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

1. 0:00 – 3:47

   Claire’s background

   1. CBClaire Butler0:00

      We had Coda. They were our first user, and they were based in Palo Alto. Uh, Dillon and I drove down and demoed the product to them, and they were the first ones, their designer Jeremy was like, "Yes, we'll take this on full-time." And I remember we were both like, "What? Really? You will?" (laughs) Like 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 Dillon gets a text from Jeremy being like, "Oh, yeah, I tried to share this with Philippe, my engineer, and he can't get the file to open, so I guess we can't use it." And we were like, " (gasps) What is it? What happened?" (laughs) "This is... We finally got someone." And I remember Dillon 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 it was a problem with Philippe's MacBook. And Evan... Eh, Evan didn't have a car, so Dillon had to drive Evan down to Palo Alto to fix the MacBook of Philippe just to get them to use the product.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky0:53

      (Intro music plays) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Claire Butler. Claire started at Figma while they were still in stealth as their 10th employee, and their first ever marketing hire. She led their original launch and go-to-market, and also their branding and positioning and messaging work. And eight years in, she continues to lead their go-to-market and bottom up growth motion, along with community, events, social, advocacy, and Figma for education 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 golden 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, Calm, Quora, and Modern Treasury trust Vanta 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 SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, and many more, Vanta helps companies obtain the reports they need to accelerate growth, build efficient compliance processes, mitigate risks to their businesses, and build trust with external stakeholders. Over 5,000 fast-growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC 2 and these other frameworks. For a limited time, Lenny's Podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash 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 retention. And by capturing website activity, ad 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, Mixpanel is 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/lenny. And while you're at it, they're also hiring, so check it out at mixpanel.com/friends/lenny. (Intro music plays)

2. 3:47 – 7:45

   The huge branding decision that Claire made on day one at Figma

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky3:49

      Claire, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

   2. CBClaire Butler3:54

      Thanks, Lenny. I'm excited to be here.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky3:56

      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?

   4. CBClaire Butler4:33

      Yeah, totally. No, that's such a good question. We were right downtown on New Montgomery and Minna. And I think the thing that s- sticks out to me is actually two competing stories (laughs) that talk about just how much at that time you'd oscillate between these, like, really high level strategic decisions and then, like, total cr- grunt work, right? So, like, my first day at 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 sum 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 product Figma was gonna be named Summit. That was the name. So the company was gonna be Figma, and then the product suite, the fir- the f- the product design tool, right, was gonna be Summit, with the idea that, you know, eventually we'll have other tools and that could be like Mountaintop or (laughs) I don't know what the... We allow... 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 name this thing (laughs) Summit. That's not gonna work. We can't have two brands. Summit's not ownable. Like we can't build equity and like multiple things, like that's just never gonna work. We kind of have to just stick with one." And I think Figma's ownable and makes sense and we should just go with Figma, so we kind of should probably kill this Summit thing. And Dillon said to me, he was like, "Oh, that's interesting. How about you make a presentation and present it to everyone tomorrow?" (laughs) And so I did that. I was like, "Oh, okay, I guess this is what I'm doing the rest of the day." So I went and made a little presentation about, you know, like how we couldn't build all this equity in two places and all of the things. And then the next day, we decided to kill that name. And so we went with Figma for the name of the product instead of Summit-And that's how fast things moved, right? And how much you just kind of ran with it and had ownership. I compare that to the first meet-up we had, which was probably just like 10 people in the office, honestly. But I remember I was like, you know, I was in charge of that so I was like, had to get all the food and everything there, and I just InstaCarted some things and ordered some pizza. But I'd forgotten ice, and so (laughs) I like 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 this street, down, uh, 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 oscillation between like, oh, we're making these high-level strategic decisions and someone also has to go buy the ice. (laughs) So that's what it was like at Figma in the early days.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky6:59

      That's incredible. That's almost a metaphor. Uh, someone's got to go carry the ice.

   6. CBClaire Butler7:03

      Someone's got to get the ice for the meet-up. Yep.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky7:05

      That's so interesting about Summit. I had no idea that was (laughs) actually-

   8. CBClaire Butler7:09

      That wasn't even the name. So if you liked that better, I'm sorry. (laughs) 'Cause I killed that.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky7:13

      Like there, 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?

   10. CBClaire Butler7:21

       I think we probably would have changed it later. You know?

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky7:23

       Mm-hmm.

   12. CBClaire Butler7:23

       I think we just, we just saved ourselves some time and without having to change it.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky7:27

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

   14. CBClaire Butler7:32

       The na- the name change? Or ...

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky7:33

       Yeah. Yeah, the name.

   16. CBClaire Butler7:34

       The first day. No, that was literally my first day.

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky7:36

       The first day. (laughs)

   18. CBClaire Butler7:36

       No, no, no. That was my first day and my second day. Like not even kidding, my first day I made the recommendation, the second day I gave the presentation and the decision was made.

3. 7:45 – 9:55

   The most stressful memory of early days at Figma

   1. CBClaire Butler7:45

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky7:45

      Wow. I was gonna ask you what the most stressful memory of early days Figma was. I'm guessing it's the same story.

   3. CBClaire Butler7:49

      It's not, actually. So I think the most stressful thing, I was thinking about this, was when we launched out of stealth. So like I come into Figma, I had lots of experience, I'd been at another startup before that, I had launched stuff. But I was still kind of junior, you know? Like I had done these things but I didn't have a ton of, a ton of, ton of cycles, and I'd never like run the whole thing from like, okay, like messaging and positioning. Like we, this was a forcing function for us to do our messaging and positioning. And I remember there like, there was like more than one day where like we locked ourselves in a conference room and I like made Dillon and Sho at the time have this positioning up on the big screen and like made them agree on it word for word 'cause we'd just never done that before. But then I'd also like never run PR or press, and all of a sudden I like had to run press and PR. And I think the hardest part there and the most stressful part was like, I didn't have anyone to talk to. It was just me, right? And I didn't at the time have enough cycles to have the confidence that like the decisions I was making were the right ones. And so I ha- Like, you know, it was hard not to second guess myself sometimes in that position. And I, I think that's some of the hardest times with being at a startup, especially when you're the only marketer, the only go-to-market person, is you don't have anyone 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.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky9:12

      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?

   5. CBClaire Butler9:19

      I just, I mean, I had Dillon, 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 V- VCs to help us. I remember Greylock was helpful, at least over there. But ultimately, like they don't know, they, you know, they help a lot but they don't know your business as, as intimately as you do. So at the end of the day, you know, that's something Dillon's really good at is trusting his intuition and gut, and so he was helpful in the decision-making. But then also, you just got to go for it. And I think that that's something that I learned at that time that's helped me throughout the rest of my career is like building that confidence or that trust in yourself, uh, because it wasn't something that I necessarily immediately had.

4. 9:55 – 12:55

   Advice for people looking to join a startup

   1. CBClaire Butler9:55

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky9:55

      Next question I wanted to get into briefly is, you joined Figma really early, became one of the most successful, beloved 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, trying to decide what to do. Clearly, you made a good choice. What did you see?

   3. CBClaire Butler10:14

      So I had been at another startup before Figma, a little bigger. I think I joined at series B and then got through ac- 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, I'll take the (laughs) decision-making part out. But then from there, I was talking to a couple different companies and when I ta- 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 this like a drone company or like a SaaS like tech, like ad tech company and I, and I just didn't get it honestly. Like it didn't intuitively make sense to me or I didn't understand the technology or something. But at Figma, the basic premise like immediately logically clicked for me. Like, oh yeah, I use Google Docs, I use Asana, I use all these online tools. Like that's so weird that design's not online. (laughs) Like why isn't it? And as a, a marketer I'd worked with designers and sent feedback in 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 checked the box. And the next one was, I knew people who believed in it. So I got introduced to Dillon via, um, Index. They were an investor at the last company I was at, and Danny Reimer specifically, and my old boss, Greg Smearon, who was an EIR there. And I trusted them a lot, and they invested in it. I also met John Lilly. I didn't know who he was. I had to Google him. (laughs) But, uh, he seemed really smart and when I Googled him, he was very impressive and he believed in it, so that was great. And then I think the third thing was, I remember when I was trying to decide, Dillon really didn't take no for an answer. (laughs) Like he, he was, he's very, uh, persuasive and I remember like he'd call me and text me and then I'd have all these like concerns or things and he would just like pick them apart one by one, like of reasons why they weren't real concerns or things to get over them. And so I think that that was the third thing is like, that's just kind of who he was and that's how he is with everything. And so if that's how he is with me, that's the, how he is with...... any obstacle that he has. And so when I looked at that, I was just like, "All right, let's- let's give this a go." And- and I didn't know, right? Like I didn't know th- I had no idea it would be as big as it is today. So some of it was luck too, for sure. But those were the three things of, like, how I made my decision.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky12:24

      So what I took away there is wanna just believe in the- in the idea obviously. Like, make- make sure you actually think this could be really big. Two is some social proof. People you trust really believe in it. In this case, it was really smart investors, they knew. And then the third is just sounds like you were also just impressed with Dylan.

   5. CBClaire Butler12:40

      Yeah, totally. I believed in him.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky12:42

      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 continued to lead go-to-market at Figma. And so that's a good segue to where I wanna spend most of our conversation.

5. 12:55 – 17:12

   What a bottom-up go-to-market motion is

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky12:56

      I essentially wanna try to unpack what worked to build Figma into the business that it is today from the beginning to even now. You're also there for eight years, so you saw a lot of what worked and- and didn't work. And so let's start with the beginnings of Figma and the go-to-market motion that you developed, and how you actually implemented it. So maybe to start, if you could just talk about just what is a bottom-up go-to-market motion. And then you also shared somewhere that Figma has a very unique bottom-up go-to-market motion. So maybe just those two areas, just like broadly what is bottom-up go-to-market motion, and then two, what is unique about Figma's approach?

   2. CBClaire Butler13:33

      I've reflected back (laughs) 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-market or our go-to-market motion, and we've said it- we've called it a lot of things over time, right? We called it product-led, we called it community-led. The way I think about it now is this bottoms-up motion that really is focused on ICs, right? So is all focused on like, okay, so you have this core audience. For us it was designers, and they're largely individual contributors, right? So they're people who are practitioners who are using your tool. For us, it's like eight hours a day. If you're a designer, you're in Figma all the time. 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, in the company and the brand. And they just- they love you so much that they're willing to put their social capital and themselves on the line and spread the product throughout their whatever their, you know, communities are. And the one that's connected the most to revenue is companies. And so that's where the revenue model really kinda clicks in is you have all these individual contributors who love you, but then they also work at these big companies and these big orgs, and they become these internal champions who spearhead adoption within their organizations and eventually turn into large amounts of revenue. And I think of that as our bottoms-up motion, and that's different from tops-down. In a lot of SaaS is tops-down where you go straight to, like, a VP or a buy- like, an executive buyer. They then, like, kind of, like, agree to doing a too- to buying a tool, and then that kind of goes down to their organization. I think with technical tools especially, like, this becomes really important. The practitioners have to love it, right? Um, and also sometimes I wonder does an executive care? (laughs) You know what I mean? Like, what tools people are using? And so for Figma what that looked 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, uh, revenue, we did have, we did have it... it was paid, but it was all self-serve. And so we'd- we'd work with these... and we weren't worried about things like, I mean, we cared about security, but all of the org features that people need and want when you're working with procurement. Um, we were just focused on technical features for users mostly. And then the- the individual contributor or maybe the manager would just put Figma on their credit card. That was the way that things grew. And so there was no sales team for a long time. We did have one eventually, and I'll talk about what that looked like. But then the second thing was we also, once we did have a sales team, and even up until now, so much of our- our, uh, revenue and our sales and our, like, MQLs or marketing qualified leads come from our free tier, right? So it's people that are using it, maybe they use it for free. We have a very robust free tier. Maybe they use it for pro, which is on your credit card. And then once it's widespread and they've gained the confidence, then they're ready to bring in sales, work with procurement, and they actually come to us and they're like, "Hey, I work at this company. I really wanna get my whole company to use it, but, like, security's not letting me. Can you help me unblock it with them?" Right? And so we didn't spend that much money, any money really, programmatically on paid or programmatic marketing because all of our leads for sales would come in through, like, a form on our website, which was current users, either free or pro wanting to upgrade. And at that point, it's a very different sales conversation to unblock someone or to, you know, just help them implement Figma when they've already- you 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

6. 17:12 – 18:52

   Figma’s unique approach to bottom-up GTM

   1. CBClaire Butler17:12

      so much of our growth over time.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky17:14

      Somebody listening to this that has say a SaaS, B2B SaaS company is like, "Oh, okay, I just need to get people to love my product and it's gonna be great." And so I wanna unpack that, just like what you did 'cause it wasn't obviously an accident that people loved Figma. But before we get there, you 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 Figma did differently? Is it this, like, obsession with ICs on teams or is there some other element of it?

   3. CBClaire Butler17:44

      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 contributor spends so much time in a 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 real- like a really small update, right? Like, you have to click one time instead of twice to do something. When you're a designer and you're in a tool eight hours a day, saving that one click is huge.... right? And so I think the obsession with quality and with craft within the editor, right, for us, for 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 of Figma, don't get me wrong, but the, the tool itself, right? Like the editor. That's where it all starts, and that's what these people love. And then the collaboration is kind of like, yes, it's the thing, it's like our differentiator, but it's actually like you stay for the collaboration. You don't want to talk about it (laughs) or like learn about it or ... Nobody wants to talk about collaboration. You just want it to work, right? You care about the tool, and that the tool's working well. And so I think that, uh, maybe that's the difference, is the obsession with the tool itself.

7. 18:52 – 23:01

   Figma’s launch out of stealth

   1. CBClaire Butler18:52

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky18:52

      Awesome. Yeah. Something I learned recently is that multiplayer wasn't even a part of Figma at, at launch-

   3. CBClaire Butler18:56

      I know.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky18:57

      ... like a year later.

   5. CBClaire Butler18:57

      I know. We can talk about that if you want to know like why ... Like making a decision of when to go to stealth 'cause we almost didn't because it didn't have multiplayer.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky19:04

      Oh, yeah. Let's talk about that.

   7. CBClaire Butler19:05

      Um, that was like our differentiator and we can't not have it, but then, you know, we did anyway, so ...

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky19:10

      Yeah. Let's take a tangent there actually, just that decision to go from stealth. So Figma was in stealth th- three years or four years before-

   9. CBClaire Butler19:16

      Gosh.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky19:17

       ... like idea-

   11. CBClaire Butler19:17

       Three, I guess. I think it was 2020, 2012 that we, that they started, and then we launched in, at the end of 2015. So between around there. Yeah, around three or four.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky19:27

       Cool. And then you joined right before they launched. We're gonna come back to what we were talking about, but just what did you see about that decision of like now's the time to launch?

   13. CBClaire Butler19:34

       Yeah. I think it was 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 ... I don't ... We could have just kept building it quiet for a long time more, but it was very demotivating, right? So that was like a very big part of this. So there was a desire holistically to get out of stealth. But we didn't wanna do it until we knew we'd 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. (laughs) Like we would have ... I still have the doc actually, where it was like on the, projected on the screen and Dylan and Sean 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 at our ... In Notion's early days. He stopped by and was chatting and he's like, "Wait, you can't launch without multiplayer." (laughs) And I was like, "I know." So I was like, everybody was like that was the core thing. But the, the idea was that we had ... We wanted to get out of stealth. We talked to Evan, our CTO, and knew 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, 'cause Evan was kind of building multiplayer. And I was ... I don't know enough about the engineering, if he was doing it on his own or not. But he was the key person doing it, 'cause there were a lot of other things too that were being built, could be built through that year. And we wanted to get more feedback from people, right? And to start, to really get started. And so, to me, the things that I wanted to see before just deciding like, okay, so we don't have our key feature. Can we still launch? Or is this ... Is there enough here for people to get excited? And my first s- you know, at least my first three months, especially before we got, uh, get going for the, for the launch of the product and probably even after that, I would just go around with Dylan and pilot or, uh, 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, th- people didn't care, (laughs) right? Like they were just like, "What is this?" You know? "Uh, I don't, I don't, I don't wanna 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, um ... But, you know, after Vector Networks came out, after some of our other core features, there were enough things where people, I remember, they would like take the laptop out of Dylan's hands when he would start showing it 'cause they wanted to play with it. And to me, when I started seeing designers do that, even if I wasn't sure if they'd use it as a team, even if I wasn't sure if like they'd buy it, we weren't ... They... We were ... We weren't selling it yet. They wanted to try it and they were excited about it, and that kind of emotional reaction of wanting to play with it in these demos was really what gave me confidence that we were ready to launch. And we had a couple teams, small numbers, (laughs) 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, we knew is that some people were using it full time, and people who weren't were really excited to try, and were like very impressed with the technical feat of it all, and interested. And to me, that was enough confidence that like, okay, it's worth it. Let's get out of stealth.

8. 23:01 – 24:50

   Signals vs. hard metrics in the early days

   1. CBClaire Butler23:01

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky23:01

      That story of the potential customer pulling the laptop-

   3. CBClaire Butler23:06

      Mm-hmm.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky23:06

      ... from Dylan is such a good metaphor for product market fit, which people describe as you feel pull. Someone literally pulling it from your hands. You talked about metrics that you maybe could share? What, what can you share there?

   5. CBClaire Butler23:19

      In these early days, especially with Bottoms Up and, and with all of these things, and people ask me all the time like, "How do you measure things in an early stage situation?" And I maybe have a controversial point of view here. I don't think you can from a metrics side. Like your numbers are so small. Uh, one of the quotes I always like to say, and I, I say this now too when we're doing stuff 'cause we're launching new products at Figma and it comes up a lot, is like, you can't optimize your way to product market fit, right? Like I don't care at the early stages if something's like optimized by 5% from like an email, right? (laughs) Like that doesn't like fundamentally tell me if something's working or not. So like, and 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 be-... again, trust yourself a lot more and have more intuition, but then also find more signal of the things that are working, whether that's anecdotal, talking to people, examples. And that becomes much more useful than, like, hard metrics are sometimes.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky24:26

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

   7. CBClaire Butler24:37

      Yes. One-

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky24:38

      Step two-

   9. CBClaire Butler24:38

      Literally one. That, that was like step one. Like, and that's not easy, right? That's not easy.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky24:43

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

   11. CBClaire Butler24:46

       Yes.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky24:46

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

   13. CBClaire Butler24:48

       Yes, exactly.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky24:48

       And then get someone to pay for your product.

9. 24:50 – 30:08

   How Figma won over Microsoft

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky24:50

      Yeah, so there's all these major milestones. Along those same lines, I saw an interview with Dylan talking about product market fit, and he had this interesting quote about how he realized first that they had product market fit, like, a year later. Which is when Microsoft, I think, was like, "Take our money, we want to pay for Figma." And he's like, "Okay, maybe this is gonna work." Is that... Does that sound about right?

   2. CBClaire Butler25:11

      Well, it's interesting, right? And that, that goes up to the bottoms-up model we could talk about. So we would have... I think the difference, if you think about a company like Microsoft and what this looks like, this is just a really good example of this bottoms-up market or motion in-... Bottoms-up motion in, in market, right? So, (laughs) 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. (laughs) That's how I got my first meeting with Microsoft.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky25:40

      Well done.

   4. CBClaire Butler25:41

      I know, I know. And I was, you know... I saw, I saw that they had, uh, 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 with them and first got feedback from them. So that's just a funny anecdote.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky25:52

      This could be a new strategy, if everyone's gonna try to contact you.

   6. CBClaire Butler25:54

      No, you literally do whatever. Uber Driver, like, shared Lyfts. Um, I can, we can talk more about that. But we... Yeah, you gotta do whatever you can to get early people to talk to, to try your product out and get really scrappy. But for Microsoft... So over time, we would have... We had like a, I think it was... What was the team that got acquired that went into Microsoft? I'll have to remember the name. But it was like a small team within Microsoft and they were... Xamarin. It was Xamarin. They were the ones who were using Figma first and we saw that and, you know, then... So they were that kind of patient zero at Microsoft and then we had, slowly over time, more pockets within Microsoft using the tool. But again, we'd never gone through like Microsoft Procurement, Microsoft Security. It just started popping up throughout the organization and we have these really cool node graphs that show this too, where like you'd have these, like, little pockets of people and then it would like jump to another... Like, they'd have one more collaborator and then jump to another pocket, and there were these really cool maps of how that spread within the, the organization. And eventually we got to the point where like that was a very comprehensive (laughs) node graph, right, that had this massive thing of all these people from Microsoft using the product. But still, it was only on credit cards, right? We, they weren't... I don't think we even had an enterprise product at this point, right? And so there was no salesperson for them to talk to, and Microsoft was like, "Wait a minute." Like, "We need to organize this." (laughs) You know what I mean? Like, "We need security, we need account management, we need procurement involved." And, um, I think that that's what it was, is like they wanted to pay for it, right? And they wanted us to have this enterprise product because they had these requirements and they wanted to have a better control over it 'cause it was just popping up within the organization without their control. And so, that's probably a good example of like what that looked like as, as this bottoms-up motion just spread to a really large organization.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky27:34

      This node graph thing. 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?

   8. CBClaire Butler27:41

      Well, I, our data science team built it. I don't, I don't know if it's like... Yes, and I'm sure it's an internal tool. I just remember we would have... There's like a, there was like a website in, like a, 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, our data analytics s- 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 one, gen two, right? Like, these people invite people. And you can see these node graphs of like how somebody started Figma, would be the center, and then they invited someone else, right? And so you can... And then it shows like how that spread, and so you get these clusters and you can see the clusters are teams. But then you can see like someone, you know, invited someone in a different org to a file and then that started like a new center of a cluster, right? And so you... They're really interesting and you can pull up... You can really... Yeah, you can type in any org, uh, any org at Figma, um, and see what that node graph looks like. But, they're super interesting to see how those spread.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky28:37

      That is super cool, and I imagine that's also, uh, informed how you go to market by figuring out who spreads to who and who's often-

   10. CBClaire Butler28:44

       Totally.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky28:45

       ... spreading it.

   12. CBClaire Butler28:45

       And that's when these internal champions... Like, that's what the key is and that's maybe the takeaway of like how important these internal champions are because you just need, uh, someone to land there, (laughs) right? And then, uh, they pass it up and you can see... You could hover over and see this person's at the center of this node graph and all of these people that spread from this one person at the company. And that, I think, was the unlock to be like, "Oh yeah, these internal champions, they really, they're really the key to all of this."

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky29:12

       I remember it spreading at Airbnb early on. I think it was one of... Airbnb was one of the early customers and it was just one designer, a few designers starting to spread to the product managers. I was just like, remember on the team being like, "Goddamn it, we just switched to Sketch. Are we gonna switch again to a new product?" What-

   14. CBClaire Butler29:25

       (laughs) That was the hardest thing for like, I don't want to switch twice.

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky29:27

       Yeah.

   16. CBClaire Butler29:27

       That was definitely something we had to get over.

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky29:29

       But it was, uh... It happened for good reasons. Okay, one last thing that you mentioned (laughs) that I wanted to follow up on. You said something about shared Lyfts, and maybe that's a funny story of some sort.

   18. CBClaire Butler29:38

       Oh, I don't know specifically. I sh-... Like, Dylan specifically is like such a hustler, right? Especially in those early days. And he would just... Really anyone that he would meet, he would talk about Figma with them. I don't remember who it was, but there was definitely a situation where he met someone in a Lyft and then they became one of our users. Uh, so yeah, 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.

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky30:06

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

10. 30:08 – 32:00

    How to win over ICs

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky30:08

       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 get IC to love you, and then step two is-... help it spread from that person, right?

    2. CBClaire Butler30:21

       Yep. Yep.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky30:22

       Okay, cool. So let's start with step one.

    4. CBClaire Butler30:25

       Okay.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky30:25

       Like I said, obviously it'd be awesome if somebody loved your product at a company. What did you actually do to make that happen in the early days?

    6. CBClaire Butler30:31

       Yeah. And it's really interesting to think about the early days too, right? 'Cause you're like, all right, uh, we don't exist. (laughs) Like how do you get them to love you when like you literally, like they've never heard of you before. Also like you were saying, in your situation like, oh, I use Sketch. I was maybe in Photoshop before that, right? Something else. I just made 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, I thought about this and like I think there are like four main areas that we focused on to make this start, right? To like get it going, and then we kind of still do this stuff today. So the first thing is all about credibility, and I think in the early days especially, credibility is so important in establishing that initial credibility, again, especially with a technical audience like designers. Um, the second is actually building the product with your users. And I know you had shown your podcast and he talked a lot about this too, um, just the customer obsession that we have, the, 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 s- specifically through a channel where they don't have to come to you because they don't really care about you yet, right? And like they're probably not gonna 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

11. 32:00 – 37:38

    How to establish credibility

    1. CBClaire Butler32:00

       with people. So I know those all sound really fuzzy, so maybe we can go into them specifically-

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky32:03

       Absolutely.

    3. CBClaire Butler32:04

       ... because, uh, they sound really fuzzy when you talk about them and so a lot of this stuff is hard like that where you're like, "Oh, that just sounds like buzzwords." (laughs) We have rea- yeah, I can give you some examples of these four things to maybe help (...) do it.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky32:14

       Let's do it.

    5. CBClaire Butler32:14

       So let's start with the first one, um, credibility. Okay. So I was the first marketer at Figma. I think one of the things I learned right away very quickly was that designers don't want to hear from marketers. (laughs) They don't want to be marketed to and they have an extremely high bullshit meter, right? They're like, you know, I, you use a word like, uh, you know, efficiency, collaboration, um, all of those buzzwords and they're just like I (laughs) go, "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 a 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 the tool like first of all, like the tool itself was a technical feat. Like it was the first time like these video game technology, WebGL, Evan's a prodigy. (laughs) Like the fact that he got a design tool to work on the internet was just amazing, right? And so like there's a lot of engineering interest there and credibility building of like how did you get this to work? So I got him to like make technical content and that I think went to number one on Hacker News, right? That people were just interested in him. And then we had a design team and our design team was our target audience. And so we talked a lot about how we chose to build features, all the things that went into it. And so many of the primitives of design tools have been like that forever, right? And so we changed some stuff. So like one of them would be like how we did grids or how we did vector networks. And we'd go into these really deep details of how we chose to make those product decisions, all of the craft decisions that went into it. And I remember, uh, one of my bars for deciding if something was like would hit this or not, if they would be interested was like, did I understand it? (laughs) You know what I mean? If I understood it, it was probably too basic, or if I could have written it myself, it was probably too basic. Like I remember, uh, we did one on grids in the early days and we went really deep on Joseph Muller-Brockman, um, and his influence on grids and I, and now I, I very much know who Joseph (laughs) Muller-Brockman is 'cause I work with designers. But at the time I like had to Google it. I was like, "Who is this?" Um, 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 'cause we had this design team. And then when, uh, six months kind of after we launched and I, you know, I'm, I actually got to hire someone to, to do marketing with me, the first person I hired was actually a designer advocate. So it was not a marketer. It was someone who was a designer. And we brought, you know, the designers and the engineers that I was trying to get to help me with stuff, like also had to design and build the product (laughs) so we didn't have a ton of time. Uh, but this designer advocate was working full time with me on this stuff and he came from our user base. He was one, you know, uh, uh, 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, to meet with users, talk to them, to write content and create content. And to, you know, bring that back to the product and that was what he did. And that designer advocacy position's actually scaled with Figma and we still have it today. It's one of, it's extreme, I think it's kind of the magic dust we call it that we sprinkle on go-to-market to make a lot of our go-to-market function work. But yeah, we, we didn't focus on marketing or marketing, like traditional marketing, right? We're very focused on the technal- technical aspects.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky35:50

       There's so many little lessons there. The designer advocate hire reminds me of something that Datadog did where they hired engineers to write their blog posts.

    7. CBClaire Butler35:59

       That's a great idea. (laughs)

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky36:00

       Yeah.

    9. CBClaire Butler36:01

       Yes. Exactly what we did. Yes.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky36:03

        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.

    11. CBClaire Butler36:15

        Yeah. Even if they weren't using it, I think that that, that was important, right? So like when we launched, like people like wanted to test it 'cause it was cool and see what it is, but then they backed out. They bounced, right? They were like, "All right, this isn't advanced enough. I'll come back later."... um, which is why we were like, give them reasons to come back. Being like, "Oh, yeah. But like, the pen tool's 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 was also before multiplayer, and so we couldn't do like collaborate, right? So it was like, use the tool to do these things. So that, that really helped people come back into the tool and spend a little bit more time in it.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky36:48

        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.

    13. CBClaire Butler36:57

        They took a long time. Also, like we had, there were, you know, I got, I had to work with an engineer or a designer to do every single one. Maybe like 10, like at most. But those ones that went out, like, you know, we tried to get on Hacker News, we tried to get on Designer News at the time. Twitter, we can jump into that, but it was also extremely big for us. And so, it was more about quality than it was about quantity.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky37:19

        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.

    15. CBClaire Butler37:28

        Yes. That was when we started accelerating this much, much more, is when we brought in that designer advocate to help us with this full-time.

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky37:35

        Cool. Okay, let's move to the next one, which I think is, uh, building with

12. 37:38 – 41:11

    Customer obsession in action

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky37:38

       your customers.

    2. CBClaire Butler37:39

       So that one we, you know, I know you talked to Shau. He talked a lot about this, right? This idea of like customer obsession and, and of building with your customers. And it also goes back to that whole decision that we talked about earlier about like when to come out of stealth. Like, you can only build so much with your customers when you're in stealth, right? (laughs) 'Cause like you don't have that many, they don't know about you. But especially, even in the early days when we only had a couple people, we really did listen and back, see also what you were saying earlier about those steps to 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, Dillon and I drove down and demoed the product to them, and they were the first ones, their designer, Jeremy was like, "Yes, we'll take this on full-time." And I remember we were both like, "What? Really? You will?" (laughs) Like 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 Oran's Hummus in Palo Alto on the way home, or on the way back to the office, to like bring some back for the team to celebrate. Um, we were just so stoked. And then we got back to the office and I think Dillon gets a text from Jeremy being like, "Oh, yeah. I tried to share this with Philippe, my engineer, and he can't get the file to open, so I guess we can't use it." And we're like, " (gasps) What is it? What happened?" (laughs) This is, finally got someone. And I remember Dillon 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 was a problem with Philippe's MacBook. And, um, so Evan, uh, Evan down had a car, so Dillon had to drive Evan down to Palo Alto to fix the MacBook of Philippe just to get them to use the product. So anyway, get them to stick around. 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, we really cared and listened to their feedback, especially when there are only a few people. So, one way we did that was, I remember we implemented Intercom back in the early days, and there were so few users and so few of us that everybody was on Intercom all day too. And so we'd get a chat and like, uh, I would jump in sometimes, Dillon would jump in, an engineer would jump in, and you'd open up a chat with people and they'd like actually like debug the product with us live, right? They'd be like, "I have this bug." And this engineer would be like, "Let me QA it right now." Right? And so like that was one example. We all did support back in that day, and the engineers would talk to users directly, get their feedback, and then go immediately fix things like bugs. And so those are just examples of, in the early days, what that looked like. And that, you know, just scales a lot over time as you're, you're growing and you're talking to more people. That advocate ended up helping us a ton when they came on board because, you know, some of the stuff, I mean, none of this stuff scales, (laughs) right? As your engineer, your engineers can do support forever. Um, in 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 just build this strong relationship with people, because they feel very invested in their journey with you.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky40:53

       Which goes back to building credibility.

    4. CBClaire Butler40:55

       A- absolutely, absolutely.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky40:57

       There's so many important lessons there. You talked about scaling this, but interestingly, this is very much doing things that don't scale, driving to their office, fixing their wifi (laughs) on their laptop.

    6. CBClaire Butler41:07

       Early days, nothing scales in the early days. You just have to do it anyway.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky41:10

       Just as a tangent,

13. 41:11 – 44:01

    Why getting users to love your product is so vital

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky41:11

       we're talking about getting people to love your product initially. Why is love so important? That's a really high bar, and I imagine you have an interesting insight on just like why it needs to be that level of, of appreciation.

    2. CBClaire Butler41:23

       Yeah, and it doesn't have to be 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 gonna do that unless you really believe in something. And so just using it isn't enough to get someone over that stage of going from just like a user to an, 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 fl- doing this for you unless they, they have that level of, of passion.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky42:08

       That's an awesome lesson. I hope people are taking that in. You shared this story of Coda and Shau, and actually he was o- he wasn't on the podcast, he wrote a newsletter and he shared all this stuff.

    4. CBClaire Butler42:18

       I read it. Yes, yes, yes.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky42:19

       Yeah. People (laughs) often confuse the two. They assume it's kind of the same thing, but he talked about how when he joined Figma, this happened. Dillon's like, "We need to fix this problem." He's like, "They're not even paying us. Like, who is this? Why do we need 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 he 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.

    6. CBClaire Butler42:43

       And we didn't have very many of them, right? But it's like, yeah, back to what you were saying earlier, like how do you get one person to actually use it? And so we very much cared that that one person stuck with it (laughs) and didn't bounce.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky42:53

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14. 44:01 – 49:06

    How Figma used Twitter as its primary channel in the early days

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky44:01

       So coming back to this 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. What come next?

    2. CBClaire Butler44:20

       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 gonna necessarily use you right away, right? And so it might take time. And then also, when you do get a couple people who start to use your product, they're gonna also start wondering what other people think about your product. And when you're at first, you, you're the first only marketing hire, and this is what something marketers ask me a lot, um, when they're like the, the only marketer in an organization is like, "How do you focus and prioritize? 'Cause 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, this early phase in thinking about ICs is, how do you get to them and where can you go where they already are as opposed to making them come to you? Because I'm a firm believer, I think now we have spaces where people can come to us, but in the early days especially, like, they're not gonna (laughs) come to your space. Like, they don't know you. They don't care about you. They don't wanna, like, go to your c- 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 really had nothing to do with us specifically. Like, the design community existed on Twitter way before we did, and that's something that they just did on their own and that grew over time. They had this large network on Twitter of influencers, and that's also how people learned about things. Also, like pe- you know, design's changing all the time, and so people would share best practices, things that they were doing, resources, and that just became kind of a home for designers. So we really went all in on Twitter. That really became a key, uh, 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, (laughs) if you don't know that about him, or a scrappy engineer who can figure things out, and he had this idea and he built this tool or this scr- this scraper where he identified a couple influencers in the design community, like people he thought were, like, people he wanted to learn from and t- 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 and made this massive node graph of these pockets of different topics of design. And when you looked at it, you'd see a kind of cluster, right? So you'd have the cluster of, like, iconographers, graphic designers, product managers, and you'd see them all there, and you'd see who the influencers were in those areas. And what we did is we found who were most influential to start, and that was another source back to, like, using whatever you can to get people to try your product. That's how we asked for feedback in the early days, too. Just DM'd them. We were like, "Hey, Rogie, like, we'd love feedback, your feedback on Figma," and that was one of the ways we got to people. But it's also people who we followed, people who we tried to build this connection with on Twitter, um, in the early days, and that's also where we pushed out that technical content that I was talking about. And then we tried to just, like, drive and spur conversation about these things. First, it was our launches, but then later, it was this technical content or whatever it was that we were producing so that we could go to people instead of making them come to us just, like, in their feed, and that became super important to us. We'd also interact with people, right? So Dylan has a huge presence and especially in the early days and now even has a huge presence talking to users. We all did show, too, like, our engineering team. And so it wasn't just the brand handle. It was the people, and I think that that's really important to, like, put a personal face behind things and connect with people, answer questions for people live there. And over time, we just built this very engaged group of people on Twitter with Figma, and that's still a huge place for us where the design community lives and where we get a lot from our users, too. And I think the focus on that, and I think why it's so important is it allows people to passively follow you over time without having to invest in you, in the tool, you know? Um, so it was our way, especially because we knew it would take a while to build the product and get to a place where people would switch full-time for them to follow along with us and build that confidence with us over time and to come, keep coming back to the tool.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky48:23

       That Twitter graph story is so legendary. I think Dylan even shared the code online. I'm gonna try to find that tweet.

    4. CBClaire Butler48:30

       Yeah. It's so good. We still use it. Like, we used it again when we were launching another product 'cause, like, we were like, "Oh, can we go pull that Twitter graph for, like, another audience?"... I don't know if we ended up using it, how much we ended up using it. But I definitely looked at it and I was like, "Oh, this is so interesting to see for like developers," or whatever it was that we were looking at.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky48:46

       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.

    6. CBClaire Butler48:54

       Oh no, we never hard sold the product. (laughs) Like it was always about feedback. And I think that that's so key to all of this is, is all about feedback.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky49:02

       Awesome. There's so many lessons here. There's a fourth bullet

15. 49:06 – 49:52

    Transparency and authenticity

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky49:06

       I think around building relationships with users.

    2. CBClaire Butler49:08

       Oh, just transparency and authenticity. So I think that that really comes in too when you get to the scale part. Like 'cause I'm talking about early days, being transparent with your users and a lot of that does come down to the stuff we talked about too about downtime, about what that looks like. And we just did that naturally with people one-on-one in those early days. But I think where it gets harder and we stuck with it because it's like in our DNA and how we act is when you get to scale, right? And you have to like still do that stuff with now a lot of people who care and who do these things with you. But, um, I think it's just so important, uh, that you are honest and also that you don't hide behind the brand, right? That you're, you're human and authentic and transparent with people and you come with examples. I think the, the better examples are probably at scale than even in the early days because that's when it gets harder to

16. 49:52 – 52:09

    GTM tactics at scale

    1. CBClaire Butler49:52

       do that.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky49:52

       So let's chat about that just so... This is about like getting started.

    3. CBClaire Butler49:56

       Yeah.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky49:57

       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?

    5. CBClaire Butler50:02

       You totally still do it, right? Um, I think that that's, that's just so important that that's how it stays, right? (laughs) 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, who love you. But today that's still how Figma spreads the most, right?

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky50:18

       Mm-hmm.

    7. CBClaire Butler50:18

       We're going into new markets, we're going into new places, we're launching a new tool. And that becomes so important to how, how we still drive adoption. And so some of those things, the tactics look a little bit different, but the themes are still the same and what that looks like at scale. A couple just examples of that are those advocates, right? That's I think a- a- a huge one. When I was a marketer that advocate was just my partner. Like he gut checked everything that I did. He'd be like, "No, that's too thirsty," or you know, like, "You're using a fluff word again." Like (laughs) you know what I mean? Also, he was, he was how, how we pitched the company. He was the people we talked to, we'd go to lunch at Etsy or, or whatever and just get feedback on things. And that function has really grown with Figma. So now that's a whole team at Figma. It's a, it's a, it's a large team and it's scaled with us with every product that we launch. So now we have developer advocates, FigJam 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, the Japan... Now, we have two of them, (laughs) the Japan designer advocate, right? Because it's just so core to how we do things. Um, and then, and we, we've scaled that. So I think on the, the credibility side, like I, I think that those, those advocates and scaling those advocates are like the magic dust that I always call them the magic dust, that like make sure that we are able to build those relationships and stay authentic throughout everything we do.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky51:40

       And these advocates, again, they're just... Like their background is designer and then they end up being an advocate designer?

    9. CBClaire Butler51:45

       Or it's now developer, FigJam person. But they're pass- they're passionate. The, their profile is they're passionate users who oftentimes they find us more than we find them, right? You couldn't just like post this job online and go source for it. It's like these people kind of emerge from the community and then they, they love it so much and they know the product so well, they're technical experts. But yes, they were for the designer ones, they were all previously

17. 52:09 – 54:16

    “Little big updates” at Figma

    1. CBClaire Butler52:09

       product designers.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky52:10

       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?

    3. CBClaire Butler52:18

       I think there's two examples. The one is building with users 'cause 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 then that's always a tension in, with any company as you're looking at a roadmap. One of the ways that we saw like done that and still continue to like focus on things that people care about that's so related to the craft and quality is through, um, we do quality weeks with engineering. And then we decided a couple years ago we had this idea where we were like, "Oh, what if we package all of those quality updates up into one thing and launch them together?" And we could even show like the tweet or the, you know, forum request that spurred us to do this. And that was where the idea of Little Big Updates came, which is a launch that we do every year at Figma. They come from these quality weeks that engineering does where the engineers can just go and like look at Twitter, talk to our support team, get all these small things that annoy people to fix them and they just fix them all and they get so many done. And then we launch them all together and, and that's so... Like one of our most popular launches that we always, that we do because people are like, "Yes, I care about this. This improves my quality of life every single day." Back to that discussion of like two clicks versus one click and things like that. They're that small, but we still do it. And I, I love that Little Big Updates when I think Airbnb did something like that too with the 100, 100 updates thing on their website.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky53:49

       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.

    5. CBClaire Butler53:58

       That, 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 'em, right? Like so they're like, "Oh yep, this tweet, I wanna fix this bug."

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky54:07

       That's got to be so satisfying.

    7. CBClaire Butler54:08

       Yeah, exactly. And like when in the marketing event we'll pull, we'll pull examples like, oh yeah, that's the one that, that you, that, that person who said that. So

18. 54:16 – 57:10

    Figma’s acquisition, and why it was one of the hardest days of Claire’s career

    1. CBClaire Butler54:16

       that one's big. And then the transparency side. You know, I think where this gets hard at scale is, yeah, all of a sudden you have a lot of people who care about your products. And I think it's really easy as a brand because you are a brand at this point as you're getting bigger to be like, "Oh, I can hide behind my handle or my Fig- my, my, you know, the Figma handle," or, "Do I really have to say something about this?" Right? And so just two examples of things like that where you just, you know, we've chosen to be transparent when we didn't have to be or like...... you know, you might not are downtime. Downtime is, is always a big deal and I remember there was this specific incidence, 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 (laughs) ... The double-edged sort of t- sort of Twitter is like you build this strong communication channel with your 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 post-mortem and we always do that. If something happens or something goes wrong, we're like, "Yeah, that was bad. Here's what happened and here's the technical reason and here's how we fixed it." And then we, 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, 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 day at Figma 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... 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. Raggi on our team, he... I remember I was talking to him about it and he was like, "We've got to talk to our users. Like, we just have to talk to them directly. We have to show we're the same company. We just have to, like, not hide behind the brand." And, uh, 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 held a Twitter space the next day with Dylan and Sho, Raggi 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, (laughs) you still have to just be transparent. And I think that that's when the tide started to turn of people giving us a chance to, like, prove that everything would be great, even when it's, like, the highest stakes and the hardest thing of still listening to people, maintaining that connection and not hiding behind the brand.

19. 57:10 – 58:06

    Figma’s core values

    1. CBClaire Butler57:10

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky57:10

       Feels like tr- like transparency is core to the values of Figma. Is that-

    3. CBClaire Butler57:15

       Yes.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky57:15

       Have you codified your values and is that one of them and is there anything extra there?

    5. CBClaire Butler57:19

       Interesting. We have codified our values. It isn't explicitly listed out, which is interesting. But esp- I think of it as our value, especially with our users, right? We think about our values a lot as have fun with it, build a community, uh, love your craft and all of those definitely come through play, but maybe this should be one 'cause I, 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.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky57:43

       And also just sh- we mentioned Sho a couple times, but on Twitter he is always asking people, "What do you need in an editor? Here's what's going great."

    7. CBClaire Butler57:49

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

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky57:52

       Mm-hmm.

    9. CBClaire Butler57:52

       Is, uh, is talking to people directly and, and, and Chris will come on when people have bugs and just respond to them. Like, he's our CTO. Like, people are just actively on there listening to people fi- fixing bugs, responding.

20. 58:06 – 1:00:21

    The Config conference

    1. CBClaire Butler58:06

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky58:06

       I want to shift to kind of the second step of the go-to-market motion. But before I do that, I have a couple things I wanted to touch on briefly. One is you 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 was just like, "Oh my God, Config is the best thing. So many talks and so many people."

    3. CBClaire Butler58:34

       Config is such a good example. I remember... I can happily talk about Config. The way that we do Config, I think... I'd never run a conference before. Maybe that's probably part of it. And I, I, I brought somebody on who had, but she and I were both sitting together and being like, "Okay, like, so yeah. We've, we're doing a conference. Like, how do we get the content for this (laughs) conference? Like, what do we do?" And we didn't know and so we just decided, "Oh, like, so much of what we do is, like, listen to our users. Let's put out this call for proposals and see what they want to talk about." And so that's how we got and get a lot of our content for, for the conference. And a lot of it comes back to what I was talking about earlier, which is very technical, deep content that targets individual contributors who are the practi- practitioners of a 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 and 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.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky59:58

       Yeah. It's kind of a lot like this podcast and my newsletter. It's like, how to actually do stuff, not just a bunch of big ideas.

    5. CBClaire Butler1:00:03

       Ooh. Yeah. No, no fluff.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:05

       I remember seeing a tweet about it where someone filmed being inside of it and they were like, "It's like a, it's like a rock concert. It's not a conference."

    7. CBClaire Butler1:00:10

       (laughs) Oh, that too. (laughs) We also just have fun. (laughs) That's another big part of it as well. Uh, yeah.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:15

       It's clear.

    9. CBClaire Butler1:00:15

       We, like... I remember literally saying, like, "How can I make this more fun?" (laughs) So that was a big part of it.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:19

        Sounds like another value.

    11. CBClaire Butler1:00:20

        Yes.

21. 1:00:21 – 1:02:09

    Spreading your product within the organization

    1. CBClaire Butler1:00:21

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:21

       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?

    3. CBClaire Butler1:00:32

       Yep. Yep.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:32

       Cool. All right. How do you do that?

    5. CBClaire Butler1:00:34

       All right. So again, I've got four things here and I'll list 'em out and then we can go through 'em. Um, the first is, like, make it easy to try the tool and to share it without a lot of gates, right? So that you can do this. The second is those DAs, I want to talk about how those DAs work in our sales process because-

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:50

       Oh, designer advocate.

    7. CBClaire Butler1:00:51

       Des- yeah, sorry. That's our acronym for them, designer advocates, 'cause they are 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 the design systems, the thing that, like was the biggest blocker to somebody (laughs) using Figma and turning it into, like your biggest reason to adopt. And then the last one was much more, uh, 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 but different ideas when you look at that in the early days versus like what we do today with it with scale.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:30

       Awesome. Let's get into it.

    9. CBClaire Butler1:01:32

       All right, cool. So the first one is making it, the product easy to try and share. So we talked about this a little bit, but if you go to figma.com today, it's very easy to sign up for a free account, right? I have a free account (laughs) myself on my personal side for, uh, my fa- for m- designing my house, (laughs) which is the other thing I used it before. But you just go and you can, and you can try the tool. And I think that's so important for us to allow someone to use it over time for a long time until they have confidence enough to be able to want to spread it within their organizations. But then it's also pretty easy to create a free team and share stuff with your organization, right?

22. 1:02:09 – 1:07:35

    The pricing tiers at Figma

    1. CBClaire Butler1:02:09

       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, and 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 styles but only collaborate with two or three people. Um, and that was, like the starter team, and you wanted to add more people to collaborate with and then, you know, you'd hit the, the k- 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

    2. NANarrator1:02:52

       Yeah.

    3. CBClaire Butler1:02:52

       ... the place where you can see it in the metrics very clearly, right? Where it was like, "Oh, this is really easy for people now to share before they have to start paying." This is huge, right? And so then you get people to start using it for free with their teams, and the teams gain confidence in it before then they all have to start uploading it to, like their procurement team or whoever it is to start paying for it. So, not introducing payment too fast, right? And buil- like giving people that time to build that advocacy and to try it out with their teams and with people before they have to pay, I think, is huge there.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:24

       That's such a good and important topic that I wanna pull a thread on a little bit. So, what you discovered there is, you don't wanna get in the way of the growth engine of the product. If it's gonna grow through people spreading it, you don't wanna cut it off at three. That seems like a monumental decision (laughs) that changed everything. Any sense of just, like how you came about to realizing that, or was it just, like obvious, "Okay. Of course, we need to change this"?

    5. CBClaire Butler1:03:45

       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, too, and we wanted to, like shut that down. So it was, like a bigger decision on just change management, but I think we a- we intuitively knew it, and it was much more about, yeah, the change management of how to make that happen.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:13

       Is there anything else you learned about what should be in free and paywalled versus what should be in freemium? Just, like broad thoughts?

    7. CBClaire Butler1:04:21

       Well, I think the other interesting thing is, too, and I, I think I said this, but, like so much of ours is like... So we have a couple tiers. We have a free tier, and then we have a pro tier, and then we have our org tier. And the free tier, you can just... Is free tier includes this, like free starter team. And so you can just do that, go to the figma.com and go Do That. Pro is all enter credit card, and then org is you talk to sales, org and enterprise, you talk to sales. And so, I think the other key thing here is, like we get a lot of upsells to org from pro, right? And so, it's not, like we, it's also a, a thought of, like what do you put in org versus pro, right? And so that's, like the other decision because pro is also relatively inexpensive, so that, that grows a lot too really quickly, and it's still very important to us. But still, most of our, like marketing qualified leads that are 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 wanna sell on?" And it has... To go from free to pro, it has to be pretty natural 'cause 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 org or enterprise, it's more about the organization and, like the scale, and that's where that design systems conversation comes in that we could talk about. But that was the thing that we really indexed on for org and enterprise of, like why you would wanna upgrade from pro to org. So it's what it... It's, like it is like this multi (laughs) two-step process, but it's also nice because, you know, you can, like increase your investment in the process, in the product as you're building your own confidence in the tool.

Episode duration: 1:31:25