Claire Butler: evaluation

Transcript context

…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 gut, by trying to connect with people, listening to them. But when I look back is when I'm like, "Oh, this is 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 our go-to-market motion, and we've said it, we've called it a lot of things over time. We called it product-led, we called it community-led. The way I think about it now is this bottoms-up motion, that really is focused on ICs. So it's all focused on like, "Okay, so you have this core audience." For us it was designers and they're largely individual contributors, 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 it all the time. And they love you, 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 in the company and the brand. And they love you so much that they're willing to put their social capital and themselves in the line and spread the product throughout 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 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. And a lot of SaaS is tops-down where you go straight to a VP or an executive buyer, they then agree to buying a tool and then that goes down to their organization. I think with technical tools especially, this becomes really important. The practitioners have to love it. And also, sometimes I wondered as an executive care, you know what I mean, what tools people are using? And so for Figma, what that looks like and why this is so efficient of a go-to-market motion for us is, we actually didn't have a sales team for the first three years. So all of our revenue, it was paid, but it was all self-serve. And so we'd work with these. We weren't worried about things. I mean, you cared about security, but all of the org features that people need and want when you're working with procurement, we were just focused on technical features for users mostly. And then the individual contributor or maybe the manager would just put them on their credit card. That was the way that things grew. And so there was no sales team for a long time. We did have one eventually, and I'll talk about what that looked like. But then the second thing was, once we did have a sales team, and even up until now, so much of our revenue and our sales and our MQLs, our marketing qualified leads come from our free tier. ked like. But then the second thing was, once we did have a sales team, and even up until now, so much of our revenue and our sales and our MQLs, our marketing qualified leads come from our free tier. So it's people, they're using it, maybe they use it for free. We have a very robust free tier. Maybe they use it for pro, which is on your credit card. And then once it's widespread and they've gained the confidence, then they're ready to bring in sales work with procurement. And they actually come to us and they're like, "Hey, I work at this company. I really want to get my whole company to use it, but security's not letting me. Can you help me unblock it with them? " We didn't spend that much money, any money really programmatically on paid or programmatic marketing because all of our leads for sales would come in through a form on our website, which was current users either free or pro wanting to upgrade. And at that point, it's a very different sales conversation to unblock someone or to just help them implement Figma when they've already have an internal champion who's bought in, and they're really the one leading and driving the sale within their organization. So I think that that's made us really efficient as like this is a really efficient model and has really powered so much of our growth over time. Somebody listening to this that has a saying, B2B SaaS companies like, "Oh, okay, I just need to get people to love my product and it's going to be great." And so I want to unpack that just like what you did because it wasn't obviously an accident that people loved Figma. But before we get there, you talked about that there's a unique approach to the way you did bottom up. What do you see as what the typical bottom-up go-to-market motion is that other companies try to play that you think Figma did differently? Is it this obsession with ICs on teams or is there some other element of it?…

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