Figma Growth

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The 5 phases of Figma's community-led growth - Claire Butler - In Depth

You’re building a passionate userbase who will spread your product for you

Get to understand the community. How do they think? What do they want to hear?

Build individual relationships and trust into the community by doing things that don’t scale. do it through connections and hustle

Don’t pitch your product hard at the start. Build trust by getting their feedback, listening to them, and showing them you understand them. Over time, some of them will use your product

you have to do stuff to build trust with a very small group of people. It’s just loads of 1:1 conversations

When they demoed, tried to see how excited a person was about figma. Seeing reactions was really important to figure out what features and positioning resonated

At the early stage, it’s all about planting seeds. The product is not ready yet. They won’t start using it for their jobs tomorrow. Just build credibility and a foundation

Content was one of the earliest ways to build credibility. Figma was a very novel and technically difficult product. So instead of sharing messaging and positioning in the blog posts; they talked about why they crafted the product the way they did. Designers and engineers wrote a lot of these pieces. They went deep in the product

Hubspot’s content was “how-to” content, while figma’s early content was a lot more esoteric and geeky. How-to content is great when you’re at scale. But early on, it’s about just creating credibility with end users — specially influencers

Design community was really prominent on Twitter. Designers talk a lot about design on Twitter. Think data curious professionals are the same — rishabh and his experience with data fanboys who don’t know sql at all

Targeted a big influencer list to talk about figma on Twitter when they launched — along with anyone else they could find to talk about them

Once the product was out of stealth, it didn’t mean people would immediately switch over. It was all about trial, and getting people to come back again and again and again until their habits were ingrained

Coda was their first team to get onboarded. Then, they worked 1:1 to get a handful of others. And once they saw that a bunch of teams were using their tool well, they got others

Figure out the most important thing. For Figma, this was realtime multiplayer mode. So in their free starter tier, they could only have 2 files at most – but could have an unlimited number of people collaborating on each file