An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire)

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? That was like the first person who said yes to us. And so we were like so excited. This is 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 James with Felipe, 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, did everyone 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 Felipe's MacBook and Evan, Evan, Evan, had a car. So Dylan had to drive Evan down to Palo Alto to fix the MacBook of Felipe 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 experience is 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 teams. 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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Thanks, Lenny. I'm excited to be here.

You've been on my wishlist 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. That's a good 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 really high level strategic decisions and then total grunt work, right? So my first day at Figma, I come into the office and we're going through some stuff. It's like 10 of us in the office, we're chatting, and I look at some of the plans, some of the things we're working on, and I see that they 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, was going to be Summit with the idea that eventually we'll have other tools and that could be like Mountaintop or I don't know what the real out. 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 cannot name this thing Summit. That's not going to work. We can't have two brands. Some is 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. And Dylan said 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. I was 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 instacarted 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, 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 gotta go carry the ice.

No, it's gotta be the ice for the meetup. Yep.

That's so interesting about Summit. I had no idea that was with...

That was gonna be the name. So if you liked that better, I'm sorry. Because I killed that. Who could like it better now that everyone loves Figma and that's just what it is?

Do you think Figma would've been as successful with that name looking back? I think we probably would've changed it later. You know, I think 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, that was my first day and my second day. Like not even kidding, my first day I made the recommendation, the second day I gave the presentation and the decision was made. Wow.

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 came into figma. I had lots of experience. I'd been at another startup 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, a ton of Cycles. And I never, like, run the whole thing from, like, okay, like, messaging and positioning. Like, we. This was a forcing function for us to do our messaging and positioning. And I remember there were like, there was like more than one day where like we locked ourselves in a conference room and I made Dylan and show at the time have this positioning up on the big screen and like made them agree on it word for word. Cause we just never done that before. But then I'd also like never run PR press and all of a sudden I had to run press and PR. And I think the hardest part there and the most stressful part was like, I can't have anyone to talk to. It was just me, right? And I didn't at the time have enough cycles to have the confidence that the decisions I was making were the right ones. And so 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 even need to talk to, to gut-check stuff with. And so it does take this immense confidence in yourself, but that's stressful when you don't have the cycles, right? And so that was very stressful for me.

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, I had 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 business 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 love companies in history. What did you see early on that 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 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 that decision making part out. But then from there, I was talking to a couple different companies and When I went to Figma, there were three areas that stood out the most to me. The first was it logically made sense. And I know maybe that sounds basic, but I was talking to a drone company or a SaaS, ad tech company, and I just didn't get it, honestly. It didn't intuitively make sense to me or I didn't understand the technology or something. But at Figma, the basic premise immediately logically clicked for me. Oh yeah, I use Google Docs, I use Asana, I use all these online tools. Like that's so weird that designs 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 that was 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 Smirin, 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 was very persuasive. And I remember he'd call me and text me and then I'd have all these concerns or things and he would just pick them apart one by one. of reasons why they weren't real 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 is 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 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 luck too, for sure. But those were the three things of.

Like how I made my decision. So what I took away there is, why don't just believe in the idea, obviously? Make sure you actually think this could be really big. Two 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 it 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 gut, 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, we called it community led. The way I think about it now is this bottoms 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 in all the time. And 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 in 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 whatever their 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 at these big companies and these big orgs, and they become these internal champions who 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. A lot of SaaS is tops down, where you go straight to like a VP, or an executive buyer, they then kind of agree to buying a tool and then that goes down to their organization. I think with technical tools especially, this becomes really important. The practitioners have to love it, right? And also sometimes I wonder, doesn't an executive care? You know what I mean? What tools people are using? And so for Figma, what that looks like and why this is 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 it, it was paid, but it was all self serve. And so we worked with these, 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, we were just focused on technical features for users mostly. And then the individual contributor or maybe the manager would just put PIM 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 revenue and our sales and our MQLs or marketing qualified leads come from our free tier, right? So it's people, they're using it, 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 is 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 just help them implement Figma when they 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, this is a really efficient model and has really powered so much of our growth over time.

Somebody listening to this that has a saying, SaaS, B2B SaaS companies 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 Figma. But before we get there, you talked about that there's a unique approach to the way you did bottom up. What do you see as what the typical bottom up go-to-market motion is that other companies try to play that you think Figma 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 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 like a really small update, right? Like you have to click one time instead of twice to do something. But 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 Figma, 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 lead of the expansion. And that is a huge part of Figma, don't get me wrong, but the, 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 talk about collaboration. You just want it to work, right? You care about the tool and that the tool's 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. I know. A year later. I know. We can talk about that if you.

Want to know, like, why, like making.

A decision of when to go to stealth. Cause we almost didn't because it didn't have multiplayer.

Oh yeah, let's not do that. Yeah, that was a poor 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.

Figma was in stealth for three years or four years before the idea.

Three, I guess, I think is 2012 that they started, and then we launched 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 hard. 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 you're just, we could have just kept building it quiet 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 it until we knew it at least be successful. But that was a key thing for me. I was working on that messaging positioning that I was telling you, we would have, I still have the doc actually, where it was on the projected on the screen and Dylan and Sean, I picked apart every word of it. And sharing with a link in multiplayer is the biggest thing. That's the core differentiator. 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 multiplayer. And I was like, I know. So it was like everybody was like, that was the core thing. But the idea was that we wanted to get out of stealth. We talked to Evan, our CTO, and knew it 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 users, get more feedback? Because 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. But there are a lot of other things too that were being built or could be built through that year. And we wanted to get more feedback from people, right? And to start, 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 we still launch? Or is there enough here for people to get excited? And my first, you know, at least my first three months, especially before we got going for the launch of the product, and probably even after that, I would just go around with Dylan and pilot, or 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 in 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 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 a 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, you know, after Vector Networks came out, after some of our other features, there were enough things where people, I remember they would 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, we weren't selling it yet. They wanted to try it and they were excited about it. And that kind of emotional, no 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 happened to talk about like metrics and how hard it is to deal with metrics at this size, but very small numbers. But we had teams who were using it full time. So we knew as 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, okay, it's worth it. Let's get out of stealth.

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, someone's literally pulling it from your hands. You talked about metrics that you maybe could share, what What can 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 from 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 at McGonigle, and 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 if something's like optimized by 5% from like an email, right? Like that doesn't like fundamentally tell me if something's working or not. So like, I think metrics are really hard and signal is 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 our metrics are sometimes.

I'm working on a post around product market fit and kind of a step by step somewhat of our guide to help people down this path. And the way you described it is the way I'm kind of thinking about it is like step one, get one company to use your product.

Yes, that was like step one. And that's not easy, right?

That's not easy. Right. And then it's like, get them to continue using your product. And then it's get two companies to use your product. And then get someone to pay for your product. Yeah. So there's all these major milestones. Along those 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. Does that sound about right?

Well, it's interesting, right? And that goes up to the bottoms up model we 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 in bottoms up motion 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 done. I know, I know. And 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 we chatted with them and first got feedback from them.

So that's just a funny anecdote.

It's gonna be a new strategy if everyone's gonna try to come. You literally do whatever Uber driver, like shared lifts. We can talk more about that, but yeah, you gotta 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. It was 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 at 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 you'd have these little pockets of people and then it would jump to another, like they'd have one more collaborator and then jump to another pocket. And there were these really cool maps of how that spread within the organization. And eventually we got to the point where that was a very comprehensive node graph that had this massive thing of all these people from Microsoft using the product, but still it was only on credit cards, right? They weren't I don't think we even had an enterprise product at this point, right? And so there was no salesperson for them to talk to. And Microsoft was like, wait a minute, we need to organize this. We need security, we need account management, we need to put Sheri been involved. And I think that that's what it was, is 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. 'cause it was just popping up within the organization without their control. And so that's probably a good example of like what that looked like as in 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 know if it's like, yes, I'm sure it's an internal tool. I just remember we would have, there was like a website in Node or something that we would use and you could type in an organization's name. you still can 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 because Figma is spreads through new users, but also Gen 1, Gen 2, these people who invite people. And you can see these node graphs of how somebody started Figma, maybe the center, and then they invited someone else. And then it shows how that spread. And so you get these clusters and you can see the clusters are teams. But then you can see like someone, you know, invited someone in a different org to a file. And then that started like a new center of a cluster, right? And so they're really interesting and you can pull up, you can really, yeah, you can type in 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 informs how you go to market by figuring out who spreads to who and who's often- 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 someone to land there, right? And then they have to 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're really the key to all of this.

I remember it spreading at Airbnb early on. I think it was when 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, God damn it, we just switched a sketch.

Are we 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 something we had to get over. But it was, 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 just 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 Figma 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 angle he could to try to get introduced to new designers, especially in his pre-launch days where we didn't have connections, as many connections, to just get people to try it out and get more feedback.

Okay, cool. So let's get back on track. We were talking about the go-to-market motion that you executed and modeled at Figma. And there's kind of these two steps, right? Step one is, get I see you still love you, and then step two is, I help it spread from that person. Yep. 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 days? Yeah. And it's interesting when you think about the early days too, right? Because you're like, all right, we don't exist. You get them to love you when like you're 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 the switch over to this new tool. We finally got it working. I really don't want to move tools again. So you have that inherent thing against it there. Especially, so I thought about this and I think there are four main areas that we focused on to make this start, right? To 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 the early days, especially, credibility is so important in establishing that initial credibility. Again, especially with a technical audience like designers. 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, 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 maybe that's 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. Absolutely. Because they sound really fuzzy when you talk about them. And it's a lot of stuff is hard like that where you're like, oh, that just sounds like buzzwords. We have real examples. I can give you some examples of these four things to maybe help you out. Let's do it. So let's start with the first one, 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 this, right? Traditional product marketing kind of stuff just doesn't work. They wanted to hear technical features. They wanted to understand how technical features work. They want to hear, How am I going to use this? And then they'll see the benefits, but 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 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 used video game technology, WebGL, Evans, a prodigy, like the fact that he got a design tool to work on the internet was just amazing, right? And so like there's 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 went to number one on Hacker 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 some stuff. So one of them would 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 to make those product decisions, all the craft decisions that went into it. And I remember one of my bars were deciding if something was like, would hit this or not, if they would be interested was like, did I understand it? You know what I mean? If I understood 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 I, and now I, I very much know who Joseph Mueller Brockman is because I work with designers. But at the time I like had to Google it. I was like, who is this? Uh, but that was one of my, 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 cuz 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 the designers and the engineers that I was trying to get to help me with stuff, also had to design and build the product so they didn't have a ton of time. But this center advocate was working full time with me on this stuff and he came from our user base. He was one of the very few people in the early days who just loved the products. 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 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. Yes, 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 start to feel like, oh, Figma.

Keeps coming up in these really interesting pieces of content. Yeah, even if they were using it, I think that that was important, right? So when we launched, people wanted to test it because it was cool and see what it is. But then they bounced, right? They were like, all right, this isn't advanced enough, I'll come back later, which is why we give them reasons to come back. Being like, oh yeah, but the pen tools always worked like this, but we didn't like that. You should test that out, right? And so we kept giving them these nuggets of reasons to come back in. Remember, this is also before multiplayer, and so we couldn't collaborate, right? So it was like, use the tool to do these things. So that, 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, there 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 tried to get on Hacker News, we tried to get at 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 full 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 Shob, 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 of stealth. Like you can only build so much with your customers when you're in stealth, right? Because like you don't have that many that know about you. But especially even in the early days when I only had a couple people, We really did listen and back to also what you were saying earlier about those steps of product market fit, like get one person to use it. That's really 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? That was like the first person who said yes to us. And so we were like so excited. This is like a huge milestone. We went to Orin's 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 jam. This was Felipe, 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 there's problem with Felipe's MacBook. And so Evan, Evan now had a car. So Dylan had to drive Evan down to Palo Alto to fix the MacBook of Felipe just to get them to use the product. So anyway, get them to stick around. That's the first one. But that, the, 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 there are 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 he'd open up a chat with people and they'd like actually like debug the product with us live, right? They'd be like, I have this bug, and this engineer would be like, let me QA it 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 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 some of the stuff, I mean, none of this stuff scales, right? That's your engineer, your engineers can't do support forever. And the reality is that becomes really important. But when we brought that advocate in, their whole job was talking to users, getting them to try to use the product, but then taking their feedback back when it wasn't something that wasn't working, that helped us scale a lot. So that became really essential. And then telling people, oh, we fixed this, it made them feel more ownership of the tool too, being like, oh yeah, I asked them to do this, they did it, right? 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 wifi on their laptop.

Early days, nothing scales in the early days.

You just have to do it anyway. 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. Of appreciation.

Yeah. And it doesn't happen more time. Like, 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 spheres of influence, like my community, people I know, you're kind of putting 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 Coda and Sho, and actually he wasn't on the podcast. He wrote a newsletter and he shared all this stuff. I read it. Yeah, it says yes. Yeah. People often confuse 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 is 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 you realize 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.

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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 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 and 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, they're not going to come to your space. They don't know you. They don't care about you. They don't want to go to your Slack channel or something, right? You have to go to them. And so for us, Dylan really identified immediately that Twitter was the place where that existed. And that really 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 is 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 that our channel that we focused on and really only focused on one, right? That was it. 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 were 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 it 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 people 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 what we asked for feedback in the early days too. Just DM them. We were like, Hey, Roggie, we 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 in the early days. 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 feed. 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 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 knew it would 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 were launching another product. Cause we were like, oh, can we go pull that Twitter graph for like another audience? I don't know if we ended up using it, how much we ended up 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 hard sold. 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's a fourth bullet, I think, around building relationships with users.

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 stuck 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 and also that you don't hide behind the brand, right? That you're human and authentic and transparent with people. And we come up 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 Figma spreads 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, 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, 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, we'd go to lunch at Etsy or whatever and just get feedback on things. And that function has really grown with Figma. So now that's a whole team at Figma. It's a large team and it's scaled with us with every product that we launched. So now we have developer advocates, Figma advocates, and regionally. So like we go into a new region and they're part of the landing team. We're in Japan. We need to find the Japan. Now we have two of them. It's 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, I think that those advocates and scaling those advocates are like the magic dust. I always call them the magic dust that makes 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.

Ward is a now developer, big jam person. But they're passionate, the profile is they're passionate users who oftentimes they find us more than 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 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 feature request page on our forum and it's just like so many. But also like as you're building product, you're always like, oh, well I could 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 of quality is through we did quality weeks with engineering. And then we decided a couple of years ago we had this idea where we were like, oh, when we package all of those quality updates up into one thing and launch them together, And we could even show like the tweet or the, you know, forum request that spurred us to do this. And that was where our idea of little big updates came, which is a launch that we do every year at Figma. They come from these quality moves 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 annoy people to fix them. And they just fix them all. And they get so many done. And then we launch them all together. And, 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. Back to 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 update. So when I think Airbnb did something like that too, with the hundred, hundred.

Updates thing on their website. Yeah, Airbnb shifted fully to that, which is only big launches. Just wait twice a year and launch a bunch of stuff.

That's exactly.

That'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, the ability to pick them, right?

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

Tweet, I want to fix this bud. That's gotta be so satisfying. Yeah, exactly. And like, in the marketing even, we'll pull, we'll pull examples like, oh, that's the one that, that you, that the person who said that. So that one's big. And then the 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 Figma handle, or do I 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, or downtime. Downtime is 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 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 sort of sort of Twitter is like, you build a strong communication channel to your users and they communicate right back to you if they're not happy, right? So they're, It's inundating 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 tweeted that and promoted it and took just full accountability for it. And we always choose to make those choices when they're hard. And that was just one example. But I think the hardest example and back to your question of the most stressful days at Figma, The true most stressful day at FinMaven for me was the day that we announced the acquisition. That was probably one of the harder moments of my career where I run social. That's 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 all that we had said. Rajeev on our team, I remember I was talking to him about it and he was like, We've got to talk to our users. We just have to talk to them directly. We have to show we're the same company. We just have to not hide behind the brand. And 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 held a Twitter space the next day with Dylan and show, Rajee and Tom, and we just had it open. And people could ask us anything they wanted. and we were able to be just 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 prove that everything would be great, even when it's the highest stakes and the hardest thing of still listening to people, maintaining that connection, and not hiding behind the brand.

It feels like transparency is core to the values of Figma. Have you codified your values and is that one of them? And is there anything interesting to see there?

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. We think about our value a lot as fun with it. Build community. I love your craft and all those definitely come through play. Maybe this should be one because I think it's so core to how to make decisions in 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 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 Chris will come on and people have bugs and just respond to them. He's our CTO, like people are just actively on there listening to people, fixing 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 things I wanted to touch on briefly. One is you even 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 feed 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 can happily talk 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 who had, but she and I were both sitting together and being like, okay, like, so yeah, 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, like so much of what we do is like 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 who are the practitioners of a 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 in my newsletter. It's like how to 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, this is like a rock 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, how can I make this more fun? That was a big part of it.

Sounds like another value. Yes. Okay, 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? Yep.

Yep.

Cool. 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 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 allows you to scale for us as design systems. the thing that was the biggest blocker to somebody using Figma and turning it into your biggest reason to adopt. And then the last one 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 when you look at that in the early days versus what we do today with it with scale.

Awesome. Let's get into it.

All right, cool. So the first one is making it the product 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 my fig for designing my house, which is the thing I used it for. But you just go and you can, 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 spread it within their organizations. But then it's also pretty easy to create a free team and share stuff with your organization. In the early days, you could just share a link and that was it. 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 like unlimited files, but only collaborate with two or three people. And that was like the starter team, and they wanted to add more people to collaborate with. And then, you know, you hit the paywall. We realized that, wait a minute, like that's hurting us. And so we switched it. And now it's like you can have something like three files, but unlimited collaborators. And that was huge for us. And you can, that's the place 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 get confidence in it before then they all have to start. Uploading it to like their procurement team or whoever it is to start paying for it. So not introducing payment too fast, right? And like giving people that time to build that advocacy and to try it out with their teams 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?

Okay, 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, we 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 kind of 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, yeah, 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. I think the other interesting thing is.

Too, and I think I said this, but like 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, you can just, it's free tier includes this like free starter team. And so you can just do that. Go to the figma.com and go do that. Pro is all enter credit card and then org as you talk to sales, organ enterprise, you talk to sales. And so I think the other key thing here is like we get a lot of upsells to org from pro, right? And so it's not like we, it's also a thought of like what do you put in org versus pro, right? And so that's like 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 like marketing qualified leads, they're sales leads. likely come from pro or from free, right? And so it's like the decisions that we think about are like, okay, what do you want to sell on? And it has to go from free to pro. It has to be pretty natural because you don't have any people involved, right? And so it's like they have to just like do that on their own. And then when you go from pro to order enterprise, it's more about the organization and like 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 Oregon Enterprise of like 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 know, you can like 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 viewers, but it's just editors that you charge for.

Yes, so true. You know, so many people, especially if you're a designer and you're working with a product manager, you can comment. Right? And so, 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 free.

This one topic 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 device there?

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because the product's still growing, right? Like we just launched variables in dev mode back in Config this year, and that influenced pricing and packaging and still is, right? And so Fig Jam 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 tier 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 just kind of annoying because you have to keep moving things in and out of drafts. Exactly. It's like I was worth my $12 a month or whatever just to not.

Have to bother with it. Yeah. Once you realize, okay, yeah, it is not that much in the scheme of things. I'm just going to do it. But it's interesting how it's not that.

Much, but I still like, nah, I don't really want to pay that if I can avoid it. Oh, for sure. We all do that, right? Especially because so much of pro, 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 these DA, so sorry. I keep calling them DAs because that's what we call them internally. 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 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 Lowery, he was a passionate Figma user. But he was a passionate Figma user who brought Figma to his organization. But the first one, you know, we were so early, we didn't have an organization to bring it to, so we just loved 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 was 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, 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. 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're blocked, or here's an idea or best practice of how to use this. That just became so powerful and so useful for them and for the sales team that they ended up calling it the Tom Factor. What even choice stuff? Because it wasn't necessarily a structured process at the beginning. They'd just be like, Hey, Tom, can you come? help talk to this company with us or help show them how this works. But then they called it the Tom Factor because he was so powerful and their deals were so much more likely to close if he joined on the calls. But it wasn't his full-time job either. He also is connected to the product because he's this special person who was a designer, was a four-user of the product, and then talks to hundreds of customers. And so he 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.

I can't speak highly enough about it. Like marketing, we think of it when, as we're scaling this role, we're like marketing product and sales. Like that's where you know, 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 in sales.

Who does this team report to?

Me.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Okay. So we're talking about how to help your product spread within an organization. We talked about developer advocates. You 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 Brandizon 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, 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 a lot of organizations use these design systems and they've 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 we couldn't share them with other people. So that was a huge blocker for us for a really long time was like these big companies were like, oh yeah, this is cool, but you gotta work. I need a design system. How else am I supposed to work with engineering? Because this is so big in engineering too, because when you're able to identify all these different buttons and these components in advance, you can tie them to code and then it's easier for them because they don't have to inspect it every time. So it's way better for everybody. So it was our biggest blocker, but then we decided, no, we're going to focus on this. And in the early days, that was just like meetups. Dylan was like, we need to do design systems meetups. And we were all like, what are design systems? Or that I was like, what is design systems? And then I went and read a pattern with thinking and atomic, Brad Frost's 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 their product team, met with Dylan, started 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 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 it because it's like an efficiency thing that they also have to invest in that isn't immediately connected to a launch that day.

Right?

And so every company is at 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 systems practitioners and they just show you how they're working. And that's so important too, because design systems are one of the main reasons you upgrade from proto org or enterprise, right? It's like you're at this phase where you're getting more organized and more advanced. You're a bigger company. And so that's one of our big re like gating features for upgrade. And so that became just the key thing we leaned in on. And that's bottoms up specific because these, 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 can 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 gets better as more people are using it, versus, I don't know, a company like Slack where it's useless on your own. 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 could it be useful for all kinds of products? Anything there?

That's what I was talking about with the IC, right? 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 you 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, the learn the craft in the best way possible for a specific thing. So I think that one of the requirements, I don't know about 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 a ton.

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 know, 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 at one of our companies, one of our bigger companies, and he was upset about something and he tweeted it. And then we immediately 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 as 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 say, to show other people, like, here's how I've lived my design systems. Here's how I do this. And so people want to learn from them. And we have the platform to be able to amplify them. And so I think a lot about like, yeah, like how can we help these people grow in their own careers and get something out of this too beyond just the love of the tool.

And then that builds back into building credibility for Figma, because now there's all these additional designers talking about Figma.

It's all circles.

Flywheels within flywheels.

All connected, all connected.

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 product spread?

Yeah, I think the key 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 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 is 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, schema, that's a big one. config. That's a big one. Scaling our DA team and really like promote, like having them grow with the company across regions and across products is really big. And so it's how do you keep not like, keep, 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 he has 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 this sort of approach in this motion?

I've thought a lot about this myself, actually, because Figma also has new products, right? So I think to myself, oh, can we replicate this? Like FigJam, FigJam is one of those examples. And Dev Mode, all of a sudden we're working with developers. So I thought about this a lot. And, you know, I don't know if there's like, oh, this, you have to have this or you have to have that, but I think there are certainly things that make it easier. And they're both true on like the market side of like the type of the audience and 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 build 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 were like, oh, Claire, you have to move from paper, Dropbox paper to Google Docs. They'd be like, yeah, fine.

Right?

Maybe that's their personality, but designers specifically, and I think engineers are the same way, just as examples, have deep passion for their tools, probably because they're in it eight hours a day. And so they're, they're using them all the time. And so it certainly helps if you, these people already care, care deeply about what their, their tools are. Another thing that helps is that you have a community that exists. within the, that kind of target audience already. And 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. Designers are so collaborative. Like you were saying you work with, as a PM, 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 with all these advantages. But I think people forget how many disadvantages that also let 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 designer news, which was a popular forum back in the day, the first response was, if this is the future of design, I'm changing careers. 'Cause designers did not wanna be collaborative. There was like this process where people were like, oh no, I wanna 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 a clearly successful product after the fact. Only after the fact. This reminds me of another story Sho 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 that'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. Like, 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 wet in the groove. 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 thinking when I was just now that I was talking earlier about how trusting yourself and trusting intuition is the hardest part, the most 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 round. 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 piece is 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've recommended most to other people?

I recommend management books lots of people. The other piece of this that we didn't touch on at all is scaling a team and like 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 Dare to Lead, to be honest, are the ones I recommend the most because I Do a lot of laid 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 this Niznara and Portugal and all of the waves and the surfing culture that's grown there. So that was just a fun one that I watched recently.

And is there a plan to do a hundred foot wave?

No, because I am expecting so there will be lots of surfing for me. I know. I will be doing yoga on the beach when my partner serves.

Amazing. We just had a kid and- I know.

I want to do a whole other podcast.

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 Fig Jam. 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 Fig Jam. Like literally all of my day. And I, you know, I'm a, I work with Figma. I use the product and I was using Figma for a long time, but Big jam 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. And it's true. It's very true. I've been there all the time. I think I'm the most active big gym user.

I had to go and go validate that in the metrics, but I, I'm into gym all the time. Next question. What is a favorite life motto that.

You like to repeat to yourself that you share with people, something that When I asked 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? Whether it was in my career or I was an athlete growing up. So I really wanted to perform and do well in things. And I just put a ton of pressure on myself. But I recently got, or not recently, in the last 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 or get to a certain place too fast. Kind of maybe it's more to like atomic habits or things like that, but I'm just much more in this mode of like, you're not gonna get everything done. It's a startup, a career, like whatever. It's not gonna happen immediately. You just have to like 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 like 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, Fig Jam 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, like, I start with Pinterest, like get ideas, but then I pull them all into like a mood board on Fig Jam 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, home, we also like will draw out rooms and model things up and have it on the iPad. So yeah, interior design and home renovations on Fig Jam.

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, like I'm not active per se, but that's probably the, I don't look at LinkedIn, so Twitter definitely be the place. 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. All right. Like I, I love my job, love my career, and, you know, I'm gonna be a mom soon and need to figure out how to make that work.

So I want to hear 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 a, basically a leave guide, like a guide.

To create a leave plan. 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 over extrapolate every moment. This is less about getting ready for pat or for paternal leave and more just being in it, which is don't over extrapolate things that are going on.

Like you're not that one thing that's bothering you or is a problem is not going to continue. Let it go. Good one. I love it.

All right. Well, that was the parenting podcast a little bit, which is totally cool. Claire, thank you again so much for being here.

Yeah. 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.