YouSaid · the spoken record

Claire Butler

lines on the record: 101
first: 2023-09-07
most recent: 2023-09-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Totally still do it, right? I think that's just so important that that's how it stays, right? In the early days, you do this stuff and you kind of get the flywheel going, you get these people, you have these people who love you. But today, that's still how Finna spreads the most, right? We're going into new markets, we're going into new places. We're launching a new tool. And that becomes so important to how we still drive adoption. And so some of those things, the tactics look a little bit different, but the themes are still the same and what that looks like at scale. A couple just examples of that are those advocates, right? That's, I think, a huge one. When I was a marketer, that advocate was just my partner. Like he got checked everything that I did. He'd be like, no, that's too thirsty or, you know, like you're using a fluff word again. Like, you know what I mean? Also, he was how we pitched the company. He was the people we talked to, go to lunch at Etsy or whatever and just get feedback on things.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just transparency and authenticity. So I think that that really comes into when you get to the scale part. Like, I'm talking about early days, being transparent with your users. And a lot of that does come down to the stuff we talked about too about downtime, about what that looks like. And we just did that naturally with people one-on-one in those early days. But I think where it gets harder and we stuck with it because it's like in our DNA and how we act is when you get to scale, right? And you have to like still do that stuff with a lot of people who care who do these things with you. But I think it's just so important that you are honest. Also, they don't hide behind the brand, right? That you're human and authentic and transparent with people. And we come up with examples. I think the better examples are probably at scale than even in the early days because that's when it gets harder to do that.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh no, we never hard sold the product of life. Like, it was always about feedback. And I think that that's so key to all of this is all about feedback.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's so good. We still use it. Like, if we use it again when we're launching another product, because we're like, oh, can we go pull that Twitter graph for another audience? I don't know if we ended up using how much we ended up using it, but I definitely looked at it and I was like, oh, this is so interesting to see for developers or whatever it was that we were looking at.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To go to them. And so for us, Dylan really identified immediately that Twitter was the place where that existed. And then we had nothing to do with us specifically, like the design community existed on Twitter way before we did. And that's something that they just”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, the next one is so this can take time, right? I think that's a big one. And also, in the early days, they're not going to necessarily use you right away, right? And so it might take time. And then also when you do get a couple people who start to use your product, they're going to also start wondering what other people think about your product. And when you're first, you're the only marketing hire. And this is what something marketers ask me a lot when they're the only marketer in an organization is like, how do you focus and prioritize? Because there's so many things you could do. How do you decide what to do? And so the thing that I think about a lot in this early phase in thinking about ICs is how do you get to them and where can you go where they already are as opposed to making them come to you? Because I'm a firm believer. I think now we have spaces where people can come to us. But in the early days, especially like they're not going to come to your space, like they don't know you, they don't care about us you don't want to like go to your like Slack channel or something, right?”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we didn't have very many of them, right? But it's like, yeah, back to what you were saying earlier, how do you get one person to actually use it? And so we very much care that that one person stuck with it and didn't pounce.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it doesn't happen over time, but these are all things that maybe they just use it first or they're interested. But by the time they're getting to the organization level or, you know, the, I'm spreading this to my other spheres of influence, like my community, people I know, you're kind of putting yourself on the line, right? You're taking a risk when you're doing that, especially if it's your job, you're bringing other people in, and you're not going to do that unless you really believe in something. And so just using it isn't enough to get someone over that stage of going from just like a user to a champion, right? And so I think it is this love thing becomes important because you don't get the scalability and spread of someone doing this, like doing this for you unless they have that level of passion.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did it right, and that's just another way where you just build a strong relationship with people because they feel very invested in your journey with you.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me QA right now, right? And so, like, that was one example. We all did support back in that day, and the engineers would talk to users directly, get their feedback, and then go immediately fix things like bugs. And so those are just examples of in the early days what that looks like. And that, you know, just scales a lot over time as you're growing and you're talking to more people that advocate ended up helping us a ton when they came on board because you know some of the stuff I mean, none of this stuff scales, right? As your engineer, your engineers get due support forever. In the early days that becomes really important, but like when we brought that advocate in, their whole job was talking to users, getting them to try to use the product, but then taking their feedback back when it wasn't something that wasn't working, that helped us scale a lot. So that became really essential and a telling people, like, oh, we fixed this. It made them feel more ownership of the tool too, being like, oh, yeah, I asked them to do this.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that one, you know, I know you talked to Show, he talked a lot about this, right? This idea of like customer obsession and of building with your customers. And it also goes back to that whole decision that we talked about earlier about like when to come out of stealth. Like you can only build so much with your customers when you're in stealth because you don't have that many that know about you. But especially even in the early days when you only had a couple people.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that was when we started accelerating this much, much more, is when we brought in that desire advocates to help us with this full-time.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Took a long time. Also, like I had to work with an engineer or designer to do every single one, maybe like 10 at most. But those ones that went out like, you know, we tried to get on Hacker News. We tried to get at designer news at the time. Twitter, we can jump into that, but it was also extremely big for us. And so it was more about quality than it was about quantity”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, even though they were using it. I think that that was important, right? So, like, when we launched people wanted to test it, so it was cool and see what it is. But then they bounced, right? They're like, all right, this isn't advanced enough. I'll come back later, which is why we're like, give them reasons to come back being like, oh yeah, but like the pen tools always worked like this, but we did it like that. You should test that out, right? And so we kept giving them his nuggets of reasons to come back in. Remember, this is also before multiplayer. And so we couldn't collaborate, right? So it was like use the tool to do these things. So that really helped people come back into the tool and spend a little bit more time in it.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the very few people in the early days who just loved the product and was very passionate about it. And that became his full time job was to represent, to meet with users, to talk to them, to write content and create content, and to bring that back to the product. And that was what he did. And that designer advocacy positions actually scaled with Figma. We still have it today. I think it's kind of the magic dust, you call it, that we sprinkle on go to market to make a lot of our go-to-market function work. But yeah, we didn't focus on marketing or marketing like traditional marketing, right? We're very focused on the technical aspects.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basic. Like, I remember we did one on grids in the early days, and we went really deep on Joseph Mueller-Brockman and his influence on grids. And now I very much know who Joseph Mueller Brockman is because I work with designers. But at the time, I had to Google it. I was like, who is this? But that was one of my bars for if something would be good enough for our technical content was, yeah, if I could have written it, it's not good enough. And so that was key for us in building credibility because we had this design team. And then when six months kind of after we launched and I actually got to hire someone to do marketing with me, the first person I hired was actually a designer advocate. So it was not a marketer. It was someone who was a designer and we brought, you know, the designers and the engineers that I was trying to get to help me with stuff, like also had to design and build the product and have a ton of time. But this is an advocate was working full-time with me on this stuff. And he came from my user base. He was one.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like to use video game technology, WebGL, Evans, Prodigy. Let them not a design tool to work on the internet was just amazing, right? And so like there's a lot of engineering interest there on credibility building of like, how did you get this to work? So I got him to make technical content. And that, I think, was number one on Hacker News, right? That people were just interested in him. And then I had a design team. And our design team was our target audience. And so we talked a lot about how we chose to build features, all the things that went into it. So many of the primitives of design tools have been like that forever, right? And so we changed some stuff. So like one of them would be like, how we did grids or how we did vector networks. And we'd go into these really deep details of how we chose made those product decisions, all the craft decisions that went into it. And I remember one of my bars were deciding if something was like hit this or not. If they would be interested was like, did I understand it? You know what I mean? If I understood it, it was probably G basic. Or if I could have written it myself, it was probably too.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you use a word like efficiency, collaboration, all of those buzzwords. And it's like, I don't want to hear this, right? Traditional product marketing kind of stuff just doesn't work. They wanted to hear technical features. They wanted to understand how technical features work. They want to hear, you know, how am I going to use this? And then they'll see the benefits, but like they don't want to hear from marketers and they don't want to be marketed to. And so I think especially with our audience in the early days, one of the things that I did was really try to like not market. And that's so funny as a marketer to say that. But that was really core to build authenticity with people, right? And so the way that we did that in the early days was what we had was tool, right? And that's pretty much what we had. And we had a design team and an engineering team. And so we did some cool stuff in the tool. Like first of all, like the tool itself was a technical feat. Like it was the first time.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very quickly was that designers don't want to hear from marketers. They don't want to be marketed to you, and they have extremely high bullshit meter, right? They're like,”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That editor tool. The third is finding a place where you can, in a way that you can build this relationship over time. And maybe that's specifically through a channel where they don't have to come to you because they don't really care about you yet, right? And like they're probably not going to convert right away or start using you right away. So how do you like get them to stick with you over time? So find out the channel where you can do that and then continue to build that relationship with them. And then the four is like just being extremely transparent and honest to build that relationship with people. So I know those all sound really fuzzy. So maybe we can go into them specifically because they sound really fuzzy when you talk about them. And I saw a lot of stuff is hard like that where you're like, oh, that just sounds like buzzwords. I can give you some examples of these four things to maybe. So let's start the first one, credibility. Okay. So I was the first marketer of Figma. I think one of the things I learned right away.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And this is interesting when you think about the early days, too, right? Because you're like, all right, we don't exist. You get them to love you and like you're literally like they've never heard of you before. Also you were saying in your situation like, oh, I use Skatch. I was maybe in Photoshop before that, right? Something else. I just made the switch over to this new tool. We finally got it working. Like I really don't want to move tools again. So you have that inherent thing against it there. Especially like, so I thought about this and like, I think there are like four main areas that we focused on to make this start, right? To like get it going. And then we kind of still do this stuff today. So the first thing is all about credibility. And I think in that early days, especially credibility is so important in establishing that initial credibility. Again, especially with the technical audience like designers. The second is actually building the product with your users. And I know you had shown your podcast, and he talked a lot about this too, just the customer obsession that we have, the care of”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I don't know specifically, like Dylan specifically is such a hustler, right? Especially in those early days. And he would just willy anyone that he would meet, he would talk about figment with them. I don't remember who it was, but there was definitely a situation where he met someone in a lift and then they became one of our users. So he used every angle he could to try to get introduced to new designers, especially in his pre-launch days where we didn't have connections as many connections to just get people to try it out and get more feedback.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. And that's when these internal champions, like that's what the key is, and that's maybe the takeaway of how important these internal champions are because you just seem someone to land there, right? And then they'll be passionate enough. And you can see you can hover over and see this person's at the center of this note graph and all of these people that spread from this one person at the company. And that, I think, was the unlock to be like, oh yeah, these internal champions, they really, they're really the key to all of this.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, our data science team built it. I don't know if it's like, yes, I'm sure it's an internal tool. I just remember we would have, there's like a, there was like a website in mode or something that we would use. And you could type in an organization's name. You still could do this. It's like within our data analytics system. You type in the name of an organization and it just pulls up everybody and it shows like because Big Ma's spreads through new users, but also Gen 1, Gen 2, right? Like these people who invite people. And you can see these node graphs of like how somebody started Figma, maybe the center, and then they invited someone else, right? And so it shows like how that spread. And so you get these clusters and you can see the clusters are teams. But you can see like someone, you know, invited someone in a different org to a file. And then I started like a new center of a cluster, right? And so they're really interesting and you can pull up, yeah, you can type in any org, any org at Figma and see what that node graph looks like. But they're super interesting to see.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very comprehensive node graph, right? That had this massive thing of all these people from Microsoft using the product, but still it was only on credit cards, right? They weren't, I don't think we even had an enterprise product at this point, right? And so there was no salesperson for them to talk to. And Microsoft was like, wait a minute, like we need to organize this, we need security, we need account management, we need procurement involved. And I think that that's what it was, is like they wanted to pay for it, right? And they wanted us to have this enterprise product because they had these requirements and they wanted to have a better control over it because it was just popping up within the organization without their control. And so that's probably a good example of like what that looked like as bottoms of motion spread to a really large organization.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You literally do whatever Uber driver shared lifts. We can talk more about that, but yeah, you got to do whatever you can to get early people to talk to try your product out and get really scrappy. But for Microsoft, so over time, we would have, we had like a, I think it was, what was the team that got acquired that we went into Microsoft? I'll have to remember the name, but it was like a small team within Microsoft. And they were Xamarin. It was Xamarin. They were the ones who were using Figma first. And we saw that. And, you know, then, so they were that kind of patient zero at Microsoft. And then we had slowly over time more pockets within Microsoft used in the tool. But again, we've never gone through like Microsoft procurement, Microsoft security. It just ended up popping up throughout the organization. And we have these really cool node graphs that show this too, where like you'd have these little pockets of people and the node like jump to another, like they'd have one more collaborator and then jump to another pocket. And there were these really cool maps of how that spread within the organization. And eventually we got to the point where like that was.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's interesting, right? And that goes up to the bottoms of model we could talk about. So we would have, I think the difference, if you think about a company like Microsoft and what this looks like, this is just a really good example of this bottoms up market or motion in bottoms up motion in market, right? So here's a funny story that I want to add. Our first meeting with Microsoft actually came, and this is the scrappiness of working at an early stage startup because I slid into the DMs of my friend's ex-boyfriend. That's how we got our first meeting with Microsoft. Well done. I know, I know. And I saw that they had signed up for Figma. And I was like, wait a minute, I think I know this person. And that's how I chatted at them and first got feedback from them. So that's just a funny anecdote.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then also find more signal of the things that are working, whether it's anecdotal, talking to people, examples. And that becomes much more useful than hard metrics are sometimes.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In these early days, especially with bottoms up and with all these things, and people ask me all the time, how do you measure things in an early stage situation? And I maybe have a controversial point of view here. I don't think you can from a metric side. Like your numbers are so small. One of the quotes I always like to say, and I say this now too when we're doing stuff because we're launching new products and it comes up a lot, is like you can't optimize your way to product market fit, right? Like, I don't care at the early stages if something's like optimized by 5% from like an email, right? Like that doesn't fundamentally tell me if something's working or not. So like, I think metrics are really hard and signal is actually way more important. Like can you get a couple people who love it, right? Not like a slight improvement of a conversion of a landing page, right? And so I think that metrics are really hard in that way. They can like help you. But when the numbers are so small, you kind of have to, again, trust yourself a lot more and have more intuition.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I wasn't sure if they'd use it as a team, even if I wasn't sure if they'd buy it, we weren't selling it yet. They wanted to try it and they were excited about it. And that kind of emotion, no reaction of wanting to play with it in these demos was really what gave me confidence that we were ready to launch. And we had a couple teams, small numbers, and happened to talk about metrics and how hard it is to deal with metrics with this size. But very small numbers, but we had teams who were using it full-time. So we knew that some people were using it full-time and people who weren't were really excited to try and were like very impressed with the technical feat of it all and interested. And to me, that was enough confidence that like, okay, it's worth it.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Denmoth Figma to companies. That was like a lot of what we did, right? So we'd go to these companies and we'd show them Figma and we'd get their feedback. And I would be kind of driving around in Palo Alto around the city doing that with Dylan. And sometimes people didn't care. They were just like, what is this? I don't want to design online, things like that. But what we wanted to see, what I wanted to see was that designers were excited when they saw the tool. And once we got enough features and I saw this pretty quickly actually when I joined Figma is that the people that we showed it to were really interested in it and cared about it. And I remember there were after vector networks came out after some of our other features. There were enough things where people, I remember they would like take the laptop out of Dylan's hands when he would start showing it because they wanted to play with it. And to me, when I started seeing designers do that, even”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was chatting, and he's like, Wait, you can't launch with a multiplier. And I was like, I know. So it was like everybody was like, that was the core thing. But the idea was that we had, we wanted to get out of stealth. We talked to Evan, our CTO, and knew it would take about another year for him to build it. And for me, it was like, well, is there enough here to get people excited to start and to get users, get more feedback? Because Evan was kind of building multiplayer. I don't know enough about the engineer if he was doing it on his own or not, but he was the key person doing it. But there are a lot of other things too that were being built, could be built through that year. And we wanted to get more feedback from people, right? And to start really get started. And so to me, the things that I wanted to see before just deciding like, okay, so we don't have our key feature. Can we still launch? Is there enough fear for people to get excited? And my first, you know, at least my first three months, especially before we got going for the launch with the product and probably even after that, I would just go around with different.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it was a couple things. So I think the first thing is that the team had been building quietly by themselves in isolation for three years. And that's hard, right? Like I think that that was a very real part of the decision to get out of stealth was that people had been building for such a long time. We needed momentum. We needed to like have a milestone that we were working towards. And when you're just, we could have just kept building it quiet for a long time more, but it was very demotivating, right? So that was like a very big part of this. So there was a desire holistically to get out of self, but we didn't want to do until we knew it would at least be successful. But that was a key thing for me. Like, I was working on that messaging positioning that I was telling you, like, we would have, I still have the doc, actually, where it was like on the projected on the screen. And Dylan and Joan, I picked apart every word of it. And sharing with a link and multiplayer is the biggest thing. Like that's the core differentiator. It's really funny. I remember Ivan from Notion was in Notions early days. He stopped by.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I guess I think it was 20. That they started, and then we launched in at the end of 2015. So between around there, yeah, around three or four.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know. I know we can talk about that if you want to know making a decision of when to go to self because we almost didn't because it didn't have multiplayer.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's actually like you stay for the collaboration. You don't want to talk about it or learn about it, or nobody wants to start collaboration. You just want it to work, right? You care about the tool and that the tool's working well. And so I think that maybe that's the difference is the obsession with the tool itself.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are other people who do bottoms up and who do it well. I think for us, it's unique because the individual contributor spends so much time in the tool and it's so important to them. I think about things that we focus on where it might take like one click off of someone's workflow. That seems like a really small update, right? Like you have to click one time instead of twice to do something. But when you're a designer and you're in a tool eight hours a day, saving that one click is huge, right? And so I think the obsession with quality and with craft within the editor, right, for us, for figmat is maybe the difference. And I think about other go-to-market tools that maybe focus so much on the collaboration side or like the product led of the expansion. And that is a huge part segment, don't get me wrong. But the tool itself, right? Like the editor, that's where it all starts. And that's what these people love. And then the collaboration is kind of like, yes, it's the thing that's like our differentiator.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wondered as an executive care. You know what I mean? Like what tools people are using? And so for FIGMO, what that looks like and why this is like”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the company and the brand. And they just love you so much that they're willing to put their social capital and themselves in the line and spread the product throughout their whatever their communities are. And the one that's connected the most to revenue is companies. And so that's where the revenue model really kind of clicks in is you have all these individual contributors who love you, but then they also work at these big companies and these big orgs and they become these internal champions who spearhead adoption within their organizations and eventually turn into large amounts of revenue. And I think of that as our bottoms up motion. And that's different from tops down a lot of SaaS is tops down where you go straight to like a VP or like an executive buyer. They then like kind of like agree to doing a tool and then that kind of goes down to their organization. I think with technical tools, especially like this becomes really important, the practitioners have to love it, right? And also sometimes.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've reflected back to get to some of these answers. I think in the moment, so much of what we were doing was influenced by like gut, by like trying to connect with people, listening to them. But when I look back as when I'm like, oh, this is like a repeatable motion. So when I look back at it, I would say that if I were to define and think about how I define go to market or go to market motion, and we've called it a lot of things over time, right? We called it product led, we called it community-led. The way I think about it now is this bottom-up motion that really is focused on ICs, right? So it's all focused on like, okay, so you have this core audience for us as designers and they're largely individual contributors, right? So they're people who are practitioners who are using your tool. For us, it's like eight hours a day. If you're a designer, you're in Fitmall all the time. And they love you, right? And you build this relationship with them within the product, but it's beyond the product, right? It's also believing what the product can be.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of who he was, and that's how he is with everything, and so that's how he's with me. That's how he is with, and he obstacle that he has. And so when I looked at that, I was just like, all right, let's give this a go. And I didn't know, right? Like I didn't know. I had no idea it would be as big as it is today. So some of it was luck too for sure. But those are the three things of like how I made my decision.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And emails, and that's really inefficient. And it made a ton of sense to me that yes, that should be online and collaborative. So that was like the first thing that I was like, check the box. The next one was I knew people who believed in it. So I got introduced to Dylan via Index. They were an investor at the last company I was at. And Danny Reimer specifically and my old boss, Greg Smiran, who was an EIR there. And I trusted them a lot. And they invested in it. I also met John Lilly. I didn't know who he was. I had to Google him. But he seemed really smart. And when they Googled in, he was very impressive and he believed in it. So that was great. And then I think the third thing was I remember when I was trying to decide Dylan really didn't take no for answer. He's very persuasive. And I remember he'd call me and texted me and then I'd have all these like concerns or things and he would just like pick them apart one by one of reasons why they weren't real concerns or things to get over them. And so I think that that was the third thing is like that's.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I had been another startup before Figma a little bit bigger. I think I joined at Series B and then got through on acquisition. And I had a sense that I wanted to do something early. So I'd already kind of made that decision that I wanted to go early stage. So I'll take the decision making part out. But then from there, I was talking to a couple different companies. And when I went to FINMA, there were kind of three areas that struck the most to me. The first was it logically made sense. And I know maybe that sounds basic, but like I was talking to like a drone company or like a SaaS like ad tech company. And I just didn't get it, honestly. Like it didn't intuitively make sense to me or I didn't understand the technology or something, but a Figma, the basic premise, like immediately logically clicked for me. Like, oh yeah, I use Google Docs. I use Asana. I use all these online tools. Like, that's so weird that designs not online. Like, why isn't it? And as a marketer, I worked with designers and sent feedback.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I Dylan, but we just did it, right? Especially in those early days. I remember there were a couple freak out moments where I would like try to get our VCs to help us. I remember Greylock was helpful. Elise over there. But ultimately, like they don't know that, you know, they help a lot, but they don't know your business as intimately as you do. At the end of the day, that's something Dylan's really good at is trusting his intuition and gut. And so he was helpful in the decision making. But then also you just got to go for it. And I think that that's something that I learned at that time that's helped me throughout the rest of my career is like building that confidence or that trust in yourself because it wasn't something that I necessarily immediately had.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not actually. So I think the most stressful thing I was thinking about this was when we launched out of stealth. So like I come into Figma. I had lots of experience.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The name change or the first day. No, that was literally my first day No, no, no, that was my first day and my second day. Like, not even kidding. My first day, I made the recommendation. The second day I gave the presentation and the decision was made.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think we probably would have changed it later, you know. I think we just saved ourselves some time and without having to change it.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The food and everything there. And I just Instacarted some things and ordered some pizza, but I'd forgotten ice. And so I had to go walk down to the nearest corner store, which was like three blocks away or something and get ice. And I got like four bags. And I remember I was walking down the street, down probably 3rd Street with like three bags of ice. And it was really heavy. And I remember thinking, this is so hard. This is so heavy. I can't carry all this ice. And it's just like that's that too. Like probably like the next week. And so I think it was just this oscillation between like, oh, we're making these high-level strategic decisions and someone else has to go by the ice. That's what it was like at Pigment in the early days.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An immediate reaction of like, we cannot name this thing Summit. That's not going to work. We can't have two brands. Summit's not ownable. Like we can't build equity and like multiple things. Like that's just never going to work. We kind of have to just stick with one. And I think Figma is ownable and makes sense. And we should just go with Figma. So we kind of should probably kill the summit thing until instead to me. He was like, oh, that's interesting. How about you make a presentation and present it to everyone tomorrow? And so I did that. I was like, oh, okay. I guess this is what I'm doing the rest of the day. So I went and made a little presentation about, you know, like how we couldn't build all this equity in two places and all of the things. And then the next day, we decided to kill that name. And so we went with Figma for the name of the product instead of Summit. And that's how fast things moved, right? And how much you just kind of ran with it and had ownership. I compare that to the first meetup we had, which was probably just like 10 people in the office, honestly. But I remember I was like, you know, I was in charge of that. So I always like had to get all.”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally. That's a true question. We were right downtown on New Montgomery and Minna. And I think the thing that sticks out to me is actually two competing stories that talk about just how much at that time you'd oscillate between these like really high-level strategic decisions and then like total crunk work, right? So like my first day at Figma, I come into the office and we're going through some stuff. There's like 10 of us in the office. We're chatting and I look at some of the plans, some of the things they're working on. And I see that they were actually had some branding and positioning and things that the product Figma was going to be named Summit. That was the name. So the company was going to be Figma. And then the product suite, the product design tool, right? was going to be Summit with the idea that, you know, eventually we'll have other tools and that could be like mountaintop or I don't know what the rule out they had a whole thing around the different things that could be for the future product set and I remember my first day”
2023-09-07 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source