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Category: Business Strategy
Tags: communitydesignFigmalaunchmarketing
Entities: ClaireClimate CorporationCoryDanny RhyrDylanFigmaIndex VenturesUber
00:00
So the first day that I joined Figma, I remember I was sitting in a presentation and Dylan was kind of walking me through stuff, showing the product and the name of the tool at the time was actually called Summit. And I remember I thought to myself like this just isn't going to work.
Metrics are so important, but I feel like when you're doing something
00:16
really early and you're like, I have to 10x this, I have to 100x this, I have to,000x this, you kind of have to go more on intuition and more on feeling, I think, and really believe that because metrics just aren't going to get you the answers that you're looking for. If you joined Figma, you had to start spending
00:31
time answering support questions. And so it sounds like pretty un unscalable, right?
Oh, you have your engineers sitting there answering support tickets, fixing bugs, like you can't do that forever. That doesn't scale.
But actually, it does scale. You think about people as companies.
And I think the
00:48
biggest advice that I would give is like people are people, right? And I think you see that it can conf like you'll see people and you'll talk to them and you'll be chatting.
It sounds so basic, right? But like I think so often in marketing we we split people into like you as a person at your desk and you as a person outside of that.
Whereas we try
01:04
to think of people as one person. It wasn't like let's have a communitydriven strategy.
It was just we need to listen to our users and we need to build a product that's going to be really useful for them and they know what their problems are more than we do and we need to spend time with them and and fix
01:20
their problems. [Applause] Hi, I'm Claire.
Uh, I'm the director of brand marketing here at Figma. I was also the first marketer and yeah, I've been here since the beginning.
So, coming up on 9 years of Figma. So, it's
01:36
been it's really fun for me to see everything come together today. My name is Cory.
I'm designer advocate here at Figma. Um, I'm based in Tokyo and I've been here at Figma for about 2 years and been a longtime Figma user in community.
As a designer advocate, I'm
01:51
part of our community team. My role is a mixture of helping build community but while also helping enable um designers.
So um could you give us an overview of your career um before joining Figma? Sure.
Uh it's kind of funny. It's hard to remember a time before Figma because
02:07
I've been here for uh 9 years. I was at another startup before that called Climate Corporation and Index Ventures was one of the investors in uh Climate Corp.
and we got acquired and you know I kind of knew a big company wasn't for me and I I really wanted to roll up my sleeves and and do something early
02:22
stage. So Danny Rhyr who is was the lead investor over at the last company I was at uh also invested was the first seed investor for Dylan.
So um I was meeting a bunch of different startups and different companies and uh Danny introduced me to Dylan and I met Dylan and kind of just decided that that was
02:40
it and that's that's you know went from there. When I started at Figma, we were pretty launched.
So, there was there wasn't even a product. There wasn't a company, you know, there wasn't even a name, honestly.
We were going to name it something else at the beginning. So, I I think back to just how much we've grown and evolved over the past 9 years and
02:56
where we are today. And it really blows my mind.
It's just so amazing to see the excitement. I just got emotional watching all the people come in and just how many people how many how much Figma means to so many people and how many people love it and use it every day.
It's just a surreal moment for me to see
03:12
everything come together. What was the first thing that you did after you joined Figma?
Literal first thing I did. So the first day that I joined Figma, I remember I was sitting in a presentation and Dylan was kind of walking me through stuff, showing the product, also showing me where to like the bathroom was like
03:28
all of the basics that you get on your first day. And uh I saw one presentation where they were going through some of the branding for Figma and some of the different naming and how they were thinking about launching it.
And the name of the tool at the time was actually called Summit. And so um Figma
03:43
was always the name of the company, but we had the strategy at the time where the tool would be called Summit and like the Figma editor. And then the company would be called Figma.
And I remember I thought to myself like this just isn't going to work. Like uh nobody knows who we are.
Summit is just like a really
03:59
basic name. There's PCs named Summit.
There's apps named Summit. This isn't anything we can own.
And so I remember saying just kind of off the cuff like, "Hey, like how locked is this? Is this something we can change?" And Dylan was like, "Yeah, what do you think?" And and I was like, "Well, I I really think we
04:14
should probably only have one name. We can't really have two." Um, and he's like, "Well, well, how about you think about that more and make a presentation and and maybe can show everybody it and then we can talk about it." And I said, "Okay, cool.
Like what does what does the timeline look like for that?" And he said, "How about tomorrow?" And I was
04:30
like, "Okay." And so uh I remember the literal first thing I did on my first day was um make a presentation about how the product should be called Figma and not Summit. And that was the first thing I did.
When Figma first launched people saying especially among designers like
04:47
there are a lot of people liking the product but also saying oh if this is the future of design then I would quit design or like this is not the future I want as a designer. So, as a first marketer at uh Figma, like what were your like go to market strategy or like
05:03
how did you deal with these market response? You know, I think it's really interesting because as a marketer working online and collaboratively, it's it's just intuitive to me, right?
Like was used to using Google Docs, was used to just having Google Slides, a sauna, these things where you just have things
05:18
constantly updated and working really collaboratively. But it didn't really click for me until I saw the response.
Honestly, that, you know, before design didn't really work that way. People were used to working in these offline tools and sharing when they're done and doing these like beautiful presentations and showing kind of more of a finished
05:34
product. Um, and so yeah, there was a lot of questioning uh of that in the early days.
I think that there's a couple things that I keep in mind when I think of like how to approach something like that. The first is, you know, you have to have a level of confidence that you're going to keep going anyway,
05:50
right? Like there's some people who don't like it.
There's different adoption curves and it's okay. Not everyone likes your product right away.
So this just having a general confidence in that and a belief that that's the way to go and that's the vision and we're going to stick with it is very important. And then I think the other thing that we did that was really really
06:07
helpful was we really looked at design is an interesting space where uh you know people really learn from each other and so people are always looking to other influencers or other people to help understand you know what's the latest in design how do you work how should we work so we really built a lot
06:22
of relationships and focused on building relationships with people who had a lot of thought in the space a lot of thought leadership and um talked to them about things. So even if they had a negative reaction at first or weren't sure about something we were doing, we just engaged in conversation and talked about it and
06:39
uh you know over time heard their opinions, we shared our opinions, got feedback from them and that was a a really important thing where maybe initially people had concerns but as we built trust with them, built credibility, uh people started using the tool that was really important and they
06:55
changed their minds. I'm also curious like Corey your response when you first got to know Figma but as a designer didn't didn't you have any like mixed feelings towards the product or as a designer like what were your thoughts on the product as a designer at the time I
07:10
was using Figma this was probably like 2016 2017 like a lot of different design tools were coming out like when every week seemed like there was different design tool like and I was you know using one tool as my main tool but like I would be using another tool beta testing it like on the side and like recreating the design like every week and testing you know, these AB testing,
07:26
these design choices to see like which one is the is going to be the best one, which one I just I switched to and like through that whole process, like one of them I found like Figma and I was using Figma and I I picked it up for a bit and I was like, "Okay, this is web- based. This is kind of interesting, but like it
07:41
doesn't make much difference compared to like what I'm using now, right?" And then um I went back to it for some reason again to use it and I started thinking about the collaboration features, right? I was just like, "Wait, wait, you can just Oh, it's web- based.
You can just share a link. I don't have to like export this and every single
07:57
time it's my final final final final version. Send that again and then I you know I could just share that and it's always up to date and thinking about like the repercussions of that of like how that would change the way interact uh and just reduce the friction I think was just a big thing I think about a lot
08:12
of time uh in the process. So I was like oh well to realize the value that I actually have to do use this tool with somebody else.
So that the first thing I did was okay let me find some other people on my team that I can get to get in the tool and let's use it together. And then once I did that, they understood it.
I understood it. I was
08:27
like, "Okay, this is a game changer." You know, once you start using it together, you just realize it's like it's completely different experience. And I think that was when it was clicked.
And then I realized that and then I was like, "Oh, I need to get my whole team on this. I need to get everyone in this and get everyone in the file." Before I was like going to introduce my team to it.
There was
08:42
actually an issue with like Japanese input. Um, and you know, back in the day, like I you still have it today in the bottom like right corner of Figma, there's a little question mark right there.
And if you push that you can have like you can send a message right to the help desk and get support on that. Right?
So I was using Figma and when you
08:58
input the Japanese characters it wouldn't show up correctly. Japanese was basically broken in Pigma at the time.
I was like oh this is great but like I'm in Japan and like I'm I'm designing in Japanese so I can't use this on my team until this is fixed, right? I was like uh maybe I'll just try to send some
09:13
support and see what happens, you know? So I I told him I I sent some screenshots.
I sent a detailed request and I said, "Hey, you know, this thing is broken here. and if you could fix this, this would really be helpful for your Japanese users, right?
And then couple weeks go by and I pick it up again and it's fixed. And I was like,
09:28
wow, this is pretty nice. I was I was like, the tool is pretty cool, but I was like, what was really really cool was it's like, oh, I gave this feedback and then they fix that.
But also, I know that like they're accepting feedback from the community and the speed of that iteration is is something that it gives me confidence that um so I think like
09:44
changing tools is like an investment for the whole team. That was kind of me weighing the option.
I was just like, "Okay, I'm really kind of investing in this team and I'm going to tell my team we should use this this product." So, you joined Figma before the product launch. How did you approach marketing marketing a product that was still in
10:00
self mode? So, I was the first marketing hire, but I was also the first just go to market person.
In the beginning, when we didn't have a product, I would go around and drive around PaloAlto, San Francisco with Dylan, and we would just pitch Figma to differenti. We made a bunch of connections in different design
10:15
teams and we would just go there and we we'd show them the product. And so a lot of what I did in the early days was meet these people, gather their feedback, kind of like what Corey was saying and in that more of a one-on-one setting and hear what they thought about the tool.
And then uh we were really trying to
10:31
understand okay when are we ready to go at it stealth then launch la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la launch the product and so a lot of what I was doing was trying to understand you know our teams ready to adopt this and is the the tool good enough to launch. I think it's such a balance that you have to think about where it's like, okay, we want to get
10:48
out of self and want to get in this this people's hands, but if it's not good enough, then it's also like, well, we're going to lose our chance. You only get one shot to launch.
And like, what were some of the factors that made that decision? Yeah, it's hard, right?
It's such a a hard question for people
11:03
because you really do only get one chance to launch the product and you want to do it right and so you want it to be good when people are all going in and looking at the tool. You want them to have a good experience.
So that's on one hand, but then on the other hand, you don't want to wait too long, right?
11:18
Because the tool, the team had already been building the tool for years before I got there. You want to keep things going.
You want to start building with people and getting their feedback. And so it is a really hard balance.
It's definitely more of an art than a science in terms of, you know, when to launch. And I remember I was sitting in this
11:34
meeting and someone literally took the laptop out of Dylan's hands because they wanted to play with it. I don't think that they didn't mean to like didn't take a laptop, but they were just like, "That's so cool.
I have to try it." And I think once they saw people starting to do that, that was like, "Okay, this is this feels like it's kind of ready." One
11:51
of the biggest challenges that we had in terms of deciding when to launch was multiplayer wasn't actually done when we launched Figma. It just was going to take like another year for for multiplayer to be done.
And so that was a really hard decision at the time where it was like this is our most important
12:08
feature arguably and we know it's going to take another year before it's done. And the decision that we had to make was, you know, do we launch without multiplayer or do we wait another year?
And we decided just to go for it and to launch and to start getting feedback, start getting in people's hands, keep it
12:24
in beta even though we knew it wasn't finished. But that is such a hard challenge, right?
Like I think there'd be a lot of good arguments on why you should wait uh for the the core feature to be done, but it definitely becomes kind of more of an art than a science at that point in terms of making that decision cuz you also just got to keep the momentum up too. Metrics are so
12:40
important, but I feel like you can't really look at them that closely when you're in a micro setting like that. You kind of have to go on anecdotes, right?
Like we didn't have enough people to like have these metrics dashboards and be like look at the usage over time, right? Like honestly, we were meeting
12:57
these teams and what we looked at was like at at the beginning, can we get one team to transfer full-time? And it sounds so funny because it's like our metric was like zero or one, right?
It's not like you're looking at these dashboards. And that's why I feel like sometimes when you're doing something really early and you're like, I have to
13:13
10x this, I have to 100x this. I have to thousandx this.
you kind of have to go more on intuition and more on feeling I think and really believe that because metrics just aren't going to get you the answers that you're looking for. What were your um team or your um plan or strategy on building this community and
13:31
um how important was that at the time? I wouldn't say in the beginnings we ever set out to like have a communitydriven strategy.
Kind of to just take to parallel Corey's story with what was happening at Figma at the time. In the early days of Figma, that little question mark button that Cory was
13:47
talking about, uh we didn't really have a full-time support team or it took a while for us to do that. And so our engineers would rotate and answer those questions.
And so it makes a lot of sense that somebody reported a bug and that Corey reported a bug and then one of our engineers saw that and just fixed
14:03
it, right? Like that's just kind of what happened.
It was really all hands on deck. And Dylan, our CEO, really believed that we need to be as close to the users of our product as possible.
And so even even now that like up until a long time ago or until recently if you joined Figma you had to start spending
14:20
time answering support questions because he wanted people to know and understand what the problems were and be really close to what that looked like. So that's been integrated and woven into who we are since the beginning.
And along with that it's really building the product alongside of the users of the
14:38
product. It wasn't like we thought to ourselves like let's have a communitydriven strategy.
It was just we need to listen to our users and we need to build a product that's going to be really useful for them and they know what their problems are more than we do and we need to spend time with them and
14:54
and fix their problems. And there's people like Corey, like Corey was one of those people that put it went into the chat, but there were thousands of other Corey's.
That idea of listening to people and then having a personal relationship, really becoming close with them and then having them go spread
15:11
Figma to their company, to their communities, to where they live. That's just what we did at scale.
And so it sounds like pretty un unscalable, right? Oh, you have your engineers sitting there answering support tickets, fixing bugs, like you can't do that forever.
15:26
That doesn't scale. But actually, it does scale because once we empowered him, he can burn it his team.
He grew a community in Tokyo, right? Like that has a huge amount of ramifications down the line.
Um, and so that's what that strategy looks like when it when it does
15:42
scale, right? It's it's how those people these people who you really build these strong relationships with then spread Figma for you.
That's the whole crux of a community tribute strategy. The advice I would give is focus on a niche because it's so hard to be too broad, especially
15:58
when you're new and you're early and you don't have a brand yet and find out who your users are and have somebody who really understands them be the face of face of what you're doing. We definitely started with designers.
you were very focused. It had very specific niche of
16:13
designers. They wanted someone who really understood their pain points, what they were going through, what it was like to design.
And that's when for me, I realized that immediately and I was like, I don't know this. I can study it.
I can I could try and and learn my
16:29
best. I I have over the years, but at the end of the day, I'm not a classically trained designer.
It's not my my core expertise. And so that's when I you know I decided I was like we have to hire somebody who knows this really really really well and have them be the face of this and having them be the people who are talking with users who
16:46
are creating content who are checking all of our marketing um who are helping us do things and that's that's when we decided to have a user from the community come join the team and that that function has scaled. How did you um come up with this idea of having like an
17:01
offline um community and how did that um scale also? Totally.
So in the early days uh we did meetups and so that's what it looked like at the beginning. Some people were skeptics in the beginning, right?
And maybe they'd want to go to meet other designers or they'd show up, but we realized how valuable it
17:18
was to bring people together and to talk. And we just saw how amazing it was when people just learn best practices from each other um and just learn from being together.
and we were able to build these one relationships, we could kind of overcome some of their concerns or talk them out or just kind of hear
17:34
people out on why they were skeptics or why they weren't sure and how we'd have these conversations and it might be I remember one u Tom was in in Seattle, Tom, our first designer advocate was in Seattle and he was talking to somebody who at the time was a very big skeptic, right? Uh and then he kept talking to
17:50
them, had these relationships, built this relationship with them. Turns out they were at Uber.
Um, and that person then brought Figma to Uber, right? And we saw the power of how that process worked and we started growing just these people and and having these relationships.
And then we had this
18:06
thought of like, well, wait a minute, you know, we've been going to these different cities, these different places. What if we brought everyone together, right?
And what what would that look like? And it was really funny.
I remember when we first had the idea, we're like, okay, how big should it be? And it sounds so funny and I laugh at it
18:21
now. It was actually we thought we were going to be at 200 people and that was going to be the conference and we even booked a venue for 200 people that was the size and we launched the conference and in the first day we had so many registrations and people who wants to join that we're like okay we have to
18:37
change the size of this thing because there's no way 200 people is going to work. Um and so expanded it and so the first config was a thousand people.
We have all these relationships. People have these connections online and because of just the distributed nature and the global nature of design, people have been talking to each other on
18:52
Twitter for so long. But then they all came together in person and it was just pure magic to see these people.
I remember so many that the line the conversation was like, "Oh, that's not what your avatar looks like on Twitter." Because this there's a strong community that existed and that people were already meeting each other and talking
19:08
that we've been doing from these meetups, but also just from the nature of design. designers have been talking and learning to each other regardless of BIGMA for so long and so bringing everybody together in person and having these relationships that were just online happen in real life was just so magical that we just knew we had to
19:25
continue like so do you have any like advice on like building communities for early startups? Totally.
I think the biggest thing is that sometimes in in you know especially for us in you know enterprise marketing or B2B marketing you think about people as companies and
19:40
I think the biggest advice that I would give is like people are people right and I think you see that it can fit like you'll see people and you'll talk to them and you'll be chatting and then you look at their badge and you're like oh you work at a really big company oh that was a company that in theory you might want to like target for sales but that's not how we think of it we're just like
19:56
you're just a person and you have interest like it sounds so basic right but like I think So often in marketing, we we split people into like you as a person at your desk and you as a person outside of that, whereas we try to think of people as one person and you can just you're yourself all the time. And sure,
20:12
you happen to work at a company, but uh I think it's doing these things that don't scale and building these relationships one-on-one like like Gory and Gory's example and then those people bring other people and those then that's how word of mouth really spreads. So Figma is beyond just a product.
It seems
20:30
like it's a brand, it's a community. So, um, what are your advice on yeah, making a brand, you know, I think that the most important thing is to actually start with a product for us and that's like what productled growth looks like, right?
And I I think that what we have as a brand really starts with a brave
20:49
product by starting from the bottom up and saying like, okay, first we have a really strong product that's awesome. We're improving it as we go.
We're listening to feedback um as we're building it and building it with the community. And then second, we have you know these relationships with people and
21:05
if those people love the product, they're spreading it to other people and that's that's growing over time of community of people. Then we can do it, right?
And then we can say, okay, now we want to layer on top all these other things like a 10,000 person conference
21:21
or like um you know all these beautiful visuals that we have. The story of Figma is not about ending at Figma.
The story about Figma is where does Figma get in that person too. And in most cases, you know, people using Figma, their story is something like, you know, I just want to
21:37
create great products. I want to enjoy the process and create that product together.
So, the narrative that we're creating on the community side is often like, how do we just enable those people to get to where they want to go? Do you know where the name Pigma comes from?
It's It would be great if you can explain it to us. Yeah, it's actually it
21:52
comes from the idea of a figment of your imagination. And the initial vision of Fikba was uh to eliminate the gap between imagination and reality.
Like that was that was the vision. And so they it kind of shifted for a while there cuz uh some people told him it was too ambitious.
And so it was make design
22:09
accessible is kind of where it went to. But as we grow and as we continue to evolve it, it always comes back to that like how do you how can we get better at as a tool helping to make eliminate that gap um and make it so anybody can have what they're they have ideas in their head turn it into a product or turn it
22:26
into something that a's world