00:21:29 · Claire Butler
[00:21:29] S5: 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 via the face of you... Based of what you're doing. We definitely started with designers. Mhmm. You are very focused and had very specific niche of 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 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, 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 have them be the people who are talking with users, who are creating content, who are checking all of our marketing, 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 is scaled. How did you come up with this idea of having, like, a offline community, and how did that scale also? Totally. So in the early days, we did meetups. And so that's what it looks like at the beginning. Some people were skeptics in the beginning. Right? And maybe they'd wanna go to meet other designers or they'd show up, but we realized how valuable it was to bring people together into TOF. And we just saw how amazing it was. Well, people just learn best practices from each other and just learn from being together and we were able to build these one on the relationships, we could kind of overcome some of their concerns or talk them out or just kinda hear 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, Tom was in in Seattle. Tom, our first designer, Abica, was in Seattle, and he was talking to somebody who at the time was a very big skeptic. Right? And then he kept talking to them, have these relationships, built this relationship with them. Turns out they were at Uber, that person then brought Figma to Uber. Right? And we saw the power of how that process worked. And we started growing just these these people and and having these relationships.
00:23:28 · Claire Butler
And then we had this 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 now. It was actually... We thought we supposed be 200 people, and that was gonna be the conference. And we even booked a venue for 200 people. That was the size. And we launched the conference, and then the first day, we had so many registrations and people who once joined that we're like, okay. We have to change the size of this thing because there's no way 200 people is gonna work. And so we 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 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 lie in 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 that we've been doing from these meetups, but also just from the nature of a design. Designers have been talking and learning to each other regardless of Figma for so long. And so bringing everybody together in person and having these relationships that were just online and happen in real life was just so magical that we just knew we had to continue with.
00:24:55 · Hannah Lee, Claire Butler
[00:24:55] S7: Like, so do you [00:24:56] S5: have any, like, advice on, like, building communities for early start ups? Totally. I think the biggest thing is that sometimes in in... You know, especially for us in, you know, enterprise marketing or b two b marketing, you think about people as companies. And 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'll get their badge and you're like, oh, you work at a really big company. Oh, that was a company that, in theory, you might wanna, like, target for sales. But that's not how we think of it. We're just like, 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 hear... You're yourself all the time. And sure, you happen to work in a company. But I think it's doing these things that don't scale and building these relationships one on one, like like Corey and Corey's example. And then those people bring other people, and those... And then that's how word-of-mouth really spreads. So Figma is beyond just a product. [00:25:59] S7: It seems like it's a brand. It's a community. So what are your advice on, yeah, making a brand?
00:25:59 · Hannah Lee, Claire Butler, Corey Lee
[00:25:59] S7: It seems like it's a brand. It's a community. So what are your advice on, yeah, making a brand? [00:26:05] S5: You know, I think that the most important thing is to actually start with the product for us, and that's, like, what product led growth looks like. Right? And I I think that what we have as a brand really starts with a great 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 as we're building it and building it with the community. And then second, we have, you know, these relationships with people. And if those people love the products, they are spreading it to other people, and that's that's growing over time of community of people, then we can do for it. Right? And then we can say, okay. Now we wanna layer on top all these other full things like a 10,000 person conference or, you know, all of these beautiful visuals that we have. [00:26:55] S6: The story of Figma is not about ending at Figma. The story about Figma is where does Figma get that person to? And in most cases, you know, people using Figma, their story is something like, you know, I just wanna create great products. I wanna 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 you where they wanna go? [00:27:16] S5: Do you know where the name Figma comes from? It's a... It would [00:27:19] S7: be great if you can explain it to us.
00:27:19 · Hannah Lee, Claire Butler
[00:27:19] S7: be great if you can explain it to us. [00:27:20] S5: Yeah. It's actually... It comes from the idea of a figment of your imagination. And the initial vision of Figma was to eliminate the gap between imagination and reality. Like, that was that was the vision. And so they... It kinda shifted for a while there because some people told him it was too ambitious. And so it was make design accessible. It was kind of where it went to. But as we grow and as we continue to evolve, 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 and make it so anybody can have what their... They have ideas in their head, turn it into a product or turn it into something that keeps this world.