![]() So rather than setting a goal to close deals, these informal chats were all about gathering feedback and sparking some inspiration. We knew that Figma was not yet ready for total team-level adoption,” says Butler. You have an incredibly high bar to switch to using a tool full-time. “If you’re a designer using a particular design tool, you’re going to be in that tool eight hours a day, every day. ![]() The Figma team was playing the long game here. Designers want to cut to the chase and get their hands on the tool,” says Butler. “We mostly skipped over the traditional ‘problem discovery’ portion of the conversation, and just jumped straight into the product demo. But the pace of these conversations didn’t follow the typical sales script. Butler spent her first months on the job tagging along with the company’s CEO and co-founder Dylan Field in early customer discovery chats. It’s about building individual relationships with people in communities that have already taken shape,” says Butler.įor Figma, that meant tapping into the robust design community. “In stealth, you don’t have your own community because you don’t exist in the real world yet. While the product wasn’t yet out in the market, the Figma team started planting seeds for the community that would sprout later. PHASE 1: WHEN EMERGING FROM STEALTH, AIM FOR BUZZ - NOT PERFECTION.īutler joined Figma about six months prior to the company emerging from stealth - on the heels of the company quietly building for over two years. Butler flags some of the key decisions that paid off along Figma’s journey - including making the call to finally emerge from stealth, introducing pricing with the right gating strategy and finally bringing in a sales motion. She shares the specific creative tactics Figma used to energize the design community and build organic momentum when the product was just beginning to take shape. In this exclusive interview, Butler imparts tons of lessons about how to build and cultivate a community along each phase of the startup journey - from the earliest innings of the company, all the way to bringing on a sales team and targeting more enterprise deals. It’s an approach to building and your go-to-market strategy that orients around fostering a passionate user base who’s going to power up your product adoption,” says Butler. How I define community is that it’s not a set of specific programs or a Slack group. “Community is such a fuzzy word and there’s no standard definition. But as Butler tells it, community is what enabled Figma to enter a crowded category and start making waves right away. When it comes to building community, folks tend to treat it as an afterthought, such as an online user group or a few in-person events to tack on later, after they’ve found product/market fit and built up a strong user base. She began shaping the company’s bottoms-up growth strategy and laying the track for a vibrant community before the product was even publicly available. As Senior Director of Marketing, Butler joined Figma as one of the first ten employees and the company’s first business hire. As Claire Butler will tell you, community was core to the company’s GTM strategy early on - even while still in stealth. After launch, it took another two years to add paid pricing tiers - and a couple more to bring on a sales team.īut taking a longer, winding path to launch a product doesn’t mean that you keep customers at arm's length along the way. Founded in 2012, Figma didn’t actually start shipping software to beta users until 2015. The sooner you can get your product out there, the better.īut the path to building Figma was an exercise in patience. In the earliest stages of company-building, folks often worship at the altar of speed - launch an MVP quickly, gather hoards of customer feedback and start pivoting your way into product/market fit.
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