From $0 Ad Spend to $12.5B: The Figma StoryㅣClaire Butler & Corey Lee

1. 0:00 – 3:17

   Highlight

   1. CBClaire Butler0:00

      So the first day that I joined Figma, I remember I was sitting in a presentation, and Dylan was kind of walking me through stuff, showing the product. And the name of the tool at the time was actually called Summit. And I remember I thought to myself, like, "This just isn't gonna work." [laughs] Metrics are so important, but I feel like when you're doing something really early and you're like, "I have to 10X this, I have to 100X this, I have to 1000X this," you kind of have to go more on intuition and more on feeling, I think, and really believe that, because metrics just aren't gonna get you the answers that you're looking for. If you joined Figma, you had to start spending time answering support questions. And so it sounds, like, pretty un- unscalable, right? Oh, you have your engineer sitting there answering support tickets, fixing bugs. Like, you can't do that forever. That doesn't scale. But actually, it does scale. You think about people as companies, and I think the biggest advice that I would give is, like, people are people, right? And I think you see that at Config. Like, you'll see people, and you'll talk to them, and you'll be chatting. It sounds so basic, right? But, like, I think so often in marketing, we, we split people into, like, you as a person at your desk and you as a person outside of that, whereas we try to think of people as one person. It wasn't like, "Let's have a community-driven strategy." It was just, "We need to listen to our users, and we need to build a product that's gonna be really useful for them. And they know what their problems are more than we do, and we need to spend time with them and, and fix their problems." [upbeat music] Hi, I'm Claire. Uh, I'm the Director of Brand Marketing here at Figma. I was also the first marketer, and yeah, I have been here since the beginning, so coming up on nine years at Figma. So it's been an- it's really fun for me to see everything come together today.

   2. CLCory Lee1:41

      My name is Cory. I'm a Designer Advocate here at Figma. I'm based in Tokyo, and I've been here at Figma for about two years, and been a long time Figma user and, and community. As a Design Advocate, I'm part of our community team. My role is a mixture of helping build community but while also helping enable, um, designers.

   3. SPSpeaker1:59

      So, um, could you give us a overview of your career, um, before joining Figma?

   4. CBClaire Butler2:03

      Sure. Uh, it's kind of funny. It's hard to remember a time before I was at Figma, because I've been here for, uh, nine years. I was at another startup before that called Clima Corporation, and Index Ventures was one of the investors in, uh, Clima Corp. And we got acquired and, you know, I kind of knew a big company wasn't for me, and I, I really wanted to roll up my sleeves and, and do something early-stage. So Danny Rimer, who is, was the lead investor over at the last company I was at, uh, also invested, was the first seed investor for Dylan. So, um, I was meeting a bunch of different startups and different companies, and, uh, Danny introduced me to Dylan. And I met Dylan and kind of just decided that that was it, and that's, that's, you know, went from there. When I started at Figma, we were pre-launch, so there was, there wasn't even a product, there wasn't a company. You know, there wasn't even a name, honestly. We were gonna name it something else in the beginning. So I, I think back to just how much we've grown and evolved over the past nine years and where we are today, and it really blows my mind. It's just so amazing to see the excitement. I just got emotional watching all the people come in and just how many people, how many, how much Figma means to so many people and how many people love it and use it every day. It's just, it's a real moment for me to see everything come together.

   5. SPSpeaker3:13

      What was the first thing that you did after you joined Figma?

2. 3:17 – 5:04

   What Figma’s First Marketer Did on Day One

   1. CBClaire Butler3:17

      Literal first thing I did, so the first day that I joined Figma, I remember I was sitting in a presentation, and Dylan was kind of walking me through stuff, showing the product, also showing me where to, like, the bathroom was. Like, [laughs] all of the basics that you get on your first day. And, uh, I saw one presentation where they were going through some of the branding for Figma and some of the different naming and, and how they were thinking about launching it. And the name of the tool at the time was actually called Summit. And so, um, Figma was always the name of the company, but we had this strategy at the time where the tool would be called Summit, and, like, the Figma editor, and then, uh, the company would be called Figma. And I remember I thought to myself, like, "This just isn't gonna work." [laughs] Like, uh, "Nobody knows who we are. Summit is just, like, a really basic name. There's PCs named Summit. There's apps named Summit. This isn't anything we can own." And so I remember saying just kind of off the cuff, like, "Hey, like, how locked is this? Is this something we can change?" And Dylan was like, "Yeah, what do you think?" And, and I was like, "Well, I, I really think we should probably only have one name. We can't really have two." Um, and he's like, "Well, well, how about you think about that more and, and make a presentation and, and maybe you can show everybody it, and then we can talk about it." I said, "Okay, cool. Like, what does, what does the timeline look like for that?" And he said, "How about tomorrow?" [laughs] And I was like, "Okay." And so, uh, I remember the literal first thing I did on my first day was, um, make a presentation about how the product should be called Figma and not Summit, and that was the first thing I did.

   2. SPSpeaker4:43

      When Figma first launched, people saying, especially among designers, like, there are a lot of people liking the product, but also saying, "Oh, if this is the future of design, then I would quit design."

   3. CBClaire Butler4:53

      Yeah.

   4. SPSpeaker4:54

      Or like, "This is not the future I want as a designer." So as a first marketer at, uh, Figma, like, what were your, like, go-to-market strategy, or, like, how did you deal with

3. 5:04 – 7:07

   Figma's First Go-To-Market Strategy?

   1. SPSpeaker5:04

      these market response?

   2. CBClaire Butler5:06

      You know, I think it's really interesting, because as a marketer, working online and collaboratively, it's, it's just intuitive to me, right? Like, was used to using Google Docs, was used to just having Google Slides, Asana, these things where you just have things constantly updated and working really collaboratively. But it didn't really click for me until I saw the response, honestly, that, you know, before design didn't really work that way. People were used to working in these offline tools and sharing when they're done, and doing these, like, beautiful presentations and showing kind of more of a finished product. Um, and so yeah, there was a lot of questioning, uh, of that in the early days. I think that there's a couple things that I keep in mind when I think of, like, how to approach something like that. The first is, you know, you have to have a level of confidence that... You're gonna keep going [laughs] anyway, right? Like, there's some people who don't like it, there's different adoption curves, and it's okay if not everyone likes your product right away. So there's just having a general confidence in that and a belief that that's the way to go and that's the vision and we're gonna stick with it is very important. And then I think the other thing that we did that was really, really helpful was we really looked at design as an interesting space where, uh, you know, people really learn from each other. And so people are always looking to other influencers or other people to help understand, you know, what's the latest in design, how do you work, how should we work? So we really built a lot of relationships and focused on building relationships with people who had a lot of thought in the space, a lot of, um, thought leadership, and, um, talked to them about things. So even if they had a negative reaction at first or weren't sure about something we were doing, we just engaged in conversation and talked about it, and, uh, you know, over time, heard their opinions, we shared our opinions, got feedback from them, and that was a, a really important thing where maybe initially people had concerns, but as we built trust with them, built credibility, uh, people started using the tool. That was really important, and they changed their minds.

   3. SPSpeaker6:56

      I'm also curious, like, Cory, your response when you first got to know Figma, but as a designer, didn't y- didn't you have any, like, mixed feelings towards the product or as a designer? Like, what were

4. 7:07 – 9:59

   A Designer’s First Impression of Using Figma

   1. SPSpeaker7:07

      your thoughts on the product?

   2. CLCory Lee7:09

      As a designer at the time, I was using Figma. This was probably, like, 2016, 2017. Like, a lot of different design tools were coming out. Like, I mean, every week seemed like there was a different design tool. Like, and I was, you know, using one tool as my main tool, but, like, I would be using a- another tool, beta testing it, like, on the side, and, like, recreating the d- design, like, every week and testing, you know, these A/B testing these design choices to see, like, which one is the, is gonna be the best one, which one I s- I switch to. And, like, through that whole process, like, one of them I found was, like, Figma. And I was using Figma, and I, I picked it up for a bit, and I was like, "Okay, this is web-based. This is kind of interesting, but, like, it doesn't make much difference compared to, like, what I'm using now," right? And then, um, I went back to it for some reason again to use it, and I started thinking about the collaboration features, right? I was just like, "Wait, wait, you can just... Oh, it's web-based. You can just share a link. I don't have to, like, export this and every single time it's my final, final, final, final version, send that again," and then I, you know, I could just share that and it's always up to date. And thinking about, like, the repercussions of that, of like how that would change the way people interact, uh, and just reduce the friction, I think this is just a big thing I think about a lot of time, uh, in the process. So I was like, "Oh, well, to realize the value of that, I actually have to u- use this tool with somebody else." So the, the first thing I did was, "Okay, let me f- find some other people on my team that I can get to get in the tool, and let's use it together." And then once I did that, they understood it. I understood it. I was like, "Okay, this is a game changer." You know, once you start using it together, you, you just realize it's like, it's a completely different experience. And I think that was when it was clicked, and then I realized that, and then I was like, "Oh, I need to get my whole team on this. I need to get everyone in this and get everyone in the file." Before I was, like, gonna introduce my team to it, there was actually a- an issue with, like, Japanese input. Um, and, you know, back in the day, like I... You still have it today. In the bottom, like, right corner of Figma, there's a little question mark right there, and if you push that, you can have, like, you can s- send a message, right, to the help desk and, and get support on that, right? So I was using Figma, and then when you input the Japanese characters, it wouldn't show up correctly. Japanese input was basically broken in, in Figma at the time. I was like, "Oh, yes, this is great, but, like, I'm in Japan, and, like, I'm, [laughs] I'm designing in Japanese, so I can't use this with my team until this is fixed," right? And I was like, "Uh, maybe I'll just try to send something to support and see what happens," you know? So I, I told them. I, I sent them some screenshots. I said, "Hey, uh..." I sent a detailed request, and I was like, "Hey, you know, this thing is broken here. And if you could fix this, this would really be helpful for your Japanese users," right? And then couple weeks go by, and I pick it up again, and it's fixed. And I was like, "Wow, this is pretty nice." I was, I was like, "The tool's pretty cool," but I was like... What was really, really cool was just like, oh, I gave this feedback, and then they fixed that. But also I know that, like, they're accepting feedback from the community, and the, the speed of that iteration is, is something that it gives me confidence in it. Um, so I think, like, changing tools is, like, an investment for the whole team. That was kind of me weighing the option. It was just like, okay, I'm really kind of investing in this team, and I'm gonna tell my team we should use this, this product.

   3. SPSpeaker9:53

      So you joined Figma before the product launch. How did you approach marketing, marketing a product

5. 9:59 – 13:33

   Tips for Marketing a Product Before Launch

   1. SPSpeaker9:59

      that was still in stealth mode?

   2. CBClaire Butler10:00

      So I was the first marketing hire, but I was also the first just go-to-market person. In the beginning when we didn't have a product, I would go around and drive around Palo Alto, San Francisco with Dylan, and we would just pitch Figma to different teams. We had a bunch of connections in different design teams, and we would just go there, and we'd, we'd show them the product. And so a lot of what I did in the early days was meet these people, gather their feedback, kind of like what Cory was saying in, in that more of a one-on-one setting, and hear what they thought about the tool. And then, uh, we were really trying to understand, okay, when are we ready to go out of stealth and launch, launch the product? And so a lot of what I was doing was trying to understand, you know, are teams ready to adopt this, and is the, the tool good enough to launch? I think it's such a balance that you have to think about, where it's like, okay, we wanna get out of stealth, and we wanna get in this, this in people's hands, but if it's not good enough, then it's also like, well, we're gonna lose our chance. You only get one shot to launch.

   3. SPSpeaker10:55

      And, like, what were some of the factors that made that decision?

   4. CBClaire Butler10:59

      Yeah. It, it's hard, right? It's, uh, such a, a hard question for people because you really do only get one chance to launch the product, and you wanna do it right. And so you want it to be good. When people are all going in and looking at the tool, you want them to have a good experience. So that's on one hand. But then on the other hand, you don't wanna wait too long, right? Because the tool... The team had already been building the tool for years before I got there. You wanna keep things going. You wanna start building with people and getting their feedback. And so it is a really hard balance. It's definitely more of an art than a science in terms of, you know, when to launch. And I remember I was sitting in this meeting, and someone literally took the laptop out of Dylan's hands because they wanted to play with it. I don't think that they did it mean to, like, s- didn't take his laptop, but they were just like, "That's so cool. I have to try it." And I think once they saw people starting to do that, that was like, okay, this is... This feels like it's kind of ready. One of the biggest challenges that we had in terms of deciding when to launch was- Multiplayer wasn't actually done when we launched Figma. It just was gonna take, like, another year for, for multiplayer to be done. And so that was a really hard decision at the time, where it was like, "This is our most important feature arguably, and we know it's gonna take another year before it's done." And the decision that we had to make was, you know, do we launch without multiplayer, or do we wait another year? And we decided just to go for it and to launch and to start getting feedback, start getting it in people's hands, keep it in beta, even though we knew it wasn't finished. But that is such a hard challenge, right? Like, I think there'd be a lot of good arguments on why you should wait, uh, for the, the core feature to be done, but it definitely becomes kind of more of an art than a science at that point in terms of making that decision, 'cause you also just gotta keep the momentum up, too. Metrics are so important, but I feel like you can't really look at them w- that closely when you're in a micro setting like that. You kinda have to go on anecdotes, right? Like, we didn't have enough people to, like, have these metrics dashboards and be like, "Look at the usage over time," right? Like, honestly, we were meeting these teams, and what we looked at was, like, at, at the beginning, can we get one team to transfer full time? And it sounds so funny, 'cause it's like our metric was, like, zero or one, [laughs] right? It's not like you're looking at these dashboards. And that's why I feel like sometimes when you're doing something really early and you're like, "I have to 10X this, I have to 100X this, I have to 1000X this-"

   5. SPSpeaker13:16

      Mm-hmm

   6. CBClaire Butler13:16

      ... you kinda have to go more on intuition and more on feeling, I think, and really believe that, because metrics just aren't gonna get you the answers that you're looking for.

   7. SPSpeaker13:25

      What were your, um, team or your, um, plan or strategy on building this community, and, um, how important was

6. 13:33 – 17:05

   Figma’s Playbook for Building a Loved Community

   1. SPSpeaker13:33

      that at the time?

   2. CBClaire Butler13:34

      I wouldn't say in the beginnings we ever set out to, like, have a community-driven strategy. Kinda to just take, to parallel Cory's story with what was happening at Figma at the time, in the early days of Figma, that little question mark button that Cory was talking about, uh, we didn't really have a full-time support team, or it took a while for us to do that. And so our engineers would rotate and answer those questions. And so it makes a lot of sense that somebody reported a bug and that Cory reported a bug, and then one of our engineers saw that and just fixed it, [laughs] right? Like, that's just kind of what happened. It was really all hands on deck. And Dylan, our CEO, really believed that we need to be as close to the users of our product as possible. And so even, even no- like up until a long time ago, or till recently, if you joined Figma, you had to start spending time answering support questions, because he wanted people to know and understand what the problems were and be really close to what that looked like. So that's been integrated and woven into who we are since the beginning. And along with that, it's really building the product alongside of the users of the product.

   3. SPSpeaker14:38

      Mm-hmm.

   4. CBClaire Butler14:38

      It wasn't like we thought to ourselves, like, "Let's have a community-driven strategy." It was just, we need to listen to our users, and we need to build a product that's gonna be really useful for them, and they know what their problems are more than we do, and we need to spend time with them and, and fix their problems. And there's people like Cory, like Cory was one of those people that put it, went into the chat. But there were thousands of other Corys. That idea of listening to people and then having a personal relationship, really becoming close with them, and then having them go spread Figma to their company, to their communities, to where they live, that's just what we did at scale. And so it sounds, like, pretty un- unscalable, right? Oh, you have your engineers sitting there answering support tickets, fixing bugs. Like, you can't do that forever. That doesn't scale. But actually, it does scale, because Cory, once we empowered him, he converted his team. He grew a community in Tokyo, right? Like, that has a huge amount of ramifications down the line. Um, and so that's what that strategy looks like when it, when it does scale, right?

   5. SPSpeaker15:43

      Mm-hmm.

   6. CBClaire Butler15:43

      It's, it's how those people, these people who you really build these strong relationships with, then spread Figma for you.

   7. SPSpeaker15:49

      Mm-hmm.

   8. CBClaire Butler15:49

      That's the whole crux of a community-driven strategy. Advice I would give is focus on a niche, because it's so hard to be too broad, especially when you're new and you're early and you don't have a brand yet. And find out who your users are and have somebody who really understands them be the face of y- be the face of what you're doing. We definitely started with designers.

   9. SPSpeaker16:10

      Mm-hmm.

   10. CBClaire Butler16:10

       We were very focused and had a very specific niche of designers. They wanted someone who really understood their pain points, what they were going through, what it was like to design.

   11. SPSpeaker16:20

       Mm-hmm.

   12. CBClaire Butler16:20

       And that's when, for me, I realized that immediately and I was like, I don't know this. I can study it. I can, I can try and, and learn my best. I, I have over the years, but at the end of the day, I'm not a classically trained designer. It's not my, my core expertise. And so that's when I, you know, I decided, I was like, we have to hire somebody who knows this really, really, really well and have them be the face of this and have them be the people who are talking with users, who are creating content, who are checking all of our marketing, um, who are helping us do things. And that's, that's when we decided to have a user from the community come join the team, and that, that function has scaled.

   13. SPSpeaker16:58

       How did you, um, come up with this idea of having, like, an offline, um, community, and how did that, um,

7. 17:05 – 20:35

   Config’s First Chapter

   1. SPSpeaker17:05

      scale also?

   2. CBClaire Butler17:06

      Totally. So in the early days, uh, we did meetups, and so that's what it looked like at the beginning. Some people were skeptics in the beginning, right? And maybe they'd wanna go to meet other designers, or they'd show up. But we realized how valuable it was to bring people together and to talk, and we just saw how amazing it was when people just learn best practices from each other, um, and just learn from being together, and we were able to build these one-on-one relationships. We could kind of overcome some of their concerns or talk them out or just kinda hear people out on why they were skeptics or why they weren't sure and how we'd have these conversations. And it might be... I remember one, um, Tom was in, in Seattle. Tom, our first designer advocate, was in Seattle, and he was talking to somebody who at the time was a very big skeptic, right? Uh, and then he kept talking to them, have these relationships, built this relationship with them. Turns out they were at Uber, um, and that person then brought Figma to Uber, right? And we saw the power of how that process worked, and we started growing just these, these people and, and having these relationships. And then we had this thought of, like, well, wait a minute, you know, we've been going to these different cities and these different places. What if we brought everyone together, right? And what, what would that look like? And it was really funny. I remember when we first had the idea, we were like, "Okay, how big should it be?" And it sounds so funny, and I laugh at it now. It was actually we thought we it should be 200 people. And that was gonna be the conference. And we even booked a venue for 200 people. That was the size. And w- we launched the conference, and then the first day we had so many registrations and people who wanted to join that we were like, "Okay, [laughs] we have to change the size of this thing because there's no way 200 people is gonna work." Um, and so expanded it, and so the first Config was 1,000 people. We have all these relationships. People have these connections online, and because of just the distributed nature and the global nature of design, people have been talking to each other on Twitter for so long, but then they all came together in person, and it was just pure magic to see these people... I remember so many the, the line, the conversation was like, "Oh, that's not what your avatar looks like on Twitter," because this, there's a strong community that existed and that people were already meeting each other and talking that we've been doing from these meetups, but also just from the nature of a design. Designers have been talking and learning to each other regardless of Figma for so long. And so bringing everybody together in person and having these relationships that were just online happen in real life was just so magical that we just knew we had to continue it.

   3. SPSpeaker19:26

      Like, so do you have any, like, advi- advice on, like, building communities for early startups?

   4. CBClaire Butler19:30

      Totally. I think the biggest thing is that sometimes in, in, you know, especially for us in, you know, enterprise marketing or B2B marketing, you think about people as companies. And I think the biggest advice that I would give is, like, people are people, right? And I think you see that at Config. Like, you'll see people and you'll talk to them and you'll be chatting, and then you'll look at their badge and you're like, "Oh, you work at a really big company. Oh, that was a company that in theory we might wanna, like, target for sales." But that's not how we think of it. We're just like, "You're just a person and you have inter-" Like, it sounds so basic, right? But, like, I think so often in marketing we, we split people into, like, you as a person at your desk and you as a person outside of that, whereas we try to think of people as one person, and you can just... You're, you're yourself all of the time. And sure, you happen to work at a company, but, uh, I think it's doing these things that don't scale and building these relationships one-on-one, like, like Cory and Cory's example, and then those people bring other people, and those... And then that's how word of mouth really spreads.

   5. SPSpeaker20:26

      So Figma is beyond just a product. It seems like it's a brand, it's a community. So, um, what are your advice on,

8. 20:35 – 22:38

   How Iconic Brands Are Really Built

   1. SPSpeaker20:35

      yeah, making a brand?

   2. CBClaire Butler20:36

      You know, I think that the most important thing is to actually start with the product [laughs] for us, and that's, like, what product-led growth looks like, right? And I, I think that what we have as a brand really starts with a great product.

   3. SPSpeaker20:50

      Mm.

   4. CBClaire Butler20:50

      By starting from the bottom up and saying, like, "Okay, first we have a really strong product. That's awesome. We're improving it as we go. We're listening to feedback, um, as we're building it and building it with the community." And then second, we have, you know, these relationships with people, and those people love the product. They are spreading it to other people, and that's, that's growing over time a community of people. Then we can do the brand, right? And then we can say, "Okay, now we wanna layer on top all these other cool things like a 10,000-person conference, or like, um, you know, all of these beautiful visuals that we have."

   5. CLCory Lee21:26

      The story of Figma is not about ending at Figma. The story about Figma is where does Figma get that person to? And in most cases, you know, if people are using Figma, their story is something like, you know, "I just want to create great products. I want to enjoy the process and create that product together." So the narrative that we're putting on the community side is often, like, how do we just enable those people to get to where they wanna go?

   6. CBClaire Butler21:47

      Do you know where the name Figma comes from? It's, uh-

   7. SPSpeaker21:49

      It would be great if you can explain it to us. Yeah

   8. CBClaire Butler21:52

      ... So it's actually, it's, it comes from the idea of a figment of your imagination, and the initial vision of Figma was, uh, to eliminate the gap between imagination and reality. Like, that was, that was the vision. And so they... It kinda shifted for a while there, 'cause, uh, some people told him it was too ambitious, and so it was make design accessible is kind of where it went to. But as we grow and as we continue to evolve, it, it always comes back to that. Like, how do you... How can we get better at, as a tool, helping to ma- eliminate that gap, um, and make it so anybody can have what their... They have ideas in their head, turn it into a product or turn it into something that exists in this world? [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 22:38