always asking people,

what do you need in the editor?

Here's what's going great.

Absolutely.

It's still how we get so much feedback, right?

Is talking to people directly and Crystal come on

and people have bugs and just respond to them.

Like he's our CTO.

Like people are just actively on there,

listening to people, fixing bugs, responding.

I want to shift to kind of the second step

of the go-to-market motion.

But before I do that,

I have a couple of things I want to touch on briefly.

One is you haven't mentioned config,

this conference that you ran,

which is a good example, I think,

of scaling a lot of the things you're talking about.

It used to be Twitter, social graph,

find people on Twitter.

Now it's like this epic conference

that I think people just love.

I was on Twitter the days of config,

and it's just my whole feet was just like,

oh my God, config is the best thing.

So many talks and so many people.

Config is such a good example.

I remember I happily talked about config.

The way that we do config,

I think I'd never run a conference before.

Maybe that's probably part of it.

And I brought somebody on the line,

but she and I were both sitting together

and being like, okay, we're doing a conference.

Like, how do we get the content for this conference?

Like, what do we do?

And we didn't know.

And so we just decided, oh,

so much of what we do is listen to our users.

Let's put out this call for proposals

and see what they want to talk about.

And so that's how we got and get

a lot of our content for the conference.

And a lot of it comes back to what I was talking about earlier,

which is very technical, deep content

that targets individual contributors

for the practitioners of the tool.

And through that process,

we build these relationships with these speakers.

Our advocates help them shape their talks.

And then I think that we do produce

really strong technical content

through that process and through config.

And we're also able to,

with these people that we work with,

help them grow their own profiles.

And that also helps them stay more connected to us,

helps them become thought leaders in their own right.

And so I think we're able to just draw

so many different people who are the practitioners

and the ICs because we're not

just putting thought leadership out there.

We're talking directly to how to use the tool

and the things that individual contributors

are still dealing with.

Yeah, it's kind of a lot like this podcast

that my newsletter, it's like,

how do I actually do stuff,

not just a bunch of big ideas?

Yeah, no fluff.

I remember seeing a tweet about it

where someone filmed being inside of it.

And they're like, it's like a raw concert,

it's not a conference.

Oh, that too.

We also just have fun.

That's another big part of it as well.

Yeah, we remember literally saying like,

how can we make this more fun?

Sounds like another value.

Yes.

Okay.

Well, let's talk about step two

of this go-to-market motion that you've developed,

which I think if I were to just simply describe it

as help people spread it within the organization.

Is that right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

How do you do that?

All right.

So again, I've got four things here.

And I'll list them out and then we can go through them.

The first is like make it easy to try the tool

and to share it without a lot of gates, right?

So that you can do this.

The second is those DAs.

I want to talk about how those DAs work

in our sales process.

Oh, designer advocate.

Yeah, sorry.

That's our acronym for them,

designer advocates,

because they're so core to how we sell

and how this works.

The third is finding the operational thing

that like allows you to scale.

For us, that's design systems.

The thing that like was the biggest blocker

to somebody using Figma and turning it into

like your biggest reason to adopt.

And then the last one was much more,

was still about maintaining and growing

that connection with those internal champions

over time.

So those are the four things.

And again, it looks different,

similar concepts with different ideas.

Let me look at that in the early days

versus like what we do today with it with scale.

Awesome.

Let's get into it.

All right.

Cool.

So the first one is making it easy to do.

The product's easy to try and share.

So we talked about this a little bit,

but if you go to Figma.com today,

it's very easy to sign up for a free account, right?

I have a free account myself on my personal side

for designing my house.

We just see that thing I used to do before.

But you just go and you can try the tool.

And I think that's so important for us

to allow someone to use it over time

for a long time until they have confidence

enough to be able to want to start

within their organizations.

But it's also pretty easy to create a free team

and share stuff with your organization, right?

In the early days, you could just share a link

and that was it, right?

And you could use the tool and everything was free.

Once we implemented pricing,

which was about two years after we launched,

we had this thing called a starter team.

And this is actually something that was switched.

So initially, the way that it worked

was our starter team was that you could have

unlimited files, but only collaborate

with two or three people.

And that was the starter team.

And you wanted to add more people to collaborate with

and then you hit the paywall.

We realized that, wait a minute, that's hurting us.

And so we switched it.

And now it's like you can have three files,

but unlimited collaborators.

And that was huge for us.

And that's where you can see it in the metrics

very clearly, right?

Where it was like, oh, this is really easy

for people now to share before they have to start paying.

This is huge, right?

And so then you get people to start using it for free

with their teams and the teams getting confidence in it

before then they'll have to start uploading it

to their procurement team or whoever it is

to start paying for it.

So not introducing payment to FATS, right?

And giving people that time to build that app agency

and to try it out with their teams and with people

before they have to pay, I think is huge there.

That's such a good and important topic

that I want to pull a thread on a little bit.

So what you discovered there is you

don't want to get in the way of the growth engine of the product.

If it's going to grow through people spreading it,

you don't want to cut it off at three.

That seems like a monumental decision that changed everything.

Any sense of just how you came about to realizing that

or is it just obvious, of course, we need to change this?

Well, I think it was intuitive.

And it was more about the change management process of how

to do that when people at this point were using the tool

and using that starter tier.

And setting people or what that looked like.

And for a long time, you could also get around that

and just collaborate with people in drafts

and just share a link too.

And we wanted to shut that down.

So it was a bigger decision on just change management.

But I think we intuitively knew it.

And it was much more about the change management

of how to make that happen.

Is there anything else you learned about what should be

in free and pay walled versus what should be in freemium,

just like broad thoughts?

Well, I think the other interesting thing is too,

and I think I said this, but so much of ours is like,

so we have a couple tiers.

We have a free tier, and then we have a pro tier,

and then we have our org tier.

And the free tier, it's free tier includes this free starter team.

And so you can just do that.

Go to this thing.

We're not going to do that.

Pro is all enter credit card.

And then org is you talk to sales.

Organ enterprise, you talk to sales.

And so I think the other key thing here

is we get a lot of upsells to org from pro.

And so it's also a thought of what you put in org versus pro.

So that's the other decision, because pro

is also relatively inexpensive.

So that grows a lot too really quickly.

And it's still very important to us,

but still most of our marketing qualified leads,

their sales leads, likely come from pro or from free.

And so it's like the decisions that we think about are like,

OK, what do you want to sell on?

And to go from free to pro, it has to be pretty natural,

because you don't have any people involved.

And so it's like they have to just do that on their own.

And then when you go from pro to org or enterprise,

it's more about the organization and the scale.

And that's where that design systems conversation comes in

that we could talk about.

But that was the thing that we really

indexed on for org and enterprise of why you would

want to upgrade from pro to org.

So it's like it is like this multi-step process.

But it's also nice, because you can increase your investment

in the process, in the product, as you're building your own

confidence in the tool.

The other really important nuance in the way

that you structured pricing, it's unlimited of viewers,

but it's just editors that you charge for.

So true.

So many people, especially if you're a designer

and you're working with a product manager,

you can comment, right?

And so much of this is to, yes, you can spread it

and you can use stigma for free for a really long time,

because you can just comment on the tool.

And it also gets us through many more places with the organization

and helps us be more useful to more people,

because, yeah, editors are viewers of free.

There's one topic that could be a whole podcast,

and I have so many questions.

Let me ask maybe one more, and then I'll move on.

How often do you revisit the packaging and pricing

at this point?

And do you have any advice there?

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, because the product's

still growing, right?

We just launched variables in dev mode back in config this year.

And that influenced pricing and packaging, and it still is, right?

And so FigJam too.

And so I would say the core foundations

aren't something we revisit a lot,

but we're continually adding new features,

and we have to think about what tiers should they go in,

what does that look like?

So those things influence that all the time.

By the way, I recently upgraded to the non-free pack,

because I hit that limit of three with the designer

that I work with.

Yeah, it's also a bit annoying, because you have like

Moog keep moving things in and out of like drafts.

That's exactly what I did.

And I was like, oh, is it worth my $12 a month or whatever,

just to not have to bother with it?

Yeah, once you realize like, okay, yeah,

it is not that much in the scheme of things.

I'm just going to.

But it's interesting how like it's not that much,

but I still like, nah, I don't really want to pay that.

Oh, for sure.

We all do that, right?

Especially because so much of pro like,

so many people have individual pro accounts, right?

Because it's not necessarily a business

or maybe it's a small business or you're an individual,

but it's very different from an organization

where someone else is paying for it.

Yeah, so funny.

Okay, step two is around designer advocates.

Talk about that.

Yeah, so I just think this day at DA,

so sorry, I keep calling them DAs,

because that's what we call them internally.

It's cool, now we know.

Advocates are just so special and such a big part of Figma.

And like I said, it took us so long to start charging

or just bring in a sales team.

And when we first hired our first sales person

and our first sales rep was the same day

that our next designer advocate started,

who eventually the first designer advocate left

and did something else

and brought in another designer advocate.

And he started on the first day that the sales team started.

And at this point, more people were using Figma.

We'd had that pro tier going for a while.

And Tom, who is still here today and is leading that team,

Tom Lowry, he was a passionate Figma user,

but he was a passionate Figma user

who brought Figma to his organization.

But the first one, we were so early,

he went to have an organization to bring it

to do just a lot of the product.

But Tom, he was the internal champion at his company

who got his company to adopt Figma.

And so when he joined Figma,

that was really the mindset that he brought to this

was also like, how do you use this as a team?

And why I think this is so special

and it's so foundational that they started together

is that they would go talk to users together

and they would bring him into the sales process.

But he was never a salesperson, never had a quota,

doesn't live on the sales team,

technical expert who has such a deep passion

and a deep, deep, deep understanding of the tool

that he would come in

and just help explain the products to other designers.

And it goes back to that same theme

that I talked about earlier with marketing

where I realized that I would never have the credibility

with designers that a designer has.

Same is true with sales.

Like they're never going to know the product as well

as a designer will.

And so Tom being there and Tom being able to be like,

oh, I understand exactly what you're talking about

and what your problems are.

Here's how this works or here's where you blocked

or here's an idea or best practice how to use this.

Like that just became so powerful and so useful

for them and for the sales team

that they ended up calling it the Tom Factor.

Because it wasn't necessarily like a structured process

at the beginning, they just vacate Tom,

can you come help talk to this company with us

or like help show them how this works?

But then they called him the Tom Factor

because he was so powerful

and their deals were so much like more likely

to close if he joins the calls.

But it wasn't his full-time job either.

Like he also is connected to the products

because he's like this special person who was a designer,

was a foreseer of the product and then talks to hundreds of customers.

And so he's like has the best way of synthesizing product feedback

and then bringing it back to the product team

because he has all of that context, right?

And so I think that that role is just so special

and it's something that we've actually chosen to scale

because it's just so valuable

in the same way it's valuable for marketing,

it's valuable for sales.

I think we're going to spur a lot of companies

building these teams with this combination.

I can't simply get highly enough about it.

Like marketing product,

we think about when as we're scaling this role,

we're like marketing product and sales,

like that's where these people come in.

And I think when you have a technical IC audience,

I don't see how else you could build any credibility

or get anywhere with people

if you don't have someone who deeply understands it,

integrated in marketing and sales.

Who does this team report to?

Me. Awesome.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so we're talking about how to help

your product spread within an organization.

We talked about developer advocates,

we talked about making it easier to spread.

What else?

Let's talk about design systems.

So let's say you're a designer

and you're designing an app

and you need a button, right?

Rather than going in and making a new button

every single time,

you need a library of the button,

right, with the color, the spacing, the padding,

all that stuff already predefined.

Maybe it's tied to code, maybe it's not,

but you just want to pull that in

and then maybe there's someone on the design system

and there's brand designer or someone who's like,

oh, we changed this from this font to that font,

that you know that and it just updates everywhere

or a padding change and updates everywhere.

And that's like the most simplistic version is a button,

but this stuff gets way more complex, right?

This turns into like, here is our welcome screen,

here is our header bar,

like all of the different components

that then become like whole pages.

And it takes, it's a huge efficiency thing, right?

If you have a very robust design system,

you're just pulling in all of those components

instead of having to design those from scratch

every single time.

And it's consistent,

like you have hundreds of designers in an organization,

they're all making buttons,

like they're going to be slightly different

and then engineering's like, wait, what padding do I use?

And so it's very inefficient.

So most, a lot of organizations use these design systems

and they become very advanced over time.

But Figma did not have design systems

in the early days, right?

Or if we did, we had them at the file level,

but you couldn't like share them with other people.

And so that was a huge blocker for us

for a really long time was like,

these big companies are like, oh yeah, this is cool,

but like, I need a design system.

Like how am I supposed to work with engineering?

Because this is so big in engineering too,

because when you're able to identify

all of these different buttons and these components

in advance, you could tie them to code.

And then it's easier for them

because they don't have to like inspect it every time, right?

So it's like way better for everybody.

So it was our biggest blocker,

but then we decided like, no, we're going to focus on this.

And in the early days, that was just like meetups.

Still was like, we need to do design systems meetups.

And we were all like, what are design systems?

Or that I'm just like, what is design systems?

And then I went and read a pattern with thinking

and atomic, Brad Frost atomic structures design systems

and started learning about it.

But anyway, so in the early days,

we just like literally brought,

there's a community of design systems people, right?

And we brought all of them together,

met with our product team,

met with Dylan,

starting just having these really informal meetups

around design systems to learn from these people

and start just learning like hearing from them.

And then we started building out more features from it.

And then we just started really leaning

into the technical like aspects

of how companies use and scale design systems.

Because while design systems are so important,

it's also very hard to get an organization to do

because it's like an efficiency thing

that they also have to like invest in,

that isn't immediately connected to a launch that day, right?

And so every company is in a different phase of maturity

of where their design system is.

But we really leaned into the content,

into the features,

into eventually showing how people do it in Figma,

both at the beginning level,

but then at the very advanced level

to really lean into that.

And that also went into marketing, right?

So that was, we have DesignSystems.com,

it's like a Figma property.

We had a whole conference around it

in the fall called Schema,

where we just bring in these advanced design practitioners

and they just like show you how they're working.

And that's so important too,

because design systems are one of the main reasons

you upgrade from Pro to org or enterprise, right?

It's like you're at this stage

where you're getting more organized,

you're more advanced, you're at your company.

And so that's one of our big like gaining features for upgrade.

And so that became just the key thing we leaned in on.

And that's bottoms up specific,

because these people are not,

the people making the design systems

are not like the VP still, right?

Like the next phase of bottoms up are the ICs

and then the design systems people.

And now those internal champions

are largely design systems people too, right?

They're either the biggest blockers

or the biggest champions,

depending on if you win them over.

I love just that lesson of,

the thing that is blocking you from being adopted,

see if you can turn that into an advantage.

Totally, totally.

Feels like looking at Figma,

it's like, wow, so many advantages for a product to spread.

It's single player, you can use it on your own.

It's got multiplayer, you can invite people.

It like gets better as more people are using it.

Versus like, I don't know, a company like Slack

where it's useless on it, on your own.

Yeah.

I guess is there anything there about just

these lessons you're sharing

are most helpful for a product that is useful on its own

or is it, or it could be useful for all kinds of products,

anything there?

That's what I was talking about with the IC, right?

Like an IC has to get a lot of value out of this on their own.

And I think it has to be technical,

or that's a hypothesis that I have.

It's certainly easier if it's a technical product, right?

Like they get a lot farther

because people want to talk much more about the product,

the care so much about the craft.

And like they want to spend a lot of time

learning and understanding it.

And I think that's true with designers,

that's true with engineers.

That's not true with every audience, right?

Like not every audience is deeply cares about

wanting to do the blur and the craft in the best way possible

for a specific thing.

So I think that one of the requirements,

but things that makes this a lot more likely to be successful

is that your IC, there's a tool and they can use it on their own.

And it's technical.

I think that helps at times.

Coming back to the strategy of helping

Figma spread within an organization,

I think you mentioned there's one more item around champions.

Oh yeah.

So just the last thing there is,

you have to keep that relationship going

with those champions forever because they don't go away.

And sometimes they get mad at you too, right?

So like I remember like there's one,

I think it was that one of our companies,

one of our bigger companies,

and he was upset about something and he tweeted it.

And then we really had to go talk to him

and understand what he wanted and what was wrong.

And so they don't go away.

But then also I think a lot about how through the process

of maintaining a relationship with those people,

we're actually able to help them

and what they get out of it beyond just the tool, right?

So like, especially over time,

especially when we have a larger platform,

I think a lot about like how can we help them grow,

whether that's growing their careers,

like they, because they like brought on Figma,

they, you know, we get a promotion or whatever that looks like.

But we have more direct control over things like,

oh, you're going to speak at one of our events,

we're going to amplify you on social,

we're going to promote you and make you a thought leader.

And it works really well for everyone

because these people also have the deep technical expertise

to show other people like,

here's how I'm full of my design systems,

here's how I do this,

and to move on to learn from them.

And we have the platform to be able to amplify them.

And so I think a lot about like, yeah,

how can we help these people grow in their own careers

and get something out of this to beyond just the level of the tool.

And then that builds back into building credibility for Figma

because now there's all these additional designers

that are talking about Figma.

It's all circles.

Flywheels within flywheels.

I'll connect it, I'll connect it.

Maybe just the last question along these lines,

what changes as you scale?

So a lot of these are things you did early on,

what changes as you grow as a company

in this bucket of helping the products spread.

Yeah, I think the thing is that you have to keep doing it.

So one of the things that I feel like I,

my role now at Figma that I think a lot about

is like how I can keep advocating for this stuff

when we are starting to implement more top-down motion.

And having to really prove ROI or thinking about

how do you scale the sales team and all of these things.

And so a lot of what I'm doing too is thinking like,

okay, how do we keep this going and keep this model successful

as the company's still growing?

Because it's not necessarily as intuitive

as you are starting to add in more of these,

some of the more traditional methods and motions, right?

And so that's kind of something that I think about quite a bit.

Things like that conference that I talked about, Figma,

that's a big one, config, that's a big one,

scaling our DA team and really like having them grow

with the company across regions and across products

is really big.

And so it's how do you keep protecting those things

because it's not immediately obvious

when you bring in just a ton of new people.

Right, it's easy to break the thing that was working.

Totally.

And you have to do new things too, right?

Like you have to layer on new things,

but how do you not just walk away

from this thing that got you to where you are as well?

Is this a fit for everyone, this sort of approach?

Let's say every B2B SaaS company,

what are maybe prerequisites for who should apply

the sort of approach in this motion?

I feel a lot of this not myself actually

because Figma also has new products, right?

So I think to myself like, oh, can we replicate this?

Like FIGJAM, like FIGJAM is one of those examples.

And DevMode, all of a sudden we're working with developers.

So I thought about this a lot.

And I don't know if there's like,

oh, you have to have this or you have to have that.

But I think there's certainly things that make it easier.

And they're both true on like the market side

of like the type of the audience

and then also on the team side.

Within the market, I already mentioned it,

but I think it really helps if people are technical.

And you have this technical audience

of people who really care about the craft

and they get a lot of value out of the tool by themselves

because that just allows them to really learn something

and really put confidence in something

before they have to spread it or start collaborating.

And it gives you something to talk about with them

that's not collaboration.

Because like I said, no one wants to talk about collaboration.

It's like nobody wants to talk about it.

And so you have other things you can talk about,

even though collaboration is so important,

no one wants to talk about it.

So being technical is important.

And then yeah, caring about your tools.

That's another one that I think a lot about.

As a marketer, I don't know how much I care about my tools.

Some of them I do, but a lot of them I don't.

You know what I mean?

Like if you're like, oh, Claire, you have to move from paper,

Dropbox paper to Google Docs.

And you're like, oh, fine.

Right?

Maybe that's a personality.

But designers specifically, and I think engineers

in the same way, just as examples,

have deep passions for their tools,

probably because they're in it eight hours a day.

And so they're using them all the time.

And so it certainly helps if you, these people already care,

care deeply about what their tools are.

Another thing that helps is that you have a community

that exists within the kind of target audience already.

Like we had that with designers.

Like yes, we grew it a lot and have grown with it a lot.

But like I said, like that Twitter community

that existed without us, that was there before we were there.

And so it made it a lot easier for us to get started

because we didn't have to make something to bring people to us.

We had a distribution channel already in place

that we could kind of work through.

So that helped a ton.

And then I think the last one was that the,

that poor IC audience has a lot of connection points

within the organization.

Like designers are so collaborative.

Like you were saying you work with,

as a piano, you were working with designers.

They work with everybody, right?

Like if you're building something, you need comments,

you need feedback.

And so it was really natural for them to be like a super spreader

because their role was such that they were collaborating

with a lot of people.

And again, when people are hearing this,

they're like, of course, Figma did so well.

They had all these advantages.

But I think people forget how many disadvantages

that also led to, right?

Like convincing a designer to switch to a new tool, very hard.

What I hear with stories there is that

when we launched Desider News,

which was a popular forum back in the day,

the first response was this is the feature of design

and changing careers.

Because designers did not want to be collaborative.

There was like this process where people were like,

oh no, I want to like do my work on my own

and then present when I'm ready.

It was like a massive shift in getting them

to think in a different way to do this.

So even to me, it was intuitive,

but of course you'd be collaborative.

But designers did not want to be all of them right away.

I think it's only like a clearly successful product

after the fact, only after the fact.

This reminds me of another story show shared with me about Uber,

which was also very classically not collaborative

and very siloed.

And there was a big push to adopt Figma

to help encourage more sharing

because that was against the culture.

Yes, that was a key problem.

And it's still a key problem with a lot of design organizations

is that yeah, they're siloed.

And it's an organizational shift to get people to be collaborative.

What sort of team do you need to have in place

to approach growth and go to market in this way?

What did you find was really important?

The most important thing there is that you have an executive

and a leader who believes in this.

I did not start this deal and started this, right?

Like he was the core person who believed in this

and who drove a lot of this and he continues to.

And he's built up this up to be like a culture of our team.

And since he believes in it,

he's able to help bring more people on board

and make everyone believe in it.

And then I think the other thing is through that

is that thing that we were talking about earlier with metrics.

Like I think so much of this is people being like,

that doesn't scale.

How do you measure this?

And yes, we are working on all of those things,

but it's not immediately clear.

The metrics don't immediately show you

if something's working or not.

It goes back to signal over metrics.

And I think that that's so important

and having leaders who believe in that too,

who are able to trust their own intuitions

and their own guts is so important.

And it's so interesting too,

because I was just like thinking when I was just now that

I was talking earlier about how trusting yourself

and trusting intuitions like the hardest part

of stressful part in the early days.

But even here, it's the thing you need the most

to be successful.

And so I don't know how that connects back,

but it just feels like that's just so important

in this type of model.

And with just being at a startup

is that you're able to believe in it

and have the confidence and then trust yourself.

I'm going to quickly summarize this model

just for people to have a very clear succinct explanation

and then comment on anything I'm forgetting and missing.

I'll keep it really brief.

And then we'll get to our very exciting lightning rounds.

So the idea here basically is step one,

make individual contributors at a company

love your product.

Step two is get them to help spread you within the company.

And to get people to love your product,

the four keys that you shared is build credibility

for your product, build a product with your users,

focus where you can connect with your users

one to many, in your case it was Twitter,

and build a relationship with users

so that they can start to trust you

and transparency is a big part of that.

Before I move on to step two, anything I missed there?

Nope, that's it.

Okay, cool.

And then step two is help them spread that product

within the organization

and what you found was really important there.

One is make it easy to share the product and try it for free.

Two is designer advocates being involved in the sales process

have the Tom factor, find and target the operating thing

that spreads adoption.

And so in this case, I think it was design systems

you mentioned mostly.

And then the final pieces shine a light on champions

and help them be successful, make it help them in their career.

Yep, that's it.

Awesome.

Well, with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round.

Are you ready?

Yes.

What are two or three books that you recommended most to other people?

I recommend management books to lots of people.

The other piece of this that we didn't touch on at all

is scaling a team and all the things that go into management.

That'll be our next step, our next podcast.

Teaching and also growing new managers.

And so radical candor and dare to lead,

to be honest, are the ones I recommend the most

because I do a lot of late out coaching new managers

and helping them learn how to manage.

And those are the first two I start with because they're so good.

What is a favorite recent movie or TV show

that you've recently watched and really liked?

So I just watched 100 Foot Wave on HBO.

And I watched it because I'm going to Portugal next week.

And that's a place where they have like the biggest waves in the world.

And it was just really interesting to learn all about

the Nazar and Portugal and all the waves

and the surfing culture that's grown there.

So that was just a fun one that I watched recently.

And is your plan to do 100 Foot Wave?

No, because I'm expecting.

So they're probably surfing for me.

Oh, wow.

Yes, I know.

Congratulations.

I hope you didn't get on the beach when my partner surfs.

Amazing.

We just had a kid and...

I know.

I want to add the whole other podcast topic.

That's a whole other podcast.

This podcast just parenting starts to come up again and again.

It's interesting.

Okay, we'll keep going.

What is a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you love?

Okay.

So you might cut this because it's a little promotional,

but ThigJam, in the last couple of months especially,

I spent a lot of time having to create strategies

and files and explanations.

And I spent in meetings and I spent all of my day in ThigJam,

like literally all of my day.

And, you know, I work at Thigma.

I use the products and I was using Thigma for a long time.

But ThigJam, for me and my role, literally use it every single day.

And now I cannot imagine living without it.

It replaces so many different tools for me.

Great pitch.

We will not be cutting that.

Great.

I'm also a big fan of ThigJam.

And it's true.

It's very true.

I'm in there all the time.

I think I'm the most active ThigJam user.

I had to go and validate that in the metrics,

but I'm in ThigJam all the time.

Next question.

What is a favorite life motto that you like to repeat yourself,

that you share with people, something that comes up when I ask that?

When I was younger, I really was...

I mean, I've always been motivated, but like,

oh, I have to get this thing right now, right?

Well, it was my career where I was an athlete growing up.

So I really wanted to perform and do well on things.

And I just put a ton of pressure on myself.

But I recently got, or not recently lost, maybe five years,

got this motto of consistent pressure over time

as being more of my motto and taking some of the pressure off

of having to do things immediately,

work it to a certain place too fast.

Maybe it's more like atomic habits or things like that.

But I've just much more in this mode of like,

you're not going to get everything done.

It's a startup, a career, whatever.

It's not going to happen immediately.

You just have to keep working at it and not giving up

and having that grit to keep going and keep pushing over time

is way more important than any immediate accomplishments.

That is so good.

I just added this question to Lightning Round,

and these answers are so good each time.

Consistent pressure over time, I so get that,

reminds me of how I think about the newsletter.

It's just like, keep at it, keep at it.

It doesn't have to be the best thing ever every single time.

Just don't give up.

Great answer.

Final question.

What's your favorite use case of Figma that you never expected?

So I think I kind of mentioned this a little bit,

but I use it for home renovation, FIGJAM especially.

So I renovated a house with my partner,

and we're doing another one right now,

and I couldn't do renovations without it.

I copy and paste, I start with Pinterest,

like get ideas, but then I pull them all to the mood board

on FIGJAM, and then I circle things,

and this helps me communicate with my partner.

I'll send it to him and get comments from him on stuff, links.

And so yes, we also draw out rooms and model things up

and have them on the iPad.

So yeah, interior design and home renovations on FIGJAM.

Claire, we've talked about making people love your product.

I think people will love this episode.

Hopefully they also spread it within their organization.

Thank you so much for being here.

Two final questions.

Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out,

and how can listeners be useful to you?

I guess Twitter, I'm not active per se,

but that's probably, I don't look at LinkedIn,

so Twitter thought definitely would be the place.

I'm just Claire T. Butler there.

And then helpful to me, you can tell me your feedback on FIGJAM

and Dev Mode, that would be really helpful to me.

And then I guess the other thing is parenting tips with work.

Like I'm a little nervous about that, right?

Like I love my job, love my career,

and I'm going to be a mom soon,

and need to figure out how to make that work.

So I want to hear how other people have done that.

I can give you two quick tips right now.

One is there's a guest post during My Pat Leave

that Tamara, I forget her last name wrote,

which is basically a leave guide,

like a guide to setting yourself up.

Oh, I need this. I'm working on this right now. I need this.

Okay. I will send this to you,

and I'll link it in the show notes.

Also, right before I went on Pat Leave,

I had Noah Weiss on the podcast who was just leaving Pat Leave,

and he gave me this awesome advice of don't overextrapolate every moment.

This is less about getting ready for Pat Leave,

and more just being in it,

which is don't overextrapolate things that are going on.

Like you're not at one thing that's bothering you,

or as a problem is not going to continue necessarily.

Let it go. Good one. I love it.

All right. Well, that's Apparenting Podcasts a little bit,

which is totally cool. Claire,

thank you again so much for being here.

Yeah.

Try to go.

Thank you. That was really fun.

That's my KPI for this podcast.

Great. Great.

Bye, everyone.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you found this valuable,

you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts,

Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review,

as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

You can find all past episodes,

or learn more about the show at LenniesPodcast.com.

See you in the next episode.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.

Keywords

Figma, go-to-market strategy, bottom-up growth, community building, product advocacy, individual contributors, stealth mode, launching a product, feedback, product-market fit, Microsoft, credibility, building, users, designer advocacy, Twitter, building advocates, downtime, upgrading, pro, product feedback, adoption strategies, parental leave

People

Claire Butler, Dylan Field, Danny Reimer, Greg Smearin, John Lilly, Evan, Philippe, Jeremy, Raji, Tom, Tamara, Noah Weiss

Companies

Figma, Microsoft, Datadog, Twitter

References

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Brought to you by Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security | Mixpanel—Event analytics that everyone can trust, use, and afford | AssemblyAI—Production-ready AI models to transcribe and understand speech

—

Claire Butler was Figma’s first GTM hire and their 10th employee. She led Figma’s early GTM strategy from stealth through monetization. She also helped the team through the journey to find product-market fit and built the team that drove Figma’s unique bottom-up growth motion. Eight years later, as Senior Director of Marketing, she continues to lead Figma’s bottom-up growth motion, along with community, events, social, advocacy, and Figma for education. In this episode, we discuss:

• An in-depth look at Figma’s bottom-up GTM motion

• Why you need to start with individual contributors (ICs) loving your product

• How to spread adoption within the organization

• How “designer advocates” have played a critical role in Figma’s growth

• The freemium strategy that drove massive growth for Figma

• How to leverage product champions

• When to leave stealth

• Early-stage metrics, and why they are often unreliable

• Advice for people looking to join a startup

—

Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/an-inside-look-at-figmas-unique-gtm-motion-claire-butler-first-gtm-hire/#transcript

—

Where to find Claire Butler:

• Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/clairetbutler

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairetbutler/

—

Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

—

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Claire’s background

(03:47) The huge branding decision that Claire made on day one at Figma

(07:45) The most stressful memory of early days at Figma

(09:55) Advice for people looking to join a startup

(12:55) What a bottom-up go-to-market motion is

(17:12) Figma’s unique approach to bottom-up GTM

(18:52) Figma’s launch out of stealth 

(23:01) Signals vs. hard metrics in the early days 

(24:50) How Figma won over Microsoft

(30:08) How to win over ICs

(32:00) How to establish credibility

(37:38) Customer obsession in action

(41:11) Why getting users to love your product is so vital

(44:01) How Figma used Twitter as its primary channel in the early days

(49:06) Transparency and authenticity

(49:52) GTM tactics at scale

(52:09) “Little big updates” at Figma

(54:16) Figma’s acquisition, and why it was one of the hardest days of Claire’s career

(57:10) Figma’s core values

(58:06) The Config conference

(1:00:21) Spreading your product within the organization

(1:02:09) The pricing tiers at Figma

(1:07:35) The role of designer advocates

(1:10:57) Design systems

(1:16:12) Leveraging internal champions

(1:17:53) Accelerating spread at scale

(1:19:14) What types of companies are a good fit for bottom-up GTM

(1:24:16) A summary of the bottom-up GTM model

(1:25:27) Lightning round

—

Referenced:

• Dylan Field on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanfield/

• John Lilly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnlilly/

• Ivan Zhao on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanhzhao/

• Xamarin: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/xamarin

• Josef Müller-Brockmann: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_M%C3%BCller-Brockmann

• Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com/

• Coda: https://coda.io/

• Oren’s Hummus on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/orenshummus/

• Intercom: https://www.intercom.com/

• How Coda builds product: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-coda-builds-product

• Dylan Field on Twitter: https://twitter.com/zoink

• Dylan’s tweet: https://twitter.com/zoink/status/1566566649712431105

• Little Big Updates: https://www.figma.com/blog/little-big-updates-august-2022/

• Sho Kuwamoto on Twitter: https://twitter.com/skuwamoto

• Kris Rasmussen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kris_rasmussen

• Config: https://config.figma.com/

• Tom Lowry on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomaslowry

• Atomic Design: https://atomicdesign.bradfrost.com/

• Figjam: https://www.figma.com/figjam/

• Dev Mode: https://www.figma.com/dev-mode/

• Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Candor-Revised-Kick-Ass-Humanity/dp/1250235375

• Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts: https://www.amazon.com/Dare-Lead-Brave-Conversations-Hearts/dp/0399592520

• 100 Foot Wave on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/100-foot-wave

• Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones: https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-James-Clear-audiobook/dp/B07RFSSYBH

• Noah Weiss on Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/the-10-traits-of-great-pms-how-ai-will-impact-your-product-and-slacks-product-development-process/

• How to create an exceptional coverage plan for your parental leave (Tamara Hinckley): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-create-an-exceptional-coverage

—

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.

—

Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

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