"we had Kota they were our first user and they were based in paloalto uh Dylan and I drove down and demoed the product to them and they were the first ones their designer Jeremy was like yes we'll take..."

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"million questions I want to ask about how figma grew and all the things that went into it I'm curious what it was like to be early days at figma is there a memory that comes to mind that's zany funny ..."

"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 ..."

"it I would say that if I were to Define and think about how I Define go to market or our go to market motion and we've said it we've called it a lot of things over time right we called it product Le p..."

"Bottoms Up motion and that's different from tops down and a lot of SAS is tops down where you go straight to like a VP or a buyer like an executive buyer they then like kind of like agree to doing a t..."

"programmatic marketing because all of our leads for sales would come in through like a form on our website which was current users either free or Pro wanting to upgrade and at that point it's a very d..."

"with quality and with craft within the editor right for us for figma 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 p..."

"yeah let's that was our poor differentiator and we can't not have it but then you know we did anyway so yeah let's take a tangent there actually just that decision to go from stealth so figma was in s..."

"a very big part of this so there was a desire holistically to get out of self but we didn't want to do it until we knew it' at least be successful but that was a key thing for me like I was working on..."

"that I would just go around with Dylan and pilot or demo 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' get their feedback a..."

"and we had a couple teams small numbers and happy to talk about like metrics and how hard it is to deal with metrics at this size but um very small numbers but we had teams who were using it full-time..."

"people describe as you feel pull someone's literally pulling it from your hands you talked about metrics that you maybe could share what what could you share there in these early days especially with ..."

"in that way they can like help you but when the numbers are so small and you kind of have to again trust yourself a lot more and have more intuition but then also find more signal of things that are w..."

"them to talk to and Microsoft was like wait a minute like we need to organize this know I mean like we need security we need account management we need procurement involved and um I think that that's ..."

"figuring out who spreads to who and who's off totally and that's when these internal Champions like that's what the key is and that's maybe the takeaway of like how important these internal Champions ..."

"key to all of this I remember spreading at Airbnb early on I think it was when airb be was one of the early customers and it was just one designer a few designers starting to spread to the product man..."

"so let's let's get back on track we were talking about the go to market motion that you executed and modeled at figma and if there's kind of these two steps Right Step One is get IC to love you and th..."

"still do the stuff today so the first thing is all about credibility and I think in the early days especially credibility is so important in establishing that initial credibility again especially with..."

"so I know those all sound really fuzzy so maybe we can go into them specific because they sound really fuzzy when you talk about it and a lot of stuff is hard like that where you're like oh that just ..."

"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 that's pretty much what we had and we had a design team and we had an enginee..."

"credibility because we had this design team and then when like six months kind of after we launched and I you know I'm I actually got to hire someone to to do marketing with me the first person I hire..."

"exactly what we did yes so ways you build credibility just kind of mirroring back what you shared one is writing content basically putting out block posts that designers would be like oh wow this was ..."

"awesome okay so one is put out great content people are like oh wow figma's got some new ideas and maybe I should pay attention the other is having someone that's that function talk to them yes that w..."

"you know just scales a lot over time as you're 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 mea..."

"this but interestingly this is very much doing things that don't scale driving to their office fixing their Wi-Fi on their laptop early days nothing scales in early days you just have to do it anyway ..."

"are taking that in you shared the story of Kota and show and actually he was he wasn't on the podcast he wrote a newsletter and he shared all this stuff I read it yes yes yes yeah people often confus ..."

"about assembly AI which makes it easy to transcribe and understand speech at scale what I love about assembly AI is you can use their simple API to access the latest AI breakthroughs from Top tier res..."

"Lenny so coming back to this go to market model that we're talking about so we're kind of still talking about get ic's at a company to Love You So step one was build credibility step two I don't know ..."

"they don't want to like go to your like slack Channel or something right like you have to go to them and so for us Dylan really identified immediately that Twitter was the place where that existed and..."

"engineer if you don't know that about him or a scrappy engineer who can figure things out and he had this idea and he built this tool or this SC this scraper where he identified a couple influencers i..."

"days and that's also where we pushed out that technical content that I was talking about and then we tried to just like drive and spur conversation about these things first it was our launches but the..."

"and I think the focus on that and I think why it's so important is it allows people to passively follow you over time without having to invest in you with the rule you know um so it was our way especi..."

"about feedback awesome there's so many lessons here there's a fourth bullet I think around building relationships with users oh just transparency and authenticity so I think that that really comes int..."

"updates thing on their website yeah Airbnb shifted fully to that which is only big launches just wait twice a year and launch a bunch of stuff that's exact ex L it's fully how they operate that that's..."

"like you know you might not or downtime downtime is is always a big deal and I remember there is a specific instance I think it was last year maybe two years ago where there was like this isue with th..."

"we announced it was we just retweeted Dylan that was like all that we had said rajie on our team he I remember I was talking to him about it and he was like we've got to talk to our users like we just..."

"figma is that yes have you codified your values and is that one of them and is there anything there we have codified our values it isn't explicitly listed out which is interesting but I think of it as..."

"to shift to kind of the second step of the go to market motion but before I do that I have a couple things I want to touch on briefly one is you haven't mentioned config this conference that you ran w..."

"is very technical deep content that targets individual contributors for the practi practitioners of the tool and through that process we build this these relationships with these speakers our Advocate..."

"it's like how to actually do stuff not just a bunch of Big Ideas yeah no no fluff I remember seeing a tweet about it where someone filmed being inside of and they're like this like a it's like a raw c..."

"so those are the four things and again it looks different similar concepts with different ideas when you look at that in the early days versus like what we do today with it with scale awesome let's ge..."

"the place where you can see it the metrix very clearly right where it's like oh this is really easy for people now to share before they have to start paying this is huge right and so then you get peop..."

"to make that happen is there anything else you learned about what should be in free and pay Wald versus what should be in freemium just like broad thoughts well I think the other interesting thing is ..."

"confidence in the tool the other really important Nuance in the way that you structured pricing it's Unlimited viewers yes but it's just editors that you charge for so true you know so many people esp..."

"like okay yeah it is not that much in the scheme of things I'm just going do but it's interesting how like it's not that much but I still like nah I don't really want to pay that if oh for sure we all..."

"designer Advocate started who eventually the first designer Advocate left it did something else and we brought in another designer Advocate and he started in the first day that the sales team started ..."

"calling it The Tom Factor like what with join stuff because it wasn't necessarily like a structured process at the beginning they just be like hey Tom can you come help talk to this company with us or..."

"product spread within an organization talked about developer Advocates you talk about making it easier to spread what else let's talk about Design Systems so let's say you're a designer and you know y..."

"Systems meetups and we were all like what are Design Systems right or I was like what is Design Systems and then I went and read a pattern way of thinking and atomic Brad Frost atomic structures Desig..."

"because these these people are not the people making the design systems are not like the VP still right like the next phas of Bottoms Up are the ic's and then the Design Systems people and now those i..."

"it's technical I think that helps a ton coming back to the strategy of helping figma spread within organization I think you mentioned there's one more item around Champions oh yeah so the just the las..."

"helping the product spread yeah I think the key thing is that you have to keep doing it so one of the things that I feel like I my RO now figma that I think a lot about is like how I can keep advocati..."

"everyone this sort of approach let's say every B2B SAS company what are may be prerequisites for who should apply these sort of the sort of approach in this motion yeah I feel this lot myself actually..."

"started because we didn't have to make something to bring people to us we had a distribution Channel already in place that we could kind of work through so that helped a ton and I think the last one w..."

"after the fact this reminds me of another story show shared with me about Uber which was also very classically not collaborative and very siloed and there was a big push to adopt vigma to help encoura..."

"interesting too because I was just like thinking when I was just now that I was talking about earlier about how trusting yourself and trusting intuition is like the hardest part most stressful part in..."

"reached our very exciting lightning round are you ready yes what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people I recommend management books a lot to people the other piece of thi..."

"that I can give you two quick tips right now one is there's a guest post during my Pat leave that Tamara I forget her last name wrote which is a basically a leave guide like a guide to I'm working on ..."