How Figma's First Marketer Built the World’s Most Beloved Product l Claire Butler & Corey Lee | EO

Figma's first marketer on winning over hostile designers

Figma's marketing began as handshakes rather than campaigns. Claire Butler joined a pre-launch company with no product, no customers and a tool named Summit, and her first act was to argue the tool and the company should share one name. Launch brought open hostility from designers, and Figma answered it by building relationships with the people who shaped design opinion. The community that later looked like a strategy came from listening, engineers answering support tickets, and meetups that grew into a conference.

Takeaways

• Figma's design tool was nearly called Summit. On her first day, Claire Butler argued that the tool and the company should share one name. Dylan Field asked her to make the case the next morning, the first thing she did at Figma.
• Figma launched in beta without multiplayer. Claire Butler says you only get one chance to launch, so the team shipped without multiplayer and gathered feedback rather than wait. The early metric was whether a single team would move over full time, a target of zero or one.
• Early marketing was one-to-one with design teams. Claire Butler and Dylan Field drove around Palo Alto and San Francisco pitching design teams and gathering feedback. She judged the product ready when someone took the laptop out of Dylan's hands to try it.
• Figma answered skeptics with relationships. Some designers said they would quit design if this was the future of the craft. Figma built relationships with design thought leaders and influencers, and many critics changed their minds as they used the tool and trust grew.
• The community grew without a deliberate strategy. Figma had no full-time support team, so engineers rotated on support tickets. Claire Butler says the approach scales because the people Figma built relationships with carried the product into their own companies and communities.
• A two-week bug fix won over a team. Corey Lee found the web-based approach unremarkable until he used Figma with teammates, and broken Japanese input blocked his team in Japan. He reported the bug, it was fixed two weeks later, and he moved the team over.
• Config was planned for 200 and drew 1,000. Registrations far exceeded expectations, so Figma expanded its first conference from the 200-person venue it had booked to 1,000 people. Designers who had talked on Twitter for years met in person.

Claire Butler's advice for early marketing

• Focus on a niche, because it is hard to be too broad when you are new.
• Treat people as people rather than as companies, which matters in B2B marketing.
• Start with a strong product and layer brand on top of it.