Finding product-market fit twice — Alma’s Harry Ritter on pivots and staying close to customers

[00:00:00] Brett Berson: Well, thank you so much for, uh, joining us.

[00:00:03] Claire Butler: Yeah, of course I'm excited to be here.

[00:00:05] Brett Berson: 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,

[00:00:20] Claire Butler: 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.

[00:00:37] And that was about six months before the company actually launched out of stealth.

[00:00:42] Brett Berson: 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.

[00:00:55] Claire Butler: Yeah. You know, I think that we had a couple kind of key principles on how we [00:01:00] 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.

[00:01:12] 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.

[00:01:29] 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.

[00:01:46] 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, [00:02:00] uh, any audience, but especially a group like designers, you know, they kind of hate traditional SaaS marketing.

[00:02:05] 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.

[00:02:22] Brett Berson: 

[00:02:22] Claire Butler: so the way that we saw it was, there are five different phases, um, of community led growth.

[00:02:27] 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.

[00:02:53] 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 [00:03:00] 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.

[00:03:12] 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.

[00:03:31] 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.

[00:03:58] So this is when you're really [00:04:00] 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.

[00:04:17] 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.

[00:04:32] Brett Berson: And did you only recognize those phases in retrospect? Or did you plan and think about those proactively.

[00:04:41] Claire Butler: 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.

[00:04:59] Um, [00:05:00] 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.

[00:05:24] 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.

[00:05:34] Brett Berson: 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?

[00:05:56] Claire Butler:  You know, I agree with you. I, I personally hate the word community. It's, it's so [00:06:00] 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.

[00:06:11] 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.

[00:06:30] 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.

[00:06:46] 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 [00:07:00] 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.

[00:07:11] 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.

[00:07:33] 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.

[00:07:50] 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. [00:08:00] 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.

[00:08:08] 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.

[00:08:28] 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.

[00:08:45] 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, [00:09:00] we finally got someone to use the product full time and it's not working.

[00:09:03] 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.

[00:09:21] 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.

[00:09:35] Brett Berson: 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?

[00:09:49] Claire Butler:  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 [00:10:00] 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.

[00:10:09] 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.

[00:10:33] 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.

[00:10:58] But, um, I think the, the thing [00:11:00] 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?

[00:11:17] 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.

[00:11:35] Brett Berson:  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.

[00:11:50] Claire Butler: 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 [00:12:00] 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.

[00:12:11] 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.

[00:12:30] 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.

[00:12:50] 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. [00:13:00] 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.

[00:13:13] 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.

[00:13:26] Brett Berson: 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.

[00:13:41] Claire Butler: 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 [00:14:00] you is so important.

[00:14:01] 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.

[00:14:25] And there's lots of ways we thought about building credibility. That was kind of  the key next step. After, after we launched.

[00:14:31] Brett Berson: Why was that specific idea? So important?

[00:14:34] Claire Butler: 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.

[00:14:52] 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 [00:15:00] 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.

[00:15:09] 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?

[00:15:24] 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.

[00:15:38] Brett Berson: 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?

[00:15:47] Claire Butler:  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 [00:16:00] 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.

[00:16:07] 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.

[00:16:26] 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.

[00:16:43] 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.

[00:16:59] [00:17:00] 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.

[00:17:23] 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.

[00:17:45] 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 [00:18:00] 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.

[00:18:06] 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.

[00:18:23] 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.

[00:18:35] Brett Berson:  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.

[00:18:46] Claire Butler: Yeah.

[00:18:47] Brett Berson: 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 [00:19:00] 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.

[00:19:08] Claire Butler: 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.

[00:19:28] 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.

[00:19:53] So we were talking directly to our early adopters and making them see that we understood them. And like I said earlier, [00:20:00] 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.

[00:20:21] Brett Berson: Yeah,  why don't you pick up that thread on,  I guess, pun intended or unintended on Twitter.

[00:20:25] Claire Butler:  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.

[00:20:45] 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 [00:21:00] 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.

[00:21:10] 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.

[00:21:33] 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, [00:22:00] these are the illustrators, these are the product designers.

[00:22:03] 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.

[00:22:18] 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 a all HandsOn deck effort where, you know, even our designer who went to RISD would cold reach out to John MAA  who was the Dean there to see if he'd  learn about Figma and then talk about Figma that day.

[00:22:49] Um, and our head of engineering, you know, had worked at medium, so reached out to F Williams and we just took every angle, all hands on deck. And we did own design Twitter that day. [00:23:00] And that then continued on, um, I wouldn't say in the beginning, that meant that it was all positive. It's really funny. I think about a comment.

[00:23:07] Uh, 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. Um, so it wasn't all positive, but uh, 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.

[00:23:32] 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.

[00:23:47] Brett Berson: Were there other things that you did sort of along this thread of building credibility that are worth exploring at all?

[00:23:54] Claire Butler: Um, yeah, I mean, a lot of it, you know, came down to launching features. Um, Like [00:24:00] 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.

[00:24:15] 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.

[00:24:34] 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.

[00:24:54] Um, and that's just another thing that we did to build credibility.

[00:24:57] Brett Berson: What are some of the things that you did in kind of [00:25:00] 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?

[00:25:11] Claire Butler: 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.

[00:25:33] 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.

[00:25:53] And again, they actually have to collaborate in the tool that became our biggest feature that was successful. That [00:26:00] 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.

[00:26:13] 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.

[00:26:41] 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.

[00:26:59] But [00:27:00] then, you know,  didn't last  beyond that.

[00:27:04] Brett Berson: 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.

[00:27:26] 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.

[00:27:56] And I'm curious, are there things we haven't touched on  of how you [00:28:00] 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.

[00:28:09] Claire Butler:  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.

[00:28:38] 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.

[00:28:57] And, uh, it's hard, right? It's really hard [00:29:00] 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.

[00:29:17] And there's all these reasons why someone can't use the tool. And so that's why things like Twitter, things like credibility, all these reasons to get people to think about you into come back again. And again, became so important because yeah, we knew they weren't adopting it full time. I would say it also, you know, Figma is free, um, for the first two years.

[00:29:37] And even today we have a massive free user base and. People, if they weren't ready to use it yet for their, um, full teams, you could use Figma for a side project. You could pop in, you could test it out. Designers love doing side projects. So that became important for us too, you know, can you do this for fun or can you do this for something that isn't as high stakes as your job, um, to come back [00:30:00] into the tool repeatedly over time?

[00:30:02] Um, when yeah, you weren't ready to necessarily switch over full time yet.

[00:30:06] Brett Berson: Are there, is there a specific way that you messaged to those early users? Cuz  I would think one of the challenges is you have someone, you demo the product, they try it and they're like, Hey,  I'm not able to sort of switch over now and then you kind of lose them for years because anytime they, they hear about Figma, they're like, oh, I tried it.

[00:30:24] It's not any good. Um, and so was, was there a way that in, in the first year or two that you were framing it or a narrative. That you shared that increase the chances that somebody's gonna keep coming back versus try and never come back again.

[00:30:39] Claire Butler:  I would say that's always the case. People would come in, it wasn't necessarily ready yet. And then we had to reengage them later. Um, I think that key to how we did that was through a. Position that we had a Figma called the designer advocates. And so, yes, we had Twitter and that was a key way.

[00:30:56] We were talking to people, but we did a ton. We continued this, [00:31:00] a huge amount of one to one outreach to people. And so the designer advocate at Figma is a person over time. Like at first, in your first phase of community building, you don't have any community, you don't have any fans or anything, but we did eventually build a group of early evangelists.

[00:31:16] And, um, in those early evangelists, we found one person who loved Figma so much and just believed in the future of it so much that they came, they came to work for us. Um, and we brought them in and they were somebody who had all the design background, all of the design expertise, but just like loved the tool.

[00:31:32] And that person really became the face of talking about Figma to, to the community. And. So much of this too, when he would have these conversations or he would talk to people, you know, a they're his friends. And so it was easier for him to have reasons to go back to them over time if things weren't ready.

[00:31:49] But I think what we did, um, also was getting people bought into the idea or the long term vision of a couple big pain points, um, that they were facing. You can [00:32:00] imagine, um, you know, it, it seems so obvious. When you think about it, but like design's the only tool that's you have to, so you had to share versions of things.

[00:32:08] Um, you'd, you'd save files and you wouldn't know which file was updated and which file was broken. Um, so with an early adopter audience, we did get people bought into the vision. Um, in, like I said, bringing them along in the journey with us. So ne not necessarily even pitching it as, Hey, can you use this tool full time tomorrow?

[00:32:26] There's no hard sales pitch here. Right? Um, one of the things this first designer advocate, his name was Brent taught me really early. That really stuck with me was, you know, don't be thirsty. And I know that that's, uh, a funny phrase, but, um, it, wasn't never about the hard sell. Uh, we were getting people to try it and then try it again.

[00:32:43] And so much of this lightweight fun stuff became important because yeah, we weren't ready for the hard sell at this point. Um, and so we never did it.

[00:32:51] Brett Berson: Maybe we could spend a minute or two talking about that  designer advocate role and maybe,  when you chose to hire the person. 

[00:32:59] Brett Berson: Where did you [00:33:00] find,  Brin?

[00:33:01] Claire Butler: Yeah, that's a, that's a fun story. Um, on Twitter one day, we were just like, we should get some of our users at this point, you know, maybe we're six months  post-launch. And like, we should get some of our users together who like Figma and just like get them to talk. And so I think we tweeted something out being like, Hey, anybody wanna come over to the, the office for pizza?

[00:33:19] like very lightweight. Um, and so a couple people did, I think we had 10 people come over, um, and have lunch with us. And, and Brent was one of those people and he was just geeking out in about Figma and just how cool it was and all the things we could do with it. Um, and that, that's how we found him. He, he came to us and I would actually say as the designer advocate, uh, role expanded and today, you know, that team's  is growing globally and is, is a pretty large team within our marketing organization.

[00:33:45] Um, usually they come to us. Um, it's not something that we like go, you know, looking for, uh, those people generally come to us.

[00:33:53] Brett Berson: Uh, before we kind of shift slightly, is there anything else?  if someone listening is thinking about [00:34:00] hiring their first advocate, Anything else they should be thinking about that in the recruiting process, in what to look for, that'll make somebody really successful in that.

[00:34:10] Claire Butler: Yeah, I think the biggest thing,  is passion, um, passion for what you have currently and passion for the space. Um, that, that to me is the most important thing. One thing that we found that is a challenge in this role is that, and I would imagine be a challenge in, in any role where someone's making this kind of transition is, you know, these people are great designers, uh, and they're switching by doing this.

[00:34:33] They're switching their jobs from spending all of their time, designing to talking to people about design. They still design things, but they have to make that switch. And so you've gotta find someone who also is excited about that and who wants to, to make that switch and kind of help people and is motivated by that instead of being motivated by actually, you know, being in the tool every day.

[00:34:54] And so I think that that's a, a key kind of thing that we think about a lot. Um, when we're hiring designer advocates,[00:35:00] 

[00:35:00] Brett Berson: zooming out slightly just from sort of the marketing and go to market function in the early days. was there anything that you,  or Dylan or someone else did in the company that allowed it to sustain energy and, um, rate of velocity when it was such a long build to kind of get to that true inflection where people are, you know, the classic kind of pulling it out of your hands.

[00:35:27] Everybody's telling everyone it, it took years to get to that point. And I think that there's something tricky about motivating a team as you're kind of wandering and working towards this kind of inflection point. That may be literally four or five years later.

[00:35:46] Claire Butler:  you know, when I joined, we were six months out of, of going  out of stealth. And I know that part of the reason why we chose to go out of stealth was team motivation because you're right. If you're just tinkering and [00:36:00] building. Without really that much user feedback all day, every day, it is hard to stay motivated, um, for such a long build.

[00:36:06] And they'd been building for three years before I got there. Um, and so one of the things that became really important was we, we wanted to get out stealth. We wanted to shift from building behind closed doors, kind of privately to being in a point where. This was in the hands of the community so that we could be getting more real time feedback for people, even though we knew the product wasn't ready.

[00:36:29] Like for example, we knew like, I, it was very obvious to me that the key thing, the go most important feature of Figma was multiplayer the ability to co-edit a file at the same time, we could build a tool and it could be great, but the thing that was most important, that was it. That was the key to our whole value proposition.

[00:36:45] And that was not ready when we launched. We did, we launched without multiplayer. We knew that that was,  missing, but it became more important to get out in public, um, than to be behind closed doors. And I think that does take a, a [00:37:00] shift of thinking from thinking like, oh, this has to be perfect before I launch it to, okay, we're not ready yet, but we're gonna launch it anyway.

[00:37:08] And we're gonna build it with our community. Um, cuz that became so much more motivating once we were out in the open, as opposed to trying to do it, buying closed doors.

[00:37:17] Brett Berson: Did you arbitrarily pick a date or how did you actually decide after multiple years  of building and stealth that it was time to share more about it?

[00:37:25] Claire Butler:  I think there was a large desire generally  speaking to be like, okay, yes, we want to, we want to go out of stealth. Um, but the two things that we thought about to kind of quote, unquote, be ready to come out of stealth were first of all, um, I didn't want  for us to launch and for people to just be like, not have anything to say about the tool to just like there to be crickets.

[00:37:46] And so one of the things I really looked at was in these, these meetings that we did, um, with all of these designers, like how excited were they when, when they saw the tool. Um, and I remember there were a series of meetings where over [00:38:00] time people would literally push Dylan out of the way, um, from the keyboard that he was doing during the demo to test it out themselves, because they didn't really believe that it was working.

[00:38:09] And to me, when I saw that, I was like, okay, People are like, think this is cool and people wanna try this, even though, you know, it's not ready yet. Um, so that was one for me where I was like, okay, this is gonna be interesting to people. And then I think the second big thing, and this was a push from our board was okay.

[00:38:26] You know? Yes. I know it's so hard to get people to use this full time. Can you get anyone like, literally, can you get five teams, one team to use this full time? And so, so much of what we were doing was trying to see, like, could we do that? Um, and eventually, yeah, we did. Um, like I mentioned, Coda was the first one.

[00:38:43] Um, and we worked really one on one to get just a handful of others. Um, and, but once we saw that we gained enough kind of confidence that it was ready to go out in the public.

[00:38:54] Brett Berson: Do you think that, that this sort of call it stealth strategy or, or whatever term [00:39:00] you want to use for how you approached it all in hindsight? Do you think it was right? Or  if it wasn't really built in stealth, then you kind of were always public about it. That that may have been a better strategy.

[00:39:12] Claire Butler: Yeah, that's an interesting question to compare, cuz I guess what  I would say. We were able to have a really big moment when we launched where people were able to be like, this is so cool. I wanna see this. I'm trying this, everybody talked about it that day. Everybody wanted to get in and were able to like, kind of have a big moment.

[00:39:32] And I've found it's really helpful, um, in when you have a really crowded market and lots of things going on, being able to gather everything together and have moments is a really good way to kind of rise above the noise. And so I'm a big fan of, of the moments thing. I would say that probably if you were to, you know, I think Dylan has a lot of opinions on this, but I think we all feel like we might have wanted to have those moments earlier.

[00:39:55] Um, just because it was hard in those early days and it was hard on the team to be just [00:40:00] building and self for such a long time. And so it is a wonder of like, oh, could we have had that moment earlier, um, and just make it move faster. Um, I think that, that, that's the kind of, you know, back and forth that you, you think about.

[00:40:13] Um, cuz I do think you can be definitely be steal too long and like be like, okay, like we gotta get this out there in people's hands. Um, and doing that as soon as you can is important, but yeah, the moment helps for sure.

[00:40:26] Brett Berson: Did you wait list the product or  when you  came outta stuff, anybody could,  take it for a spin.

[00:40:30] Claire Butler: yeah, when we did come outta south, we did. And so we launched it as a beta. It was a closed beta where people had to like, you know, sign up and have a wait list. Um, that's one thing that I probably would change. I think I would've just opened it up if I could do it again. Um, the, the, it was nice. It was nice to have a wait list.

[00:40:47] It made us feel good. Um, but I, I think I probably would've switched it. We waited until that multiplayer feature was ready to go out into, out of beta, just cuz it, in my mind, I was like, this product does not finish. We gotta call it a [00:41:00] beta. But I wonder, I think I would've made it an open beta if we could do it again because there was no reason not to get as many people into the tools we could just to increase our velocity of feedback and increase the velocity of people using the tool.

[00:41:11] Brett Berson: so either right after you kind of officially had this launch moment, or maybe in the six months or 12 months before that in all of these customer conversations and all of those credibility building, I assume you were just had like an unbelievable amount of customer feedback and customer asks.

[00:41:31] And at the same time, the product service area of what you had to build was enormous. And so do you remember how you thought about as a team taking all that customer input into actually sorting and organizing what you were gonna build when.

[00:41:49] Claire Butler: Yeah, totally. So I guess one thing that I would say is Dylan was great at this, uh, you know, Figma didn't have a PM for years after we launched. And that, that of course we did have a [00:42:00] PM and that was Dylan. Um, and so he was really good at being able to synthesize all that information and think about like, okay, what are the things where there's like saying, I need this, I need this, I need this.

[00:42:11] And what's the most important thing. And we did also rally around, uh, especially in those early. We all just really believed that multiplayer was gonna be the most important thing, because it was gonna take so long for us to check every single box that someone could come up with to compare us to another tool, to have these features.

[00:42:30] Um, but what we believed was that if they could experience the benefits of multiplayer, then that would be enough. Um, and they would get over and deal with some of the inconveniences of not having some of these other features because they got so much benefit from basically not having versions of files and being able to collaborate with each other at the same time.

[00:42:50] So we really kind of bet the farm, a multiplayer too, and, and listened to everything else and all the other features, but really prioritized making sure that that, that was where our focus was.[00:43:00] 

[00:43:00] Brett Berson: So the last thing that we haven't fully dug into in this kind of three pillar system that, that you outlined  is the idea  of being,  bottoms up oriented. And I think now, I mean, back then, it was probably a little bit. Of a buzzword and now it's really become a buzzword. And maybe in the early days it was a company like Atlassian that was doing it when it was completely non-consensus.

[00:43:21] But when you think about how you, um, operationalize that or things that you did that actually made it work so well, cuz I feel like everyone once bottoms up adoption, um, and there are a few companies that are able to do it in this compounding style, like Atlassian and like Figma. And so were there things that you did either from a go to market and marketing perspective, a community perspective or a product perspective that you think really made this work for you all.

[00:43:51] Claire Butler:  Yeah, I think you, you know, it's a, it's a total approach to building a company and to building a go to market. So if I were to think about how we did this, um,  for us. We [00:44:00] realized it a little bit later in the phase, um, of, of the company.

[00:44:03] So if the first phase  uh, you know, community growth is building credibility, the second phase is you're, you're having early evangelists. Um, I would say you don't actually start realizing a bottoms up that bottoms up wor is working until later when you're actually introduced pricing. And for us, that wasn't until two years  afterwards.

[00:44:22] And so. It really was. If you think about it those first two years before we introduced pricing, that allowed us to be bottoms up. And also remember  we didn't introduce a sales team at this point. So at two years we had selfer. Um, and then at four years is when we introduced sales.

[00:44:39] So at two years is, um, is when we were starting to like, okay, we have all these people, we've been building this credibility, building these relationships for two years. Now we're starting pricing and we, we flipped the switch. And when you think about what that looked like, we never, at this time still, we didn't focus on teams.

[00:44:57] We never focused on teams. We always focused on [00:45:00] individuals. And so the relationship with individuals was how we would then go into a company. And so, yeah, we were, we weren't selling teams, we weren't pitching teams. Um,  we only talked to individuals and then empowered those people to then bring Figma into their company.

[00:45:16] And that was our approach. And that's what we did. Um, and it, and it was working. And just to give you an example of what that looked like, tactically, um, the designer advocates were how, how we did that. And so at this point, um, Tom, uh, became our, our next designer advocate. So Brin Brin had left Brin, started his own company that later got acquired by GitHub, which was wonderful.

[00:45:37] Um, and we had another person come in to who now leads our designer advocate team, whose name is Tom and Tom is, he was doing these. Things that you think to yourself, like this does not scale, um, just talking to users and, um, you know, having these one-on-one relationships, but just to see how that works, you know, Tom would go to a meetup, um, in Seattle with someone Parker.

[00:45:59] So [00:46:00] Parker was, you know, this person who was just like, I don't get it. Figma is not here. I'm a sketch user a hundred percent. Like why would I use Figma? He would spend a long time talking to Parker over months. So they would talk to each other. He'd listen to why, you know, Figma wasn't ready. He'd like zoom out and unpack the problem.

[00:46:18] Um, Figma would, in the meantime, launch more features, he'd reach out back again. They'd connect. Um, eventually Tom flips Parker and so Parker becomes a staunch Figma advocate. Parker's then the one who brings Figma into Uber, and then it was all about how do we enable Parker to bring Figma into Uber? Um, And it did.

[00:46:37] And, and Parker was our first user at Uber. Uh, but then to see again, what this looks like, Parker eventually leaves Uber, right? And then Parker goes to Oracle. Um, and then what happens next? Parker reaches back out to Tom and is like, okay, I'm ready to bring figment into Oracle. Can you help me? And, and that's what we did.

[00:46:54] That's what it happened, what it looked like. And so we were never selling to going into the front doors of these [00:47:00] organizations and selling, we were working with the individuals and then helping them, empowering them to bring figment to their organizations. And that sounds like really unscalable work.

[00:47:10] But the thing was, we did it enough times and those people then did it enough times. And those people did enough times, like in this like, you know, expanding network effect that it actually did scale. And that's,  so much of, for years of how we got, you know, when we finally did introduce the sales team or all of our self serve revenue was organic.

[00:47:28] And people coming to the website saying just like help me bring figment to my organization. And that's what it actually looked like in practice.

[00:47:35] Brett Berson: When you think about kind of this bottoms up,  incredible success that you had, where you have a Parker start to use the product in, in maybe solo mode  and then recruit in, uh, his or her colleagues  around them. Did you think a lot about, uh, getting non designers at some point in the product and other stakeholders, um, in some sort of intentional way, or was that just organic when you start to have product managers coming in and marketers and [00:48:00] other people.

[00:48:01] Claire Butler: Yeah, we definitely did think about it. Like Figma spent a lot of energy on things like comments, um, and presentation mode. Like those things became really important.  but I would say that, especially in this phase, we were really true to the core designer and making sure that they were happy, um, and that they needs were taken care of.

[00:48:20] And then they were the ones who really did the hard work for us of bringing in the non designers, because it was easier for them. And then they didn't have to do as much work. Um, and, and that, that worked out really well for us.

[00:48:33] Brett Berson: So you mentioned this in passing briefly, but really curious what was like the, one  of the way that you approach pricing. You mentioned, I think that it was kind of a couple years post this launch moment that it was free. Then you got together and, and sort of put out your first paid offering.

[00:48:49] What was that whole process?

[00:48:52] Claire Butler: Yeah, it was, it was hard. Like I think we knew we wanted to always have a free tier. And so the next thing we thought about was like, okay, where do we gate? [00:49:00] Right. Where do we gate from being free to, to charging? And so the way that we did it, the first time around was really oriented around like, okay, what are the things that you would need to do as a team, um, versus needing to do as an individual?

[00:49:15] So, um, the first pricing model that we had out, we had a, a starter team that you could use. So we had a free tier that was free, and we also had a free starter tier where you could have, um, so many people collaborating and a file together, um, and have unlimited projects. And then in the actual paid tier is where we put, what it became really important was this concept of, um, Libraries.

[00:49:38] So in, in design, if you think about it,  you have some things that you're always using, like the like button or a signup button or certain colors that you have. And, um, if a designer creates that from scratch every time, it's kind of a waste of time. So designers have these things called design systems, and they have teams of people who are making design systems where they'll have a standardized component of a button [00:50:00] or of a login screen.

[00:50:01] And then as a designer, you can pull those into your product. Um, and then it saves you a lot of time and it also makes it more efficient when you go to code it because it's all standardized. And then you can just think about, you know, actually solving the design problem. And so we put in all of the things that you'd need around collaboration around working together as a team into, into the paid offering.

[00:50:22] Brett Berson:  what was the actual internal process to land on this sort of early version of pricing? And where did you find the most tension? I think kind of what jumps to mind for me is you always have this balance of,  you want people to come in and get the magic of a, of a number of different parts of the product.

[00:50:44] Um, and often the things that they most love is is, is also the things that over time you wanna charge for. And so  there's both gating. So unless you are a paid user, you can't use this feature. Um, and then there's also trialing, you know, you can get access to all of these things and then we take it away from [00:51:00] you unless you pay.

[00:51:01] And, and so curious, like what that actually looked like, um, from a process perspective to sort of land on that early approach to pricing and gating.

[00:51:10] Claire Butler:  So I think it was pretty clear for us that we wanted libraries to be paid and we wanted a free tier, but what, we didn't know what was, what the kind of starter tier would look like, and that's where it's like, okay, you're working in a team. We want you to test out some of the great things that are, um, in our product, but yeah, we want you to also upgrade.

[00:51:31] And so I think it was a lot of kind of gotten intuition the first time around, but I would say we changed it later. And so what we realized is exactly what you're saying, uh, for us, the thing that we really needed people to do. And I I've talked about this a couple times is collaborate with each other in a file.

[00:51:47] And in our team, our starter team, we initially had the gate be that you'd only have two people collaborating with each other and you could have unlimited number of files. Um, but what we realized was that actually wasn't [00:52:00] great because you were encouraging kind of small teams or very, very small teams to work together in the starter tier, but we weren't encouraging people to experience that magic moment of collaboration.

[00:52:11] So later we ended up doing a refresh of what that starter tier looked like, and we switched it. So that you could only have a couple files within the starter team, but you could have unlimited number of people collaborating in the file because you're right. We, we needed to people to experience that magic moment of collaborating with each other.

[00:52:28] And so I would say that's something we, we learned over time and then switched. Um, when we, when we realized that.

[00:52:35] Brett Berson: In, and maybe to sort of abstract this a little bit, but if from time to time you get founders or marketers or go to market leaders reaching out and they're putting together their first approach to pricing. Are there big ideas or things that you tend to say over and over again in terms of guiding them or increasing their chances of doing it?

[00:52:54] Well,

[00:52:55] Claire Butler: I think it all comes down to that magic moment. Right. And it's interesting cuz when we first did our pricing [00:53:00] model, we didn't actually know for sure. Um, we didn't have like the data to show of that magic moment. We didn't have enough users to even show that, but we just had this intuition that that was the thing of all the things that was gonna get people to use the tool.

[00:53:13] And so, so much of this is like, okay, how do you funnel people towards your magic moment and get to them to experience that as quickly as possible. And I think that's like the, the thing that I always think about and not get your magic moment.

[00:53:25] Brett Berson: So you mentioned that, you know, it was a number of years before you kind of brought in sales people or maybe more traditional go to market kind of people. What, what was the story behind that decision and, and how did you all, uh, approach those first few hires? Uh,

[00:53:43] Claire Butler: Yeah. So, uh, we introduced our sales team. I think it was or started selling four years, um, after we launched out of, out of stealth. And so. Eventually, you know, you get to a point where we care, you know, so much of our emotion was working with individuals, empowering them [00:54:00] to bring figment to their organizations.

[00:54:02] But eventually we got to the point where, you know, you think about Microsoft at Google and, and some of these other big companies eventually, you know, you do have security in, in, uh, procurement and people who realize that the tool being used throughout the company and need someone to help them. Um, you know, these individual champions need someone to help them navigate things like security.

[00:54:21] And we had to have all of those features. And so it became really obvious to us. Like you think about, you know, one example of this was, was Microsoft. We'd look at these graphs of all of everyone within. Microsoft and the Microsoft domains. And we had clusters of people using Figma at Microsoft all over the organization, but they weren't connected to each other at all.

[00:54:39]  pockets of it had popped up organically. People had been putting it on their credit cards all over the organization. Um, and when you look at stuff like that, it became really obvious to us, like, okay, there's an opportunity here to come in at the enterprise level and actually work with procurement.

[00:54:53] Um, and so, but the, the data and the usage is what dictated that it wasn't like, we just decided like, [00:55:00] oh yeah, we should definitely introduce the sales team. Now we got really far with self-serve before ever thinking about sales.

[00:55:07] Brett Berson: And do you think in hindsight, that was the right decision?

[00:55:10] Claire Butler: Yes. I do at least, um, you know, I think it's like, okay. So when our sales team finally did come in, um, what they were doing, they had so many leads, right? They had so many people to sell to, and it allowed them to really be set up to be these experts who were helping people navigate their own internal orgs or move through security or move through contracts.

[00:55:32] It wasn't this a hard sell. It was never a hard sell. It was okay. Person who's the internal champion at Microsoft. I just wanna help  unblock you. And so our sales team was able to just come in as these helpers, um, as opposed to having to, to do hard sales and for years, um, you know, we, we really didn't do paid marketing either.

[00:55:52] We had so much organic inbound and people just going to our web form saying, you know, will you help  unblock me and to bring Figma into my whole company, [00:56:00] that that was enough leads to feed our sales team. And so it really allowed us to have this really collaborative, consultative process, um, as opposed to, you know, going outbound immediately or having to do paid, um, to feed some MQL goal.

[00:56:15] Brett Berson: Do to this day, do you only call on and support accounts where people are knocking on your door or there's part of the sales motion that is knocking on the door of Coca-Cola or Ford or whomever?

[00:56:29] Claire Butler: It's a mix. I would say, um, as we grow, of course, you know, our sales team is much, much bigger at this phase than it was, um, when we were first introduced and at some point, um, eventually we do wanna look at like, okay, how do we go to these organizations? Whether they're a lot of times though, we'll go to these organizations, um, whether that be Ford, who is a, a user or, or Coca-Cola, and be like, okay, like, is anyone using this?

[00:56:54] Has anyone signed up yet? Um, and talked to those people. Um, and so it is [00:57:00] definitely a combination of, of inbound and outbound, but even our outbound is often largely within our free user base. Someone's tried it, um, or has, has gotten an idea about this or uses this for something, even if the whole organization hasn't adopted.