Claire Butler: evaluation

Transcript context

…Cool. And then you joined right before they launched. We're going to come back to what we were talking about, but just what did you see about that decision of now's the time to launch? 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. 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 have a milestone that we were working towards. We could have just kept building it quiet for a long time more, but it was very demotivating. So that was a very big part of this. So there was a desire holistically to get out of stealth. But we didn't want to do it until we knew it'd at least be successful. But that was a key thing for me. I was working on that messaging, positioning that I was telling you, like we would have this. [NEW_PARAGRAPH]I still have the doc actually where I was like, projected on the screen and Dylan and Sean and I picked apart every word of it and sharing with a link and multiplayer is the biggest thing. That's the core differentiator. It's really funny. I remember Ivan from Notion's early days, he stopped by and was chatting, and he's like, "Wait, you can't launch with that multiplayer." And I was like, "I know." So I was like, everybody was like, that was the core thing. But the idea was that 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 engineering 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 or could be built through that year. And we wanted to get more feedback from people 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, or is there enough fear for people to get excited?" At least my first three months, especially before we get going for the launch with the product, and probably even after that, I would just go around with Dylan and pilot or demo Figma to companies. That was a lot of what we did. So we'd go to these companies and we'd show them Figma and we'd get their feedback, and I would be 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. 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 after Vector Networks came out, after some of our other core features, there were enough things where people, I remember, they would 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 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 of 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 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. Let's get out of stealth."…

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