How Figma turned users into Champions

What’s up! This is Sheldon from The Zero to One - helping you grow your product by breaking down the growth tactics, strategic playbooks, and GTM motions behind your favorite startups and giving you the actionable insights to replicate them.

Firstly, hope you’re having an awesome holiday season!

This week is exciting. Looking at Figma is one of the best ways to learn about PLG. Today we’re looking at the core principle underlying it.

Welcome to episode 2 of the Figma series: Designing a $20B multiplayer experience.

Building a product that creates Champions

Product-Led Growth. The growth engine on every SaaS founder’s wishlist.

And the core growth driver behind some of the world’s most used and loved startups:

• Notion

• Airtable

• Zoom

• Slack

• Dropbox

• Mailchimp

And notably, Figma.

However, PLG only works when you have a product worth loving. Mid doesn’t cut it.

The next thing you need is people (typically ICs) to spread that product loving, i.e. Champions. If you’re planning to go the PLG route - these will be the people who make or break your startup.

But to turn ICs into Champions, not only do you need to build a product they love, but you need them to believe in you, as founders, a team, and a company.

Figma did just this.

(quick side note, this is just the beginning of the Figma PLG story - next week we’re going through the exact 4-step process Figma used to become a leader in PLG)

Now why is love so important for PLG and a product like Figma?

PLG relies on your product being shared amongst peers, teams, and organizations - through Champions.

The problem is that sharing can be scary. You’re putting yourself and your reputation on the line.

You need to be sure about the product.

You can’t just like it, you’ve gotta love it!

So how did Figma turn ICs into obsessed Champions?

A three-step framework centered around a core principle.

Proximity to customers.

Let’s get into it!

🔬 How this looks practically:

3 actionable insights from the tactic.

🏋 1. Establishing initial credibility

The first thing Figma did to get ICs to love them was establish that initial credibility.

This is especially important with highly technical users like designers. When it comes to their craft, they don’t hand out trust easily.

Because of this, highly technical users often have high bullshit meters.

Meaning you can’t buzzword your way into their reimagined and integrated tech-stack, that completely revolutionizes the way they do work.

Designers care about only one thing:

The actual benefits.

To meet this head-on, Figma’s first GTM hire, Claire Butler, decided Figma’s new marketing strategy would be simple…

Don’t market.

Rather get the Figma team to focus on authenticity.

When you have a product that’s a technical feat and is designed for technical users, then that’s what you should use for your marketing.

So that’s exactly what Figma did.

Figma was, and still is, an amazing technical feat. So they focused on that.

Piquing the interest of both engineers and designers.

To do this, the Figma team started putting out technical content, both on how they built the product:

And design more generally:

Us tech nerds ate it up.

They were ranking in all the right places. Even going number 1 on Hacker News.

Figma is a design tool, for designers, and so who better to write content than their design team.

They started adding to their content portfolio. Creating content on their decision-making for the product.

Why and how they made different design and product decisions.

This made Figma relatable to other designers and gave an insight into the technical expertise of the Figma team.

The idea was if a non-designer could write the content, then it wasn’t deep enough.

Designers needed to respect the craft behind it. Only then would they feel heard and understood - rather than marketed to.

This put quality ahead quantity. Or for the more fancy of you, depth over breadth.

And with every piece of content tried to rank highly on HN, Twitter, and Designer News.

Talking about content. If you’re looking to create GTM content that generates demand, check out Narrative. We’ve worked with some awesome companies and founders like YC and Noah Kagan. Plus we offer a 30-day money back guarantee if you’re not happy with your content - does anyone else do this nowadays?

Now let’s get back to the newsletter.

Then to scale this non-marketing, marketing approach, Figma made the next hire in their marketing team.

A Designer Advocate. A role they invented to talk with users and designers, and, well, advocate for them.

This role became crucial to build this initial credibility, showing care and appreciation for designers. And as they grew, scaled with them. Playing an integral role in Figma’s PLG motion (but more on this next week).

Okay, so Figma now has some street cred.

What next?

🤲 2. Build with your users

Figma’s history of building with its users predates its launch.

Dylan would go to designers when they were still building and ask them to complete tasks and workflows in front of him.

This helped Figma understand the behavior intuitive to designers. And importantly, how to map that to Figma.

He also wanted to get as much feedback as possible. So he would go back to the same designers showing them progress made and how they solved the feedback they previously brought up.

Post-launch, this only amplified.

Especially with the editor.

It was a tool for designers, the editor needed to have an awesome UI/UX.

One story I love which shows the extent they were willing to go to help their customers was with Coda, their first full time user.

After successfully getting them on board, Coda phoned them to say they couldn’t go through with it.

Why?

Their lead engineer couldn’t use the product.

But turns out the problem wasn’t Figma, it was the MacBook being used.

So Evan drove to Palo Alto to fix it.

But this obsession didn’t stop at the Founders. Each person in the Figma team really cared and listened to feedback from users.

They would all do support:

• Talking to users directly

• Jumping on calls

• Meeting in person

• Talking on Twitter

And all these actions snowball trust over time.

The more you prove to your users that they can trust you, the more they will.

Plus, actioning user feedback doesn’t just give users more trust in you.

It also gives them a feeling of ownership.

Users start to feel like they can have an impact on the product and its direction.

They tell you about an annoying UX feature, and the next week it’s fixed.

They tell you about an integration that would massively improve their lives and then it’s also suddenly there.

A bug? Fixed.

A tutorial? Added.

Users start to feel invested in the product. Almost like a team member. But all in their own special category: Champions.

Often though, the common behavior is to focus on the feedback from paid users.

They’re the ones buttering your buns after all.

But Figma listened to free users with the same rigor as its paid ones. This is crucial with a PLG-driven company.

You want free users to also feel this ownership. As free users are most often the gateway into your product spreading. Plus it will leave them thinking, “if they take free users this seriously, imagine the experience for paid ones.”

💌 3. Nurture trust over time

When trying to find your initial distribution, it’s important to remember that people don’t care about you.

This might sound harsh. But it’s true. No one knows you.

So you can’t expect users to come to you.

You have to find them. This is something we spoke about a lot together in our The Hustle deep dive - so go give it a read if you want to go a bit deeper on the concept.

Figma did exactly this going all in on Twitter (X if I have to). Specifically, the design community on the platform, as well as a network of design influencers.

Figma even built an internal scraper to find design influencers to make sure they were engaging with the most influential people.

This tool spotted clusters of design influence, and figured out who was at the center of them.

They then followed and built relationships with those people.

These clusters were different spheres of product design:

• Iconographers

• Graphic designers

• PMs, etc.

Figma was getting both breadth, by covering these different pockets of influence, and depth, by identifying the key people needed for a tipping point within them.

Then to position themselves as experts, Figma shared deeply technical content (as we talked about above), both as Figma, and as individuals.

This gave Figma, and their team, a presence with users. Now with a name and face to connect with.

To get people to stick with them they never hard sold with their socials.

Instead, always focusing on feedback and helpful content relating to Figma.

And in doing so, users were building trust with a variety of different Figma team members.

The next Figma builds trust with its users is to be completely transparent with them.

Which admittedly is easier to do at the start. But is more impactful the bigger you get.

Figma doesn’t hide behind its brand.

Creating personal connections within the design community, and giving them open access. Amplifying this was Figma scaling their Design Advocates (DA).

But I’m getting ahead of myself again, let’s leave this to next week and their role in getting Figma to spread beyond Champions.

Let’s get back to transparency.

The thing about transparency is that it requires a tradeoff.

You have to be vulnerable. Which means taking accountability - even when it’s hard.

So when you have a $20B acquisition offer and it’s stopped by regulators, you have to address it. Which Figma did with an open Twitter Space.

It also means that you have to consistently ask for feedback, face-to-face - which for Figma has led to major events that have become essential to the brand.

Config and Little Big Updates.

At Config, users decide what to speak about. And Figma finds the best ways to make those topics happen.

Which leads to deep and useful content for designers.

But Little Big Updates. What an awesome initiative.

Every so often the team fixes small bugs (is anything user related really small though?) that improve the quality of life of users.

Something that used to be 2 clicks? Now only 1.

Every little thing matters when it comes to your users’ experience. Few understand this more than Figma.

For The Zero to One, it’s been your host, Sheldon.

PS. I’m super excited about next week’s episode where we get really stuck into Figma’s PLG motion!

In case you missed it ⏮️

Last week was the first Figma deep-dive where we looked out how FIgma changed the default of design from singleplayer to multiplayer.

Bringing the whole team in to improve the design process and the final product. And becoming a truly revolutionary product in the process.

My picks to take your business to the moon 📽️

• Get an inside look into Figma’s GTM motion, this was super helpful for this episode (link)

• Samir and Shaan take a look at YouTube, business, and the intersection of it - old, but gold (link)

• Some gems in Greg Isenberg’s 2024 review - if you know where to look (link)

Tools of the week 🔨

• ElevenLabs: Free Text to Speech & AI Voice Generator.

• Vly: The easiest way to build custom full-stack software without code.

• Synthesia: Free AI Video Generator - Create AI Videos in 140 Languages. Turn text to video, in minutes.

Stay awesome and speak soon!

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