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 uh Dylan and I drove down and done with the product to them and they were the first ones their designer Jeremy was like yes we'll take this on full time I remember we were both like what really you 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 to share this with the lead 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 a problem with Philippe's MacBook and Evan Evan now had a car so Dylan had to drive Evan down but Palo Alto to fix the MacBook of the lead 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 Hardware experiences building and growing today's most successful products today my guest is Claire Butler Claire started at figma while they were still in stealth as their 10th employee and their first ever marketing hire she led the original launch and go to market and also their branding and positioning and messaging work and eight years in she continues to either 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 this episode is brought to you by vanta helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth thousands of fast-growing companies like gusto.com quora and modern treasury trust fans that to help build scale manage and demonstrate their security and compliance programs and get ready for audits in weeks not months by offering the most in-demand security and privacy Frameworks such as sock 2 ISO 27001 gdpr HIPAA and many more vanta helps companies obtain the reports they need to accelerate growth build a phishing compliance processes mitigate risks to their businesses and build trust with external stakeholders over 5 000 best scoring companies use vanta to automate up to 90 of the work involved with sock 2 and these other Frameworks for a limited time Lenny's podcast listeners get one thousand dollars off Banta go to vanta.com Lenny that's v-a-n-t-a.com Lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts get started today this episode is brought to you by mixpanel get deep insights into what your users are doing at every stage of the funnel at a fair price that scales as you grow mixpanel gives you quick answers about your users from awareness to acquisition through attention and by capturing website activity add data and multi-touch attribution right in mixpanel you can improve every aspect of the full user funnel powered by first party behavioral data instead of third-party cookies mixed panels built to be more powerful and easier to use than Google analytics explore plans for teams of every size and see what mixpanel can do for you at mixpanel.com friends slash Lenny and while you're at it they're also hiring so check it out at mixpanel.com friends slash Lenny thank you Claire thank you so much for being here welcome to the podcast thanks thank you deserve to be here you've been on my wish list of guests for a long time and so I'm really excited to be finally chatting you were the 10th employee at figma which is now worth tens of billions of dollars depending on which valuation you look at and probably thousands of employees I don't even know but many many and you joined before the product even launched and so I have a million questions I want to ask about how figma grew and all the things that went into it I'm curious what it was like to be early days at figma is there a memory that comes to mind that's zany funny fun tangible of just like what it was like to work at figma in the early days yeah totally that's your question we were right downtown on New Montgomery and Minna and I think the thing that sticks out to me is actually two competing stories that talk about just how much at that time you'd oscillate between these like really high level strategic decisions and then like total current work right so like my first day of figma I come into the office and you know we're going through some stuff there's like 10 of us in the office we're chatting and I look at some some of the plans some of the things they're working on and I see that uh they were actually had some branding and positioning and things that the products 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 for the product design tool right was going to be Summit with the idea that you know eventually we'll have other tools and that could be like Mountaintop or I don't know what the rule out they had a whole thing around the different uh things that could be for the future product set and I remember my first day I had an immediate reaction of like we cannot make this thing Summit that's not gonna work we can't I have two Brands someone's not ownable like we can't build equity and like multiple things like that's just never gonna work we kind of have to just stick with one and I think Sigma is ownable and it makes sense and we should just go with thin way so it kind of I should probably kill the summit thing until instead to me he was like oh that's interesting how about you make a presentation and present it to everyone tomorrow and so I did that 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 film all this equity in two places and all 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 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 that I did that too like probably like the next week and so I think it was just this oscillator between like oh we're making these high-level strategic decisions and someone also has to go buy the ice so that's what it was like at figma in the early days that's incredible that's almost a metaphor uh someone's got to go carry the ice it almost got ice for the Meetup yeah that's so interesting about Summit I had no idea that was that was one of his name so if you like that better I'm sorry to kill them like who could like it better now that everyone loves figma and that's just what it is do you think figma would have been as successful with that name looking back I think we probably would have changed it later you know I think we just we just saved ourselves some time and without having to change it and then how many days or weeks into your tenure was that happening the the name change or the first day no that was literally my first day no no that was my first day in my second day like not even kidding my first day I made the recommendation the second day I gave the presentation and the decision was made wow I was gonna 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 about this was when we launched out of stealth so like I come into figma I had lots of experience I'd been in another starter 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 they were like there was like more than one day where like we locked ourselves in a conference room and I like 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 because 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 TR and I think the hardest part there and the most stressful part was like I can 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 like the decisions I was making were the right ones and so I like you know it was hard not to second guess myself sometimes in that position and I think that's some of the hardest times of being in the startup especially when you're the only marketer the only go to market person is you don't need to talk to to like gut check stuff with and so it does take this like immense confidence in yourself but like that's stressful when you don't have the Cycles right and so that was very stressful for me for sure how did you overcome that did you find people to work with and run ideas by did you just do it and figure it out I just I mean I Dylan but we just did it right especially in those early days I remember there were a couple freakout 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 is 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 gotta 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 uh 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 convinced you that figma was the company to join and ask because a lot of people today are looking for places to join gen 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 the decision making part out but then from there I was talking to a couple different companies and when I went to figma there were kind of three three areas that stood out the most to me the first was it logically made sense and I know maybe that sounds basic but like I was talking to like a drone company or like a SAS like Tech like ad tech company and I I just didn't get it honestly like it didn't intuitively make sense to me or I didn't understand the technology or something but at figma the basic premise like immediately logically clips for me like oh yeah I use Google Docs I use Asana I use all these online tools like that's so weird that 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 um index they were an investor at the last company I was at and Danny Reimer specifically and my old boss Greg smearin who was an eir there and I trusted them a lot and they invested in it I also met John Lilly I didn't know who he was I had to Google them but uh he seemed really smart and when they Googled in was very impressive and he believed 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 like he was he's very uh persuasive and I remember like he called me and texted me and then I'd have all these like concerns or things and he would just like pick them apart one by one like of reasons why they weren't 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 was with everything and so that's always with me that's how he was with and he obstacle that he has and so when I looked at that I was just like all right let's give this a go and and I didn't know right like I didn't know it I had no idea it would be as big as it is today so some of it was locked too for sure but those are the three things that like how I made my decision so what I took away there is when I just believe in the an idea obviously like make make sure you actually think this could be really big to his 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 it's a start if you could just talk about just what is a bottom-up go to market motion and then you also share somewhere that figma has a very unique bottom-up go to market motion so maybe just those two areas just like broadly would have 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 um so much of what we were doing was 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 Mark or go to market motion and I've said it we call it a lot of things over time right we called it product LED product 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 virtually 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 food um and they they love you right and you build this relationship with them within the product but it's beyond the product right it's also believing what the product can be um and the company and the brand and they just they love you so much that they're willing to put their social capital and themselves in the line and spread the product throughout their whatever their you know communities are and the one that's connected the most revenue is companies and so that's where the revenue model really kind of Clicks in is you have all these individual contributors who love you but then they also work with these big companies in these big orgs and they become these internal Champions whose spearhead adoption within their organizations and eventually turn into large amounts of Revenue and I think of that as our Bottoms Up motion and that's different from tops down and a lot of SAS is tops down where you go straight to like a VP or by like an executive buyer they then like kind of like agree to doing a to find a tool and then that kind of goes down to their organization I think with technical tools especially like this becomes really important the practitioners have to love it right and also sometimes I wondered as an executive care you can know what I mean like what tools people are using and so for figma what that looks like and why this is like so efficient of a go to market motion for us is we actually didn't have a sales team for the first three years so all of our Revenue we did have have it it was paid but it's also served and so we'd work with these and we weren't worried about things like I mean we cared about security but all the work features that people need and want when you're working with procurement um we were just focused on technical features for users mostly and then the the individual contributor or maybe the manager would just put pigment on my credit card that was the way that things grew and so there was no sales team for a long time we did have one eventually and I'll talk about what that looked like but then the second thing was we also once we did have a sales team and even up until now so much of our our revenue and our sales and our like mq Wells our 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 for each year maybe they use it for pro which is on your credit card and then once it's widespread and they begin 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 you know just help them Implement figma when they've already already have an internal Champion who's bought in and they're really the one leading and driving the sale within their organization so I think that that's what's made us really efficient as like a this is a really efficient model and has really powered so much of our growth over time somebody listening to this that has a saying SAS B2B SAS companies like 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 we talked about that there's some 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 figmented differently is it this like obsession with ices on teams or is there some other element of it I think there are other people who who do Bottoms Up and and who do it do it well I think for us it's Unique because the individual contributors spends so much time in the tool and it's so important to them I think about things that we focus on where it might take like one click off of someone's workflow and that seems to be like a really small update right like you have to click one time instead of twice to do something when you're a designer and you're in until 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 LED of the expansion and that is a huge part segment 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 several collaboration you just wanted to work right you care about the tool and the tool is working well and so I think that maybe that's the difference is the obsession of the tool itself awesome yeah something I learned recently is that multiplayer wasn't even a part of figma at launch I know I know we can talk about that if you want to know like what like making a decision of when to go to self because we almost didn't because it didn't have multiplayer oh yeah 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 so figma was in stealth for three years or four years before that idea for me I guess I think is 20 2012 that we that they started and then we launched in at the end of 2015. so between around there yeah around three or four cool and then you joined right before they launched we're gonna come back to what we're talking about but just what did you see about that decision of like Now's the Time to Launch yeah I think there's a couple 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's a desire holistically to get out of stealth but we didn't want to do it until we knew it would at least be successful but that was a key thing for me like I was working on that messaging positioning that I was telling you like we would have I still have the dock actually where it was like on the projected on the screen and Dylan and Joe and I picked apart every word of it and sharing with a link in multiplayer is the biggest thing like that's the core differentiator uh it's really funny I remember Ivan from notion was a Notions early days he stopped by and was chatting and he's like wait you can't launch with that multiplier and I was like I know so I was like everyone buddy was like that was the core thing but the the idea was that we had we wanted to get out of stealth we talked to Evan our CTO and knew 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 uh 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 Jeep person doing it but there are a lot of other things too that were being built could be built through that year and we wanted to get more feedback from people right and to start 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 or can we still launch or is this is there not fear of people to get excited and my first you know at least my first three months especially before we got uh get going for the for the launch with 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 on Palo Alto around the city doing that with Dylan and sometimes people didn't care right like they were just like what is this you know I don't I don't want to design online things like that but what we wanted to see what I wanted to see was that designers were excited um when they saw the tool and once we got enough features and I saw this pretty quickly actually when I joined figma is that the people that we showed it to were really interested in it and cared about it and I remember there were a you know after Vector networks came out after some of our other features there were enough things where people I remember they were like take the laptop out of Dylan's hands when he would start showing it because they wanted to play with it and to me when I started seeing designers do that even if I wasn't sure if they'd use it as a team even if I wasn't sure if like they'd buy it they were selling it yet they wanted to try it and they were excited about it and that kind of emotion 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 happy to talk about like metrics and how hard it is to deal with metrics at this size but um very small numbers but we had teams who were using it full-time so we knew so some people were using it full-time and people who weren't were really excited to try and we're 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 stuff that story of the potential customer pulling the laptop from Dylan has said she could 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 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 you can from a metric side like your numbers are so small uh one of the quotes I always like to say and I say this now to you when we're doing stuff because we're launching new products I think about 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 of some things like optimized by five percent 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 people who love it right not like a slight Improvement of a conversion of a landing page right and so I think that metrics are really hard in that way they can like help you but when the numbers are so small you kind of have to again trust yourself a lot more and have more intuition but then also find more signal of the things that are working whether it's anecdotal talking to people examples and that becomes much more useful than like hard metrics are sometimes I'm working on a post around product Market fit in kind of a step-by-step somewhat of our guide to help people down this path and the way you described it as the way I'm kind of thinking about it is like step one get one company to use your product yes literally one that's that was like step one like and that's not easy right that's not easy right and then it's like get them to continue using your product yeah and then it's get two companies to use your product yes and then get someone to pay for your product yeah so there's always major milestones along the same lines I saw an interview with Dylan talking about product Market fit and he had this interesting quote about how he realized first that they had product Market fit like a year later which is when Microsoft I think was like take our money we want to pay for figma and he's like okay maybe this is going to work is that does that sound about right well it's interesting right and that goes up to the bottoms of 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 promotion and the bottoms up Motion in in market right so here's a funny story that I want to add uh our first meeting with Microsoft actually came and this is the scrappiness of working in an early stage startup because I uh slid into the DMS of my friend's ex-boyfriend well done I know I know and I was you know I saw I saw that they had signed up for figma and I was like wait a minute I think I know this person and that's how I we we chatted at them and first got feedback from them so that's just a funny anecdote it could be a new strategy everyone's going to try to you literally do whatever it Uber driver like shared lifts um I can we can talk more about that but yeah you got to do whatever you can to get early people to talk to to try your product out 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 we 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 to go 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 like you'd have these like little pockets of people and then it would like jump to another like they'd have one more collaborator and then jump from another pocket and there were these really cool maps of how that spreads in the organization and eventually we got to the point where like that was a very comprehensive nodecraft right they had this massive thing of all these people from Microsoft using the product but still it was only on credit cards right we they weren't I don't think we even had an Enterprise product at this point right and so there was no sales person for them to talk to and Microsoft was like wait a minute like we need to organize this people like we need security account management involved and um I think that that's what it was it's like they wanted to pay for it right and they wanted us to have this Enterprise product because they had these requirements and they wanted to have a better control over it because it was just popping up within the organization without their control and so that's probably a good example of like what that looked like as in this bottoms and motion spread to a really large organization this node graph things so is that a tool you built that's like showing help you visualize within a company who how it's all clustering or what is that well our data science team built it I don't I don't know if it's like yes and I'm sure it's an internal tool I just remember we would have there's like a there's like a website in like an in node or something that we would use and you could type in an organization's name you still could do this it's like within our data analytics system um you type in the name of an organization and it just like pulls up everybody and it shows like because figma is you know spreads through new users but also gen 1 Gen 2 right like these people who invite people and you can see these node graphs of like how somebody started Sigma would be the center and then they invited someone else right and so and then it shows like how that spread and so you get these clusters and you can see the Clusters are teams but you can see like someone you know invited someone in a different work to a file and then that started like a new center of a cluster right and so you they're really interesting and you can pull up you can really yeah you can type in any org any org at Sigma um and see what that node graph looks like but they're super interesting to see how those spread that is super cool and I imagine that's also a informs how you go to market by figuring out who spreads to who and who's 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 seem to someone to land there right and then now they're passionate up and you can see you can hover over and see this person's at the center of this note graph and all of these people that spread from this one person at the company and that I think was the unlocked to be like oh yeah these internal Champions they really they're really the key to all of this I remember it's spreading at Airbnb early on I think it was when Airbnb was one of the early customers 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 we're gonna 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 uh 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 like Dylan specifically is like such a hustler right especially in his 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 uh so he used every every angle he could to try to get introduced to new designers especially in his pre-launch days where we like didn't have connections as many connections um to just get people to try it out and get more feedback Okay cool so let's let's get back on track we were talking about the go to market motion that you executed and modeled at figma and if there's kind of these two steps Right Step One is yeah I see still love you and then step two is help it spread from that person right 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 years yeah and this is 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 me when like you literally like they've never heard of you before also like you were saying in your situation like oh I used 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 like I really don't want to move tools again so you have that inherent like thing against it there especially like so I thought about this and like I think there were like four main areas that we focused on to make this start right so like get it going and then we kind of still do the 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 the technical audience life designers um the second is actually building the product with your users and I know you had shown your podcast and he talked a lot about this too um just the customer Obsession that we have the the care of especially that editor tool the third is finding a place where you can like in a way that you can build this relationship over time and like maybe that's like specifically through 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 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 absolutely because uh they sound like buzzing 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 everyone else yeah I can do some examples of these four things so maybe I'll do it so let's start with the first one um credibility okay so I was the first marketer 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 here right they're like you know I you use a word like you know efficiency collaboration uh all of those buzzwords and they're just like I don't I don't want to hear this right traditional product marketing kind of stuff like just doesn't work they wanted to hear technical features um they wanted to understand how technical features work they want to hear you know how am I going to use this and then they'll see the benefits but like they don't want to hear from marketers and they don't want to be marketed to and so I think especially with our audience in the early days one of the things that I did was really try to like not market and that's so funny as a marketer to say that but that was really core to build authenticity with people right and so the way that we did that in the early days was what we had was tool right and that's 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 a tool like first of all like the tool itself was a technical feat like it was the first time like it's video game technology webgl Evans Prodigy like the company 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 what's 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 stuff so like one of them would be like how we did grid so how we did Vector networks and we'd go into these really deep details of how we chose made those product decisions all the craft decisions that went into it and I remember uh one of my bars where deciding if something was like hit this or not if they would be interested was like did I understand it you know even if I understood it was probably too basic or if I could have written it myself it was probably too basic like I remember uh we did one on grids in the early days and we went really deep on Joseph Mueller Brockman um and his influence on grids and I and now I I very much know Jessica 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 because we had this design team and then when six months kind of after we launched and I you know I'm I actually got to hire someone to do marketing with me the first person I hired was actually a designer advocate so he's not a marketer it was someone who was a designer and we brought you know the designers and the engineers that I was trying to help me with stuff like also had to design and build a product so we didn't have a ton of time uh but as a center Advocate was working full-time with me on this stuff and he came from my user base he was one you know one of the very few people in the early days who just like loved the product and was very passionate about it and that became his full-time job was to represent to meet with users talk to them to write content and create content and to you know bring that back to the product and that was what he did and not Designer advocacy positions actually scaled with figma and we still have it today it's one it's extreme I think it's kind of the magic Dusty palette that always sprinkle on go to market to make a lot of our go to market function work work but yeah we didn't focus on marketing or marketing like traditional marketing right we're very focused on the technical technical aspects so many little lessons there the designer Advocate hire reminds me of something that datadog did where they hired Engineers to write their blog posts that's a great idea yeah that's 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 like when we launched like people like wanted to test it because it was cool and see what it is but then they might they bounced right they're like all right this isn't Advanced enough I'll come back later uh which is why we're like give them reasons to come back being like Oh yeah but like the pen tools always worked like this but we did it 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's like use the tool to do these things so that that really helps 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 they were you know I got I had to work with an engineer or designer to do every single one maybe like 10. like at most but those ones that went out like you know we try to get on Hacker News we try to get at designer news at the time Twitter we can jump into that but 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 cool okay let's move to the next one which I think is uh building with your customers so that one we you know I know you talked to show he talked a lot about this right this idea of like customer Obsession and a building with your customers and it also this back to that whole decision that we talked about earlier about like when to come out itself like you can only build so much with your customers when you're in stealth okay because you don't have that many that about you but especially even in the early days when it only had a couple people we really did listen and back to also what you were saying earlier about those desks 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 uh 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 I remember we were both like what really you will okay 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 Lawrence hummus in Palo Alto on the way home are on the way back to the office so like brings it back for the team to celebrate um 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 year this was the lead 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 a problem with the leap's MacBook and um so Evan Evan had a car so Dylan had to drive Evans down but Palo Alto to fix the MacBook of the lead 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 uh the way that we did that was largely through just you know each person didn't we really cared and listened to their feedback especially when they're only a few people so one way we did that was I remember we implemented intercom back in the early days and there were so few users and so few of us that everybody was on intercom all day too and so we 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 debugged the product with us live right they'd be like I have this bud and this engineer would be like what makes you laugh right now right and so like that was one example we all did support back in that day and the engineers would talk to users directly get their feedback and then go immediately fix things like bugs and so those are just examples of in the early days what that looks like and that you know just scales a lot over time as you're you're growing and you're talking to more people The Advocate ended up helping us a ton when they came on board because you know some of the stuff I mean none of this stuff seals right that's your engineer your engineers can't do support forever um and the early days that becomes really important but like when we brought that advocate in their whole job was talking to users getting them to try to use the product but then taking the feedback back when it wasn't something that uh you know wasn't working that that helped us scale a lot so that became really essential and then telling people like oh we fixed this um it made them feel more ownership of the tool too being like Oh yeah I asked them to do this they did it right and that that's like just another way where you build a strong relationship with people because they feel very invested in their Journey with you which goes back to building credibility absolutely absolutely there's so many important lessons there you talked about scaling this but interestingly this is very much doing things that don't scale driving to their office fixing their Wi-Fi on their laptop early days nothing scales in their early days you just have to do that 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 I'm just like why it needs to be that level of of appreciation yeah and it doesn't happen over 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 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 they have that level of passion that's an awesome lesson I hope people are taking that in you share this story of Coda and show and actually he was he wasn't on the podcast he wrote a newsletter and he shared all this stuff I read it yeah 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's this why do we need a we have like real things to build why do we have to hop on this bug and then later he realized why that was so important and that was a big lesson you learned from Dylan of just like this needs to be taken really seriously if someone's trying to use your product help them actually be successful and we'd have very many of them right but it's like yeah back to what you were saying earlier like how do you get one person to actually use it and so we very much care that that one person's stuff fit into the house today's episode is brought to you by assembly AI if you're looking to build AI powered features in your audio and video products then you need to know about assembly AI which makes it easy to transcribe and understand speech at scale what I love about assembly AI is you can use their simple API to access the latest AI breakthroughs from Top tier research Labs product team that startups and Enterprises are using assembly AI to automatically transcribe and summarize phone calls and virtual meetings detect topics in podcasts pinpoint when sensitive content is spoken and lots more all of assembly as models which are accessed through their API are production ready so many PMS I know are considering or already building with AI and assembly AI is the fastest way to build with AI for audio use cases now is the time to check out assembly AI which makes it easy to bring the highest accuracy transcription plus valuable insights to your customers just like Spotify call rail and writer do for theirs visit assemblyai.com Lenny to try their API for free and start testing their models with their no code playground that's assemblyai.com Lenny so coming back to the go to market model that we're talking about so we're kind of still talking about get ICS at a company to Love You So step one was build credibility step two I don't know if these are steps or just things you do in some sequence or not uh step two is build with your users why come next oh the next one is so this can take time right I think that's a big one and also in the early days they're not going to necessarily use you right away right and so it might take time and then also when you do get a couple people who start to use your products they're gonna also start wondering what other people think about and when you're a first you're the first only marketing hire 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 like they're not gonna go New Year's Day it's like they'll know you they don't care about you they don't want to like go to your like slack Channel or something right like you have to go to them and so for us Dylan really identified immediately that Twitter was the place where that existed and that one 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 designs 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 and we got pretty Advanced on how we did this so Dylan is also a great engineer if you don't know a fact about him or a scrappy engineer who can figure things out and he had this idea and he built this tool or the script the 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 a kind of cluster right so you'd have the cluster of like iconographers graphic designers product managers and you see them all there and you'd see who the influencers were in those areas and what we did is we found who were most influential to start and that was another source back to like using whatever you can to get people to try your product that's what we asked for feedback in the early days too just DM them we were like hey Raji like we love feedback your feedback on figma and that was one of the ways not to people but that'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 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 as this technical content or whenever it was that we were producing so that we could go to people instead of making that 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 huge presence talking to users we all did show too like our engineering team and so it wasn't just the brand handle it was the people and I think that that's really important to like put a personal face behind things connect with people answer questions for people live there and over time 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 um so it was our way especially because we it would take a while to build the product and get to a place for people to switch full time for them to follow along with us and build that confidence with us over time and come keep coming back to School the Twitter graph story is so legendary I think Dylan even shared the code online I'm gonna try to find that tweet yeah it's so good we still use it like if we use it again when we're launching another product because like we're like oh can we go pull that Twitter graph for like another audience I don't know if we ended up using 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 heard sold the products like it was always about feedback and I think that that's so key to all of this is is all about feedback awesome there's so many lessons here there's a fourth bullet I think around building relationships with users oh does transparency and authenticity so I think that the advocate 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 more 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 now a lot of people who care who do these things with you but um I think it's just so important uh that you are honest and also they don't hide behind the brand right that you're you're human and authentic and transparent with people anything fun with examples I think the better examples are probably at scale than even in their 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 I think that's that 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 Cinema spreads the most right and we're going into new markets or 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 just examples of that are those Advocates right that's I think a huge one when I was a marketer that Advocate was just my partner like he got checked everything that I did he'd be like no that's too thirsty here you know like you're using a Fluff Ford again like you know what I mean also he was he was how how we pitched a company he was the people we talked to he'd go to lunch at Etsy or whatever and just get feedback on things and that function has really grown with figma so now that's a whole team at figma so it's a it's a large team and it's scaled with us with every product that we launched so now we have developer Advocates a gym Advocates and regionally so like we go into a new region and they're part of the landing team like we're in Japan we need to find the Japan now we have two of them it's the Japan designer Advocate right because it's just so core to how we do things um and we've scaled that so I think on the The credibility side like I think that those those advocates in scaling those Advocates are like the magic dust that I always call them out of dust that like make sure that we are able to build those relationships and stay authentic throughout everything we do and these Advocates again they're just like their background is designer and then they end up being an advocate now developer big Jam person but they're passion they're passionate that the profile is they're passionate users who oftentimes they find us when we find them right you couldn't just like post this job online and go source for it it's like this will kind of emerge from the community and then they they love it so much and they know the products 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 samples 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 can go do all of these fixes and Bug updates but I also have to go build new stuff right to grow and that's always attention with any company as you're looking at a road map one of the ways that we saw like done that and still continue to like focus on things that people care about that's so related to the craft and quality is through um we do quality weeks with engineering and then we decided a couple years ago we had this idea where we're like oh once they package all of those quality updates up it's one thing and launch them together in videos show like the Tweet or the you know Forum request that spurred us to do this and that was where idea of Little Big updates came which is a launch that we do every year at figma they come from these quality moves in engineering that is 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 Improvement 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 up this one I think Airbnb did something like that too with the 100 100 updates thing on their website yeah Airbnb has shifted fully to that which is only big launches just wait twice a year and launch a bunch of stuff that's exactly 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 got to be so satisfying yeah exactly and like in the marketing even we'll pull we'll pull examples like oh yeah that's the one that that you that the person who said that so that one's big and then let's share his parents decide 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 my you know the sigma 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 wouldn't have to be or like you know you might not are downtime downtime is is always a big deal and I remember there was a specific instance I think it was last year maybe two years ago where there was like this issue with these servers and like an AWS cluster went down and we couldn't we didn't know what was going on and so we had downtime like multiple times in a week and people were pissed right things were not going well again back on Twitter we built the double edge sort of sort of Twitter is like you build a strong communication Channel they're users and they communicate right back to you if they're not happy right so they're it's 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 he fixed it and then we we like tweeted that and promoted it and took just full accountability for it and you know we always choose to make those choices um when they're hard and that was just one example but I think the the hardest example and back to your question of like the most stressful days at figma the true most stressful thing for me was the day that we announced the acquisition that was like probably the one of the harder moments of my career where I I run social that's like my job is running social and all of a sudden you have this Onslaught on social and you have to figure out what to do and I remember the way that we announced it was we just retweeted Dylan that was like all that we had said Raji on our team he I remember I was talking to him about it and he's like we've got to talk to our users like we just have to talk to them directly we have to show where the same company we just have to like not hide behind the brand and you know he was totally right and so I remember we decided that day that the next day we just had to have an open public forum where we could talk directly with our users and let them ask us any questions and so we'd have the Twitter space the next day with Dylan and show Raji and Tom and we just had it open and people could ask us anything they wanted and we were able to be just like really honest and transparent with them 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 time started to turn of people giving us a chance to like prove that everything would be great even when it's like the highest days and the hardest thing of still listening to people maintaining that connection and not hiding behind the brand feels like like transparency is core to the values of figma is that yes have you codified your values and is that one of them and is there anything interesting we have codified our values it isn't explicitly listed out which is interesting but I think of it as our value especially with our users right we think about our value a lot as like fun with it build community uh love your craft and all those definitely come through play maybe this should be one because I think it's so core to how we make decisions in our framework of when we have a decision you know which way we're gonna go and also just we mentioned show a couple times but on Twitter he's always asking people what do you need an editor here's what's going great absolutely it's still how we get so much feedback right is uh is talking to people directly and and and Crystal come on and people have bugs and just respond to them like he's our CTO like people are just actively on there listening to people fixing bugs responding I want to shift to kind of the second step of the go to market motion but before I do that I have a couple things I want to touch on briefly one is you haven't mentioned config this conference that you ran which is a good example I think of scaling a lot of the things you're talking about it used to be Twitter social graph find people on Twitter now it's like this epic conference that I think people just love I was on Twitter the days of config and it's just my whole feed it 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 I could happily talk about config the way that we do config I think I never run a conference before maybe that's probably part of it and I I brought somebody on hand but she and I were both sitting together and being like okay like so that we're doing a conference like how do we get the content for this conference I think 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 for the conference and a lot of it comes back to what I was talking about earlier which is their technical deep content that targets individual contributors for the practice practitioners of the tool and through that process we build this these relationships with these speakers our Advocates like help them shape their talks and then I think that we do produce really strong technical content through that process through config and we're also able to with these people that we work with help them grow their own profiles right 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 no fluff I remember seeing a tweet about it where someone filmed being inside of and they're like it's like a it's 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 like how can I make this more fun 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 yeah yeah 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 like make it easy to try the tool and to share it without a lot of gates right so that you can do this the second is those DA's I want to talk about how those DA's work in our sales process oh designer Advocate yeah sorry that's our acronym for them Center Advocates because they're so core to how we how we sell and how how this works the third is finding the operational thing that like allows you to scale um for us that's Design Systems the thing that like was the biggest blocker to somebody using figma and turning it into like your biggest reason to adopt and then the last one was much more was still about maintaining and growing that connection with those internal Champions over time so those are the four things and again it looks different similar concepts with different ideas let me look at that in the early days versus like what we do today with it with scale awesome let's get into it all right cool so the first one's making it the products 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 uh my favorite for Designing my house to see if I think I've used it before 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 start within their organizations but then it's also pretty easy to create a free team and share stuff with your organization right in the early days we just you could just share a link and that was it right and you could use the tool and everything was free once we implemented pricing which was about like two years after we launched we had this thing called a starter team this is actually something that was switched so initially uh 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 um and that was like the starter team and he wanted to add more people to collaborate with and then you know you hit the 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 a place where you can see it in the matchups 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 able to start using it for free with their teens and the teams getting confidence in it before then they all have to start uploading it like their procurement team or whoever it is to start paying for it so not introducing payment too fast right and feel 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's you don't want to get in the way of the growth engine of the product if it's going to go through people spreading it you'd want to cut it off at three that seems like a Monumental decision that changed everything any sense of just like how you came about to realizing that or is it just like 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 people were using the tool and using that starter tier and like 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 to and wanted to like shut that down so it was like a bigger decision on just change management but I think we intuitively knew it and it was much more about yeah the change management how to make that happen is there anything else you learned about what should be in free and paywalled versus what should be in freemium just like broad thoughts I think the other interesting thing is too and I I think I said this but like so much of ours was 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 a free TR you can just it's freeze here includes this like free starter team and so you can just do that go to this thing.com I'm gonna do that Pro is all enter credit card and then org as you talk to sales Oregon 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 it's also a thought of like what you put in org versus Pro right so that's like the other decision because press also relatively inexpensive so that 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 can 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 but 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 and 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 uh viewers yes but it's just editors that you charge for 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 are 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 so 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 uh the non-free pack because I hit that limit of three with the designer that I work with yes it's also kind of annoying because you have like moving things in and out of like trash 12 a month or whatever just did not have to bother with it yeah once he realized like okay yeah it is not that much in the scheme of things I'm just yeah but it's interesting how like it's not that much but I still like nah I don't really want to pay that oh for sure we all do that right especially because so much of pro like so many people have individual Pro accounts right because it's not necessarily a business or maybe it's a strong business or you're an individual and 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 I'm so sorry I keep calling them Das because that's what we call them internally school now we know Advocates are just so special and such a big part of figma and um like I said it took us so long to to start charging or to bring in a sales team and when we first hired our first sales person and our first sales like rep it was the same day that our next designer Advocate started who eventually the first designer Advocate left it did something else and brought in another design Advocate and he started the first day that the sales team started and at this point more people were using figma we'd have that Pro tier going for a while and Tom who is still here today including that team Tom Lowry he was a passionate figma user but he was a passionific user who brought figment to his organization but the first one you know we were so early we didn't have an organization to bring it to you just love the product but Tom he brought he was the internal champion at his company who got his company to adopt Sigma and so when he joined Sigma that was really the mindset that he brought to this was also like how to 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 as truth sales like they're never going to know the product as well as a designer will and so Tom being there and Tom being able to be like oh I understand exactly what you're talking about and what your problems are here's here's how this works or here's where you're blocked or here's an idea or a best practice of how to use this like that just became so powerful and so useful for them and for the sales team that they ended up calling it The Tom Factor like what he was doing stuff because it wasn't necessarily like a structured process at the beginning they just like hey Tom can you come help talk to this company with us or like help show them how this works but then they called it the Tom Factor because he was so powerful and there deal we're so much like more likely to close if he joined um but it wasn't a full-time job either like he also is connected to the product because he's like the special person who was a designer was a four user the product and then talks to hundreds of customers and so he's like has the best way of synthesizing product feedback and then bringing 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 yeah highly enough about it like marketing Pro like 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 can build any credibility or get anywhere with 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 yeah okay so we're talking about how to help your product spread within an organization 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 know you're designing an app and right like you need a button right rather than going in and making a new button every single time you need a library of the button right with the color the spacing the padding all that stuff already predefined maybe it's tied to code maybe it's not but you just want to pull that in and then maybe there's someone on the design system and there's brand design 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 the different components that then become like whole pages and it takes it's a huge efficiency thing right if you have a very robust design system you're just pulling in all of those components instead of having to design those from scratch every single time and it's consistent like you have hundreds of designers in an organization they're all making buttons like they're going to be slightly different and then engineering's like wait what pattern do I use and so it's very inefficient so most a lot of organizations use these Design Systems and they become very Advanced over time but figma did not have Design Systems in the early days right or if we did we end up had them at the file level but they couldn't like share them with other people and so that was a huge blocker for us for a really long time was like these big companies are like oh yeah this is cool but like I you gotta work I need a design system like how else am I supposed to work with engineering because this is so big in engineering too because when you're able to you know 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 right so it's like way better for everybody so it was our biggest blocker but then we decided like no we're gonna focus on this and in the early days that was just like meet up still was like we need to do Design Systems these meetups and we were all like what are Design Systems right or that I'm just like what is Design Systems and then I went and read a pattern by thinking and atomic Brad Frost atomic structures Design Systems and started learning about it but anyway so in the early days we just like literally brought there's a community of Design Systems people right and we brought all of them together met with 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 like aspects of how companies use and scale Design Systems because while Design Systems are so important it's also very hard to get an organization to do it because it's like an efficiency thing that they also have to like invest in that isn't immediately connected to a launch that day right and so every company is in a different phase of maturity of where their design system is but we really leaned into the content into the features into eventually showing how people do it in Sigma both at the beginning level but then at the very advanced level to to Really lean into that and that also went into marketing right so that was we have designsystems.com it's like a sigma property we had a whole conference around it in the fall called schema where we just bring in these Advanced design practitioners and they just like show you how they're they're working and that's so important too because Design Systems are one of the main reasons you upgrade from Pro to org or Enterprise right it's like you're at this phase where you're getting more organized or more advanced you're a bigger company and so that's one of our big 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 Bottoms Up are the ICS and then the Design Systems people and now those internal Champions are largely designed people too right they're either the biggest blockers or the biggest Champions depending on if you win the most 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 could invite people it like gets better as more people are using it versus like I don't know a company like slack where it's useless on it on your own yeah I guess is there anything there about just these lessons you're sharing are most helpful for a product that is useful on its own or is it or it could be useful for all kinds of products anything there that's what I was talking about with the IC right like an IC has to get a lot of value out of this on their own and I think it has to be technical or that's a hypothesis that I have it's certainly easier if it's a technical product right like 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 learn the craft in the best way possible for a specific thing so I think that one of the required requirements but things that makes this a lot more likely to be successful is that your IC there's a tool and that you can use it on their own and it's it's technical I think that helps a ton coming back to the strategy of helping figma spread within organ I think you mentioned there's one more item around Champions oh yeah so yeah 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 that 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 um what they get out of it Beyond just the tool right so like uh especially over time especially 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 gonna 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 you're selling full of my Design Systems here's how I do this and 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 it's all circles within flywheels 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 at 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 on top down motion and having to really prove Roi or you know thinking about how do you scale the sales team and all these things um and so a lot of what I'm doing too is thinking like okay like how do we keep this going and keep this model successful as the company's still growing because it's not necessarily as intuitive as you are starting to add in more of these some of these 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 brand just a ton of new people right it's easy to break the thing that was working totally and he has a few new things too right like you have to layer on new things but how do you not just walk away from this and this is where you are as well is this a fit for everyone this sort of approach let's say every B2B SAS company order can maybe prerequisites for who should apply these sort of the sort of approach in this motion yeah I felt a lot of this on myself actually because figma's also has new products right so like I think to myself like oh can I replicate this like the jam like the jam 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's certainly things that make it easier and they're both true on like the market side of like the type of the audience then also on the team side within the market I already mentioned it but I think you're 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 wants to talk about a 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 um so being technical is important and 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 even like if you're like oh Claire you have to move from paper Dropbox paper to Google Docs they'd be like ah fine right maybe that's their personality but designers specifically and I think Engineers are the same way this is examples have deep passions for the tools probably because they're in it eight hours a day and so they're using them all the time and so it certainly helps if you these people are be care care typically about what their their tools are another thing that helps is that you have a community that exists within the the kind of target audience already like we had that with designers like yes we grew it a lot and have grown with it a lot but like I said like that Twitter community that existed without us that was there before we were there and so it made it a lot easier for us to get started because we didn't have to make something to bring people to us we had a distribution Channel already in place that we could kind of work through so that helped a ton and then I think the last one was that the that before I see audience has a lot of connection points within the organization like designers are so collaborative like you were saying you work with as a TM you were working with designers they work with everybody right like if you're building something you need comments you need feedback and so it was really natural for them to be like a super spreader because their role was such that they were collaborating with a lot of people and again when people are hearing this they're like of course figma did so well they had all these advantages but I think people forget how many disadvantages that also led to right like convincing a designer to switch to a new tool very hard one of my favorite stories there is that when we launched uh designer news which is a popular for back in the day the first response was is this if this is the feature of design and changing careers because designers did not want to be collaborative there was like this process where people were like oh no I want to like do my work on my own and then present when I'm ready it was like a massive shift in getting them to think in a different way to do this so even to me it was intuitive but of course you'd be collaborative but designers did not want to be all of them right away I think it's only like a clearly successful product after the fact only after the fact this reminds me of another story show shared with me about Uber which was also very classically not collaborative and very siled and there was a big push to adopt figma to help encourage more sharing because that was against the culture yes so yes that is that problem and so instilled with a lot of designer organizations yeah they're siled and that's it's an organizational shift to get people to be collaborative what sort of team do you need to have in place to approach growth and go to market in this way what did you find was really important the most important thing there is that you have an executive and a leader who believes in this 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 you 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 know what we are working on all of those things but um it's not immediately clear the mattress don't immediately show you if something's working or not it goes back to signal over metrics and I think that that's so important and having leaders who believe in that too who are able to trust their own intuitions and their own guts is so important and it's so interesting too because I was just like thinking when I was just now that I was talking about earlier about how trusting yourself and trusting intuition is like the hardest part the most stressful part in the early days but even here like it's the thing you need the most to be successful and so I don't know what what kind of 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 gonna 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 a very exciting lightning rounds so the idea here basically is step one make individual contributors at a company love your product step two is get them to help spread you within the company and to get people to love your product the Four Keys that you shared is build credibility for your product build a product with your users Focus where you can connect with your users one to many in your case was Twitter and build a relationship with users so that they can start to trust you and transparency as 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 time Factor um 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 of shine a light on Champions I 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 a lot to people the other piece of this that we didn't touch on at all a team and like all the way that all these met that'll be our next step our next podcast teaching teaching also growing new managers and so radical Candor dare to lead I 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 bizarre and Portugal and all the the waves and the surfing culture that's grown there so that was just a fun one I watched recently and is your plan to do 100 foot wave no because I am expecting so there could be no surfing for me oh wow yes yoga on the beach where my partner serves amazing we just had a kid and I know the whole other podcast stuff 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 thick 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 spend all of my day in food 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 uh you're also a big fan and it's true it's very true I've been there all the time I think I'm the most active victim user I had a good Indigo validate that in the metrics but I I'm in food gem 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 comes up when I ask that when I was younger I really was I mean I was I've always been motivated but like oh I have to get this thing right now right whether it was my career Where I Was An Athlete growing up so I really wanted to like perform and do well on things and I just put a ton of pressure myself but I I recently uh not recently lost like maybe five years got this motto of like consistent pressure over time um as being more of my motto and like 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 like Atomic habits or things like that but I've just watched more in this mode of like you're not going to get everything done it's a startup a career like whatever it's not going to happen immediately you just have to like keep working at it and not getting up and having that grid to keep going and keep pushing over time is way more important than any like immediate accomplishments that's 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 um I use it for home renovation the gym especially so I I renovated in a house with my partner and we're doing another one right now and I couldn't do Renovations without it I I copy and paste like I start with Pinterest like get ideas but then I pull them all to the mood board on fig Jam in the next Circle things and this helps me communicate with my partner I'll send it to him and get you know comments from him on stuff links and so yes Homer we also like draw out rooms and model things up and have it on the iPad so yep 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 finding 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 I don't look at LinkedIn so it's definitely be the place um just Clarity Butler there and then helpful to me you can tell me your feedback on figgem 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 tomorrow I forget her last name wrote which is a basically a leave guide like a guy 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 he 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 for paternal leave and more just being in it which is don't over extrapolate things that are going on like you're not one thing that's bothering you or is the problem is not going to continue necessarily Let It Go good one I love it all right well now it's appearancing 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 podcast 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 lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode

Channel: Lenny's Podcast

Views: 20,369

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Id: UmirRfy-gzA

Length: 91min 26sec (5486 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 07 2023