The 5 phases of Figma’s community-led growth — Claire Butler

 Well, thank you so much for, uh, joining us.

 So I thought maybe we could start by going all the way back to the early days of Figma when you first joined and maybe to contextualize it a little bit, you could talk about like, what was the state of the company product, uh, when you joined and then use that as a jumping off point,

So when I joined the company, the company was still in stealth. So the team had been building for about two or three years before I joined. And I was the first person who was thinking about anything outside of building the product besides Dylan, of course. Uh, so I was the first business person who was thinking about marketing and, and how we would launch.

 And that was about six months before the company actually launched out of stealth.

 So when you go back to that point in time and you kind of postmortem, what are the things that you think you got really right, that helped supercharge some of the early success that Figma.

 Yeah. You know, I think that we had a couple kind of key principles on how we thought to ourselves, like, okay, how are we going to actually take Figma to the market that were really intentional? And that really laid a foundation for us of how we would eventually lead to a massive organic community led growth engine.

And I think like some of those principles in my mind were. We, we did have the idea that we would really go after a bottoms up, go to market strategy. We were inspired by companies like slack, who had done this, where you have these individuals who bring Figman to their organization and that that's how they, they go to market.

And that was something that we, we really stro for and wanted to set up. I think another principle that we really thought about was community, and that's really a theme that you'll see come up a lot. Um, in our conversation we knew designers and designers. Are used to community, the design community existed before Figma.

And so because of that, we knew how important it was for us to really understand the community and how important that community was going to be to our success with this audience. And then I think the third thing there, um, is authenticity whenever you're talking to, uh, any audience, but especially a group like designers, you know, they kind of hate traditional SaaS marketing.

So they don't want fluff. They don't wanna be marketed to or sold to. Um, they want authenticity in how, how you're talking about the product and how you show up. And authenticity was really key to how we thought about, you know, how we would go to market. And, and that really came through in all of the things that we did.

so the way that we saw it was, there are five different phases, um, of community led growth.

So the first one was this idea of planting seeds. So when you have community led growth, um, it's really a companywide mindset and it has to start with a CEO and that's, that starts when a company's first starting to talk to users. So in this phase, um, of community led growth, you're really thinking about, okay, how can I talk to users, ask them for feedback and check in with them over time as we're building and making progress.

No one use it is using the tool yet, but it's all about planting seeds and bringing people into the journey with you. And then that transitions into phase two, which is all about building credibility. And this is when you're ready to bring your product into the world. It's when you are able to talk to a group of people who are actually ready to start using your product, even if the product's not quite ready yet.

Um, and this is especially important when your target audience is technical or has domain expertise, it's about making them, see that you get them and that you're innovating in this space in a way that they should follow you in what you're saying, even if the product isn't ready yet to use. And then a third phase is this idea of like, okay, you're launched.

How do you get some early evangelists? This is about getting people over the hump to actually try and use your product. It's flipping these critics into advocates and building up a core, even if really, really small group of power users who just love your tool. And then the fourth phase is this idea of like, okay, how do you take this group of people expand the group of evangelists that you have, and actually start empowering them to do things like monetize.

So this is when you're really introducing the idea of like self-serve revenue. Um, these power users are bringing the tool into their organizations and spreading, uh, the tool to their teams without any sales assistance. And then the last phase is this idea of okay, enterprise and scale. This is when you find these internal champions who love the tool, brought it into their organizations.

As self server is free and you're helping them unblock Orgwide adoption with sales assistance, unblocking things like security, procurement and admins. And I think those five phases would really apply for lots of different places, but that's definitely the five phases we went through with Figma.

 And did you only recognize those phases in retrospect? Or did you plan and think about those proactively.

 Well, as less reflecting back, you know, it's, it's interesting. I just hit my seven year anniversary with Figma and Figma itself is turning 10 in August. And when I look back, there's actually some really clear milestones. So like, okay. Moving from planting to use to building credibility was launching out of steal, um, from building credibility to early evangelism.

Um, that one wasn't as clear. And honestly, that can take a really long time. I like kind of jet packed that one over like three, you know, potentially like three years, cuz that's where you have this tipping point of where you're trying to get people to, to really use the tool. So that one just eventually we felt it, but then going from early evangelism to empowering evangelists to, you know, actually bring it to the organizations was when we introduced self-serve pricing.

 And then moving into enterprise was when he brought on a sales team and introduced enterprise pricing. So it actually kind of my, like when I look back, it really did line up with company wide milestones.when you think about that first 12 months of joining and focusing on whatever the community strategy was, can you talk about that in a, in a lot more detail and maybe given how bastardized the term community has gotten in kind of a business context, what did it mean pragmatically and why do you think it was such a big input into the early sort of success around distribution?

 You know, I agree with you. I, I personally hate the word community. It's, it's so fuzzy. There's no standard definition and you know, who knows what it actually means, but, uh, if I think about my definition of community and how I thought about it, it's not just like a set of programs or slack group.

 I think it's an approach to how you build, go to market that really orients around this idea of, okay, you're building a passionate user base, who's gonna spread, uh, your product option for you. And so what that looked like specifically for Figma, uh, was a couple things. You know, one, you gotta get to know the community, you really have to understand them.

You have to understand how they think, what they wanna hear. Then you have to build relationships in that community. And then you have to build trust, um, with people in that community, doing things that don't scale. So in south, you know, You have no community yourself, right? You don't exist in the world yet.

So what that looks like tactically, when you're first getting started is yeah. Building individual relationships with people in the community. And when we did that, um, you know, we're not public, so it's all through connections and, and honestly hustle. So the first people that we talked to and when I was starting at Figma, my first six, I spent most of my time going around with Dylan, talking about Figma to designer.

So that was pretty much the core of my job. And we asked those people for feedback and, and we found those people, it started with some, some VC intros. And then we'd ask those people who we met to introduce us to other people, friends of those people we talked to. Um, but then it'd also be, it was really funny, you know, people in Dylan's Uber X or I think about the first person we talked to at Microsoft.

And that was actually my friend's ex-boyfriend who I had Facebook messaged, just trying to get a beating with them. And it was really whoever we could find to talk to within the design community to talk to as many people as we could and talking to people is great. And we, I wouldn't say we were pitching Figma, we were asking for feedback.

Um, and I think that's key and, and I'd love to talk more about that. Um, but in that so much of what we're doing in the early days, They weren't ready to switch over and use Figma full-time at this point. But what we were doing is we were building trust with these groups of people, by getting their feedback, by listening to them, by showing them we understood them.

And over time, you know, some of these people did actually start using our product full-time and I'd love to give, um, an example of that. And in how you, you do that by building trust, you know, our first team that used Figma. I remember, we went down to Palo Alto and talked to, um, a group Coda. So I'm sure, you know, the product Coda.

And we were, we were kind of showing them Figma, asking for feedback, seeing, you know, what they thought of the tool. And I remember really specifically the, the designer, Jeremy was like, you know, we can use this, we can adopt this full time. And we were like, yes, finally, somebody's gonna use their product full time with their team.

We got one. Um, and we were so excited and Dylan and I were driving back from Palo Alto up to San Francisco and we get this text from Jeremy being like, oh shoot, it doesn't work. Bummer. We were so excited about this. And we were like, oh no, we finally got someone to use the product full time and it's not working.

We went back to the office and tried to debug everything of what could be going wrong. And it turns out it wasn't even anything on Fig's end, but it was something. Their their laptop, but our CTO, Evan immediately drove down back to Palo Alto and debugged the person's laptop to make sure that Figma is gonna work for them.

And I just share that as an example of, you know, you've gotta do stuff to really build trust with a very small group of people. And we're not talking volume at this point. It's really, you know, one to one, um, trying to get just a few people to really feel trust with you.

 One thing you just mentioned is so many of these dozens or hundreds of conversations you had over the first year or two. And so I'm curious if I was watching you conduct those conversations. Can you kind of break them apart into how you ran them and maybe why you did it that way?

 so it's interesting because you know, the, the product and the tool of Figma, I guess, just to think about it. Okay. So you're a designer and if you're a designer using a design tool, you're in the design tool, eight hours a day using it. The the whole time. And so you have a really high bar in order to use a tool full time.

 And we knew even at that time, that for a lot of people, Figma might not be ready for total adoption at a team level. But what we were really trying to do was hear what people thought, get them excited. And I keep on saying, listen to their feedback. So the way that we would run these meeting, Um, a lot of the times, I wouldn't say we did, like one of your, you know, traditional like discovery and then demo, we, we jumped straight into demo.

And I think a lot of that too, is because designers, um, really wanna try stuff. And with these early adopters that we were talking to, they wanted to understand how the tool worked and what it was. So we would, we would demo the tool and we would show it to them. Um, and then we'd go into things like their feedback and what they thought about it and things that, um, you know, they would wanna see from the tool and, and that became really important.

But, um, I think the, the thing that I always looked for was when we demoed how excited. Was the person about Figma because we were doing something different, like a design tool had never been built on the internet at that point, it was always an offline desktop app. And so it was really important to me to see, you know, were they excited about this?

Was this something they were interested in technically, and also from a product standpoint. And we had, we really rethought some of the primitives of how a design tool might work. So seeing their reactions to the things that we were building was really important to me to kind of understand, you know, how excited they were and where we might be falling short.

 going back to the comment that you made against doing kind of classic customer discovery, can you talk a little bit more about why you went down that path? And I assume it's kind of balancing this selling and getting early customers, not necessarily just needing product feedback.

 Yeah, no, that's a good point. Um, I think a big piece of that actually comes down to. Kind of how I see the point of feedback. And of course, feedback is so important to product development and you have probably have lots of resources all over that you could look for on how to conduct interviews in a way to get the best customer feedback and then prioritize them against each other.

And that's all so important, um, especially in product management, but I think another aspect of getting feedback that is equally important at this phase that it kind of talked about and alluded to earlier is this idea of using feedback to build trust and. What we did, especially in the way that we conducted these, these interviews was okay.

Like, how do we basically open ourselves up to be vulnerable with the people we're talking to and bring these community people along on the journey with us. So we were fostering this culture of transparency on where we were, what we were building and bringing them along. And at this early phase, it's all about planting seeds with people like the product's not ready yet.

Um, they're not gonna use a full time at their job tomorrow. It's about getting them excited, getting them interested and bringing them into, into the fold with you. And so. Getting this from feedback from, from everyone, whether they're skeptics or whether they were excited or not, uh, is so important and has been, really become how Figma still to this day thinks about, you know, building we build with the community.

And we, we really listen to people, but that that's both in product feedback, but also in just sharing how we do things and where we're at. And what I've seen is, is that's really how you, you build trust. And that was equally as important to us at this space.

 What are the other important tenants of community over the first 12 to 18 months. And as you got into launch, other than. Having these high quality conversations and building the sort of one-on-one connectivity between a given designer and, Figma.

 Yeah. So, you know, everything that I was talking about was really in the stealth phase, right. When we were not yet launched, just talking to people. But if you think about the first 12 to 18 months, we go into launch and I think the way that you launch and the way that you approach yourself to the market, um, where the community's all then looking at you is so important.

And there, I think the, the key thing that you're thinking about is, okay, how do you build credibility and build credibility at this point, you can't always do one to one. Um, how do you build credibility with a community? And, you know, I, I think about that and that to me is, is key into setting up the foundation for then both your brand and how you think about, you know, how you'll be interacting with your customers going forward.

And there's lots of ways we thought about building credibility. That was kind of the key next step. After, after we launched.

 Why was that specific idea? So important?

 Yeah. So, um, you know, with designers, like I said, in the earlier designers really don't like SAS marketing. So, uh, it's interesting, you know, you spend so much time, any, any founder or person in marketing who's getting ready to launch or launch anything, spend so much time thinking about things like messaging and positioning.

Uh that's what's on your website, you talk to press about it. Um, that's so important. Uh, but at the same time, you also, for us, you're talking to your end user. And one thing that, that we thought about and we learned was that like, you know, we can spend all this time on messaging positioning, and we totally have to do that.

And, you know, be so intentional and think about every word. But at the end of the day, a designer is not going to spend any time reading our messaging and positioning. They're just gonna go straight into the product and try it out. And so we had to think about, you know, how do we talk to these people in a different way?

So they understand. We're not just, you know, trying to sell MBS, we get them, we are building something that's going to be useful for them. And, you know, we're, we're like them. We're we're designers building for designers.

 And so kind of pulling apart that building credibility. Can you talk about the activities or kind of specific things that you did to build credibility in the eyes of the early users?

 I would say one that I'd love to talk about that I think was probably the most impactful thing that we did early on to build credibility was content. So. I think, like I said earlier, one of the things I, I learned from talking to all of these designers in my first six months was pretty much no designer wants to talk to a marketer , which is, which is funny.

 But, um, so I realized that I personally, Claire was not going to be the one who was going to build credibility with design early adopters. Um, instead my role was to actually enable other people and to create the space, to have our designers and our engineers and other people be the ones creating credibility.

And one way we did this was really through content. That's a way that we did this in a really scalable way. Um, Figma itself is a really cool product. If you think about it. Um, we challenged a lot of these old arguably broken design primitives around, um, how design works with things like the pen tool or, um, vector networks.

It was technically hard to pull off. So those are the things that we talked about with our designers. We weren't sharing our messaging and positioning with them. We were going deep into the product with these early adopters, um, who were interested in, in Figma and also engineers who were interested in learning how we did it.

So we spent a lot of time creating technical content directly targeted at designers and engineers, talking about very specific things about the product. Um, and I can give a couple of examples of what that looked like. So one. I think our first blog post that we did, uh, was written by one of our designers Johan and it was called grid systems for screen design.

And in this grid systems for screen design article, I remember Johan was so passionate about grids. Uh, he just loved grids and he talked so much about the father of grids, who I, I learned, um, Yos F Mueller Brockman, and how Yos F influenced so many things about how Figma approached grids and personally, you know, as a marketer I'd never heard of, of Yos F Mueller Brockman.

Now, of course I do. Um, but at the time I hadn't and I myself was not gonna be the one to write a manifesto on grids and all of this deep thinking about how grid should work in a design tool. Um, but Johan was, and Johan cared really deeply about this. And so my role in this and what Figma did is we just like opened up space for Johan to really.

You know, go off on how we felt about grids and, and that just was great. And people really resonated with that. Everybody was curious about then how Figma thought about grids and, and what that looked like. And it was that kind of stuff that we did that we did over and over and over again, to build with credibility with the audience.

And we still do that kind of content. People just love understanding why we build the way we do and that just builds so much credibility and how we think about building and the principles that go into why we do the things we do.

 well, I guess I'm curious cuz Like when we think about, um, like the godfather of content marketing, I'd argue is HubSpot, right from you know, 2005, seven And so much of their content is like how to content.

 But it sounds like the content and the angle that, that you all came up with was, was maybe a bit more esoteric or more kind of geeky design content and more, maybe interesting and less, um, I'm gonna read this and change the way that I work kind of a thing. And I'm curious where that kinda came from and why you landed on that.

 Yeah, no, that's a great question. And I think it all also connects to the stage of the company. So, yeah, HubSpot's great. At scale. At this point in the company, we were not thinking about scale. Our main goal was to build credibility with a group of designers, especially design influencers. Um, Who, you know, we're thinking about how they think about Figma.

And I also think it's interesting, you know, just to understand designers, like it might not be true of every audience, but designers and I would argue a lot of different technical audiences really did not want that how-to content. We also, weren't looking for beginners at all. We were talking to very advanced designers and technical people who knew how to design, you know, a lot of them had been trained in design or had been designing for many years and we that's who our early adopters were.

So we were talking directly to our early adopters and making them see that we understood them. And like I said earlier, too, at this phase, the, the tool's not advanced enough for them to adopt it full time E every day. So I'd love to talk about our distribution and how we leaned into Twitter. Um, but we had to just build relationships with them over time, because it was gonna take a lot to actually get them to switch over, to do something, their full tool for their full-time job for eight hours every day.

 Yeah, why don't you pick up that thread on, I guess, pun intended or unintended on Twitter.

 when you think about the design community, We were lucky, like I mentioned, the design community already existed before we joined it or before Figma launched. And so we learned there's very specific watering holes in places where that design community existed and the biggest one where that was was Twitter.

 Um, so it designers joke about it, but they call it design Twitter. Um, and that's this niche community of designers that, that really love on Twitter and they talk about design. Um, they, they live and breathe it. And I think that's also inherent to designers. You know, I think about myself and I'm not sure, especially like as a, a person doing marketing, how much I would talk about marketing, but for designers being a designer is inherent to who you are.

And so a lot of times there's little separation between your personal life and your professional life, because you just care about design so much. And so Twitter is really the place where, where people lived, um, to talk about these things. And so what that looks like for us, when we thought about, you know, how do we, how do we use that for, for our distribution channel was really thinking about breaking down design Twitter.

So for example, when we were first launching out of stealth, our biggest strategy was thinking. Okay. Like how do we penetrate design Twitter, especially on that day and really have all of design Twitter talking about Figma. And so we got pretty analytical about it. Uh, Dylan specifically built a custom script to really help us break down the different, like nodes within design, Twitter to see like, okay, these are the typographers, these are the iconographer, these are the illustrators, these are the product designers.

And here's how much like influence they wield. And we need to talk to them and we need to understand, you know, what they think about Figma and, you know, let them bring them along the journey with us. And really those are the people back to the journey that we were talking to for the six months, two years prior.

So this wasn't like. Early strategy. We'd already been building relationships with these people, but then on launch day, you know, we really targeted a big influencer list. And just also anybody who we could possibly, you know, who was on Twitter to, to really talk about Figma that day. And so, um, when we launched, you know, we reached out to everybody and it was an all hands on deck effort where, you know, even our designer who went to RISD would cold reach out to John Maeda who was the Dean there to see if he'd learn about Figma and then talk about Figma that day.

and our head of engineering, you know, had worked at medium, so he reached out to Ev Williams and we just took every angle, all hands on deck. And we did own design Twitter that day. And that then continued on, I wouldn't say in the beginning, that meant that it was all positive. It's really funny. I think about a comment.

when we first launched one of the first comments we got back was quote unquote, if this is the future of design, I'm changing careers. so it wasn't all positive, but people were talking about us and From that, then we'd built out this distribution started building a following, and then we really used content to passively stay in touch with these people over time, because like I said, and if you look at Fig's journey, this was not like a, oh, I see Figma, I'm gonna sign up and use this tomorrow.

It was a long time to build enough trust and credibility to be able to switch a full team over to using the tool. So Twitter became our distribution channel to, to, to reengage with this people over time, um, before they were using us.

 Were there other things that you did sort of along this thread of building credibility that are worth exploring at all?

 Um, yeah, I mean, a lot of it, you know, came down to launching features. Um, Like designers, even today we think about this and I'm like, oh, I can tell when we launch a feature, um, if it's something that a design's really gonna care about. Uh, and so often those are small things that a traditional, if I think about traditional marketing lens, I'd be like, this is a small update.

Nobody's gonna care about this, but I can tell you designers care. And that's because you think about you're in a tool eight hours a day, you click something and it takes one extra click to do something, but then you multiply that by the thousands of times you're clicking and it becomes a huge deal. And so I would say another thing that we did, for example, that we still do and still think about so much.

And in our craft of building the tool is these small updates that really impact someone's life. And so we did those and we spent the time thinking about quality of life and thinking about, you know, how something works. Um, and then we would share those out and something that probably wouldn't elevate to the level of a big launch to other people did for us.

Um, and that's just another thing that we did to build credibility.

 What are some of the things that you did in kind of this bucket, either in credibility or, or really, really early community building that that didn't work or that you stopped doing and anything that you learned from those things?

 Yeah. Well, I, I don't know if it's like didn't work, but I'd love to talk about one that kind of had a moment in time and then stopped being useful. And like that one specifically was, um, you know, we did this set of activities that was really about getting people to try the tool. So, so much of the early phase was about building credibility, but then eventually we moved on.

It was like, okay, credibility's great. We've got credibility. Um, but people aren't using the tool yet. We need them to actually use the tool and get in there. And so we did, uh, a set of activities that was really about getting people to use the tool we realized, you know, over time we saw okay, to get pick Figma sticky and getting people in over time.

And again, they actually have to collaborate in the tool that became our biggest feature that was successful. That people then would be like, yes, this is the killer feature of why I would use this. Even though you don't have X, Y, and Z feature comparison to use the tool. Um, but you can collaborate. And that's the magic moment of being in the same file at the same time.

Um, that's so useful. So one example of an activity we did there, um, that was targeted at this was called pixel pong. And so it was this live stream that we would do every Friday, um, where our designer advocate, which is like the second marketing person, I would guess I would say a Figma came in and he brought in, four of his friends, basically, who were design influencers to compete with each other, um, live in Figma in a really fun, lightweight way, um, using the tool.

And then we, we live streamed that, and then people would like vote on the winner on Twitter. And, you know, that was, we don't do that today. Um, I, I wouldn't say it had a ton of, you know, long term relevance, but it was a way to get people to try the tool. And, um, that became, you know, something that was really useful for that moment in time.

But then, you know, didn't last beyond that.

 One of the unique things about Figma. I think relative to a lot of products and SAS tools of the last 10 years is that it's. It's an example of like a complicated, big build, full stack piece of software. Versus I think a majority of, of SAS that's been built over the last 10 years is one that begins with a wedge.

And then they try to build out over time. So it would be like, Hey, I'm gonna help a designer with some handoff problem they have, and then try to build out horizontally as opposed to Figma, which was a long build, slow build, fully featured product. I would think that the way that you think about marketing and bringing those two styles of product to market are, are different.

And I'm curious, are there things we haven't touched on of how you bring to market kind of a full stack, big product build that maybe is a little bit different than most of the SAS that was brought to market over the last 10 years.

 I think that's a, a really good point and speaks to also this phase of the company building. Like I said, I would imagine for, for places where they were looking for a wedge, you really orient in the early days on, okay. How do I get people to adopt this tool? Um, and use it full time. And for. We did we oriented on community, um, as opposed to orienting on full wide team adoption, you know, we didn't introduce the sales team to Figma until four years after we launched out of self.

 We didn't introduce any pricing at all until two years after we launched out of self. And so it was really about trial and getting people to come back again and again and again, um, over time. Because we knew they weren't gonna switch over yet. It definitely took a lot of, um, resilience, I would say, uh, to build that way.

And, uh, it's hard, right? It's really hard to do that. Um, especially when you come up around against things and you can just imagine anyone who thinks about this, like, oh, I can't use FMA yet because I don't have X, Y, Z feature. When you have this, then you symbols, then I'll take it over. But like, oh, actually need components or I need a plug in ecosystem.

Claire Butler, Figma’s first business hire, walks us through the different phases of the company’s community-led growth model — from planting the seeds pre-stealth all the way to org-wide enterprise adoption.

The 5 phases of Figma’s community-led growth

Figma’s first business hire, Claire Butler, shares tactics for building a vibrant community from stealth mode to moving upmarket.

The 5 phases of Figma’s community-led growth — Claire Butler

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The 5 Phases of Figma’s Community-Led Growth