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.
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?