00:14:23 · Hannah Lee, Claire Butler, S0
[00:14:23] S7: You only get one shot to launch. And, like, what were some of the factors that made that decision? [00:14:28] S5: Yeah. It... It's hard. Right? It's a... It's such a a hard question for people because you really do only get one chance to launch the product, and you wanna 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 wanna wait too long. Right? Because the tool... The team had already been building the tool for years before I got there. You wanna keep things going. You wanna 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 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 his laptop, but they were just like, that's so cool. I have to try it. And I think once I saw people starting to do that, that was like, okay. This is... This feels like it's kind of ready. One 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 Ad[00:15:29] S0: This episode is brought to
00:15:29 · S0, S1, S2, S3
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00:16:29 · Claire Butler
[00:16:29] S5: Gonna 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 feature arguably, and we know it's gonna 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 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 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 because you also just gotta keep the immense muck too. Metrics are so important, but I feel like you can't really look at them that closely when you're in a micro setting like that. You kinda 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 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 10 x this. I have to 100 x this. I have to a thousand x this. You kinda have to go more on intuition and more on feeling, I think, and really believe that because metrics just aren't gonna get you the answers that you're looking for.
00:17:54 · Hannah Lee
[00:17:54] S7: What were your team or your plan or strategy on building this community, and how important was that at the time?
00:18:03 · Claire Butler
[00:18:03] S5: I wouldn't say in the beginnings we ever set out to, like, have a community driven strategy. It kinda 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 Corey was talking about, we didn't really have a full time support team or 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... Like Corey reported a bug, and then one of our engineers saw that and just fixed 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, like, up until a long time ago or till recently, if you joined Figma, you had to start spending time answers to four questions because you 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. Beginning. And along with that, it's really building the product alongside of the users of the product. It wasn't like we thought to ourselves, like, let's have a community driven strategy. It was just, we need to listen to our users and we need to load a product that's gonna 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 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 Figma to the 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. That doesn't scale. But, actually, it does scale because Corey, once we empowered him, he converted his team. He grew a community in Tokyo. Right? Like, that has a huge amount of ramifications down the line. And so that's what that strategy looks like when it when it does scale. Right?
00:20:13 · Claire Butler, S1, S2, S3
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 when you're new. Ad[00:20:29] S1: This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Ad[00:20:53] S2: Hiring now? Then this Ad[00:20:54] S1: is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Ad[00:20:59] S3: It's officially the holiday season, and Abercrombie's new collection has outfits for everything on your calendar. It's the busiest time of year, and between shopping and party invites, I don't have time to plan every look. But Abercrombie's always got me covered. Their sweaters are the perfect easy layer for low key plans, and on a nice night out, I'm reaching for their classic trousers. Fill your closet with the pieces you'll need all season long. Have a very Abercrombie holiday. Shop in the app, online, and in stores.