Figma

“Set up meetings with about 70 or 80 different buyers who are, you know, heads of risk. At different companies in different industry verticals and literally sort of showed them a Figma prototype of what they would be using if they were to use a product like Oce…”

“Because early on, you spend almost more of your time with engineers, designers, product leaders, as you do customers, because everything that you do is so iterative, is so tight knit in this closed loop, that if you can't work well with other parts of the busi…”

“We got to build things from the ground up with our Salesforce instance using reverse ETL and all these products that were kind of merging in that time, 2018, 2019, so that we could actually pipe product data into Salesforce. So as we started building the buzz,…”

“We were able to focus the sales motion and all the early enablement efforts on taking people from anywhere from three to six products into one all-in-one design platform, collaboration built in, and if we got them to do that, and they're already doing a little…”

“I think there's generally three pillars. Can you impact the end users in converting to enterprise? Security. You know, that could, that's a very large bucket. And I think the admin experience, whether it's managing users or managing content, and we had thought…”

“You know, we were fortunate to have probably 18 months to two years of a healthy inbound business.”

“Dylan interviewed every candidate and saw their presentation for about two and a half years.”

“You could look at this whole wall and he'll point at one small level of detail and he'll double click and triple click. And it is a skill set that he has. That's pretty exceptional. I've seen it. In, in, in product reviews, I've seen it in stuff that we're doi…”

“We would actually go to design crits, design critiques, where designers and product managers would come in, and they would tear down things that people were building and shipping, and it was so interesting because we got to see all of the level of detail that …”

“And so what we did when we went live in January and really started to scale hiring was just simply drew the line in a thousand employees and below was SMB mid-market. A thousand employees and greater was enterprise. It was easy to do because that's how Clearbi…”

“So for Figma pro it was 15 dollars a month. If you wanted to pay monthly, you could do it annual and that was 12 dollars a month for the year. And then our enterprise tier was 540 dollars for a design editor.”

“Again, I think, you know, the early team, both on the leadership side and just broader sales were, it was probably 60%, you know, female.”

“And so we shifted probably that like six to 12 months mark from calling it a design tool to calling it a design platform.”

“The same maybe brash, challenger, sales methodology, sales rep that works at, you know, some other companies is just not going to work at Figma.”

“I think that some level of repeatability needs to exist. And if you're doing Sales, and you're doing that founder led motion. You've understood what are the questions that you're asking these customers that will ultimately expose some pain or opportunity to th…”

“Everyone has to do a demo of Figma as part of the interview process. And if you were the first 25 reps, you had to do it with myself. Dylan and Amanda Clay.”

“And the other thing that Dylan asked me actually to do in the first month of joining was to join the support team. He asked me to not do anything on the sales side, spend four months with the support team in the support queue, working on bugs, understanding th…”

“When I joined the company, it just raised our series B a few months earlier. I think there was about 40 to 45 employees, give or take. No sales team.”

“We don't want to slow down the sales process to get the customer to their max spend and account value. We want them to get on the product because when they get on the product, we are looking at, you know, average sales price and trying to increase that. We kno…”

“And in that first few months, I started realizing that, you know, more than half of our user base on any given customer account was not a designer.”

“At one point we had this engineering script that required basically this one customer at a time. I think it took around 30 minutes to convert from our pro tier to our organization tier, which is our kind of business enterprise tier at the time.”

“The first iteration of going outbound wasn't just knocking on cold doors. We had this whole usage model. People weren't coming to us maybe, but they were using free or pro Figma in some way, and we were trying to get to them as soon as we possibly could so tha…”

“The other wrinkle I'll stay with Figma that was interesting, this is the first in my career, was that early on Dylan said we don't discount. We're not discounting the product.”

“Sales motion experience is probably more relevant than domain experience.”

“When I think about web native software, there's a few concrete things. One is that URLs are very important. Figma is a web native collaborative software. You can share a URL with someone and they can hop into the same environment as you know, multiplier by def…”

“I think the biggest problem is that kind of, like, kind of gap between what's, you know, what's designed in their mock and what's actually built.”

“Two thirds of our users are, our weekly active users are non-designers, like developers, like PMs and others.”

“When you end up in a conversation where it's just about features, this is not a place you want to be in, right? Because, well, technically, Sketch has more features, you know, or competitors have more features. And so, what we really needed to kind of, like, s…”

“I think the best products come out of a little bit of, like, internal conflict around people standing up for a use case in a way that, like, is counterintuitive to the core product team. The core product team is so used to one way of thinking and, like, a set …”

“Our design systems features was actually one of the reasons, you know, people chose Figma, because it created economies of scale, and the design functions were maturing, and that kind of buying, the buyer was becoming more kind of centralized in these design o…”

“And so he actually visualized Design Twitter into this graph And figured out the nodes that were the largest of, okay, who's following who, and then went to them and showed Figma, got their feedback, kept going back to them, not trying to sell them it, but jus…”

“For slides, for example, you know, something like five percent of Figma files are decks. Before slides existed, right?”

“The first thing is, like, in a corporate environment, you can kind of logic your way into a lot of choices, and it can sometimes be hard to fight that because so much of the incentive is making progress, making decisions, and so someone who's willing to slow s…”

“The tension was this idea that everyone could be in the file at the same time. And that was now intuitive, but back then was considered undesirable to some extent. Like, you know, this idea that a hovering art director is always going to be in your file, like …”

“Around the time when I joined, I like to describe Figma as designers reluctantly using it because they recognize the value of collaboration, but like they themselves, a single player tool, like they felt it was insufficient relative to sketch.”

“For now, we've been very, building a very integrated product. And so it's a little bit harder to imagine something like completely orthogonal. And that being said, you know, certainly for the right thing, and if it isn't service advancing our vision for making…”

“We actually talked to, spent a lot of time with the customers at the most sophisticated design teams. So back then, that was like a Facebook and Airbnb. They represented the future of design teams, like where design teams might be in two or three years. So how…”

“I think that companies like Notion and Figma have a clearer path to going from self-serve to enterprise because it's seat-based. You're expanding from team to team. You can go to IT and you can make an easy, compelling case, and it's, and there's a lot of prec…”

“I kid you not, two weeks later, every team in our company was doing a FigJam. It just blew up like that. And it's that sort of thing that that's how software gets in. And we didn't even, you know, for the most part, IT didn't know Figma was even in the company…”

“I mean, truly like a person, you know, I think especially for engineers, they'll know is Evan Wallace over at Figma. Like that guy's an unnaturally good, like engineer, like truly one of a kind, I think of Charles in a very, very similar class. I just think he…”

“For example, I was at Figma recently, I think they're really exceptional at it.”

“Both at Meraki and Samsara, and really to this day, we start with a demo, right? And that can be over Zoom. It can be in person, but we start with, we're gonna show you a live working system. It's not a, you know, a sandbox. It's not Figma. We're gonna show yo…”

“Can we just get some bullet points and, like, make a decision here versus, you know, it's some eighty-page PRD, which I just feel like is kind of, like, pretty outdated at this point. And at that point, I'd much rather just get, like, a V-zero or Figma make pr…”

“What are the things that are going to get us a step change outcome? That we would never have when we were running the business in an incremental way, right? And those could be on the growth side or those could be creative. Like, what are the creative breakthro…”

“Dropbox was a tool for everyone. So that made it harder to be specific about what needs you were serving even as you moved into enterprise. Whereas like, Figma was way more focused on the core audience, and even for prosumers, even for SMBs, it is a profession…”

“What surprised me is how little is different, actually, and the reason for that is you have to be tighter on process in the sense that you've got to be able to forecast what you're going to do for a quarter. You've got to be really tight and clear on budget an…”

“The narrative and the brand is the same. Where there's variance is in specifically what they need, what their needs are. So as you're a larger organization, you care more about governance, you care more about, you know, specific admin features, et cetera. So w…”

“So if you look at Figma, two thirds of people who build in Figma are non-designers. They're engineers, they're marketers.”

“We have. We're, I mean, at the cadence of multiple a week.”

“The whole company is built around that, starting from Dylan, who every day will respond to people on social who are asking questions or giving feedback on what we're building. In fact, he's so fast, I have to give our whole team, we have a whole team of people…”

“The only team that sits across all of those things is marketing, and it's the job of marketing to make sure that it all works together and all of those touch points speak to each other because they represent your brand.”

“Being open about the thought process and the judgment that's applied and being open about the assumptions that are made to get there Actually allows more people to understand the decision making, and I think that is how you scale organizational taste.”