Dylan Field describes Figma's year-long pivot period and how a user study revealed product-market fit when someone sent a 12-page feature request. He wishes he'd scaled faster once the signal appeared.
Chapters
Your story is very interesting, especially for a lot of startup founders today. Because I feel like, you know, it's very common. I'm sure you run across founders that you've probably funded that, you know, three, six months in, you know, it's not working. You know, I'm only a quarter of the way through the list. Like I want to pivot, I don't, you know. And then this is such a powerful example of sometimes you have to work through the list. Like it might take 18 months, it might take 24 months from like where you're at to a workable or usable thing.
But in a way, like that's the both. Right. We had from August 2012 to May, June 2013. That was a period where we were pivoting constantly, trying lots of things.
Yeah.
But then, okay, we had a thesis, we went for it, felt like there was an opportunity and started to build it out more.
Yeah.
And then it was okay. It's going to take a while retrospect like we had. We're lucky to have raised money and have resources. I should have hired faster. Once we started to get signal from the market around product market fit. So I mean, I remember going to a user study with a friend at Corsair at the time. Showed up at 6 o' clock after he finished work. Offices were pretty empty. I brought a bottle of wine with me because the text editing experience and flow in figma was so slow. It and just writing things out took a long time. So I knew we'd have to like drink some wine to get to the user study. We finished the entire bottle.
Oh wow.
In that user study and the next day or two days later or something, he followed up with me and sent me like 12 pages of a doc. It's like, here's all the stuff I want you to build and why I should have taken something like that and gone, okay, this is queer. Product market pull. Like the market's pulling the product out of us.
Yeah.
I should have then gone, okay, let's go higher, faster. Let's, you know, figure out how to inflect growth of our internal team. I think instead I was still very cautious. And so that's something I wish that I, you know, if I could have gone back in time, I wish we could have, you know, gone a little faster there.
Yeah. I mean basically when you catch lightning in a bottle, that's what it feels like. That, that's a great reminder.
That was early, before we even shipped it. So we didn't know.
Yeah.
But I think now I look back on them like there were signs that there was fit here, even if the product wasn't ready.
