The Story of Figma🎨

How do you go from this👇

🧭 𝗣𝗟𝗔𝗡:

• Drop out of University

• Join the Thiel Fellowship to work on software for drones

• Pivot to the “Photoshop in the Browser”

• Revolutionize the design industry 🎨

To this?👇

💥 𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗟𝗜𝗧𝗬:

• YEARS of development and iteration ⏳

• Overcome significant technical challenges

• Convince skeptical designers to switch to a new tool

• Launch a product that changes the way designers work

• From competing with Adobe to almost getting acquired by them

This is how Dylan Field and Evan Wallace built a tool that is being used by millions of designers and teams around the world.

Let’s get into it. This is the Story of Figma 🎨

It’s 2012 and Dylan Field just dropped out of Brown University. This was the main requirement to get funding and become a member of the Thiel Fellowship. But he applied to the Thiel Fellowship with a way different idea than Figma. It was to build better software for drones.

This is a short snippet from his application to the Thiel Fellowship:

The “smartest programmer he knows” was Evan Wallace. Dylan was obsessed with drones, but Evan (who had actually spent a lot of time building/programming drones) was pushing Dylan to work on something related to WebGL instead of drones.

This was also the time when he showed him a graphics demo that landed Evan in WIRED.

So they pivoted towards building what they called “Photoshop in the browser” which was inspired by a 3D demo of a ball floating in water that Wallace had built previously👇

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What if we brought design software to the browser, and at the same time, we made design multiplayer?

This was the idea and it seems simple now but at the time was very bold and came with technical challenges.

Traditional design tools were siloed, non-collaborative, and required powerful hardware.

So Dylan and Evan wanted to create a cloud-based design tool that would allow designers to collaborate in real-time, from anywhere in the world.

“Photoshop in the browser” was a strong pitch that secured them a $3.8M seed round from Index and Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO at the time.

This was the first pitch they used at the time:

With money in the bank, they started to work on Figma’s first version. But Photoshop has tons of use cases, so they built a series of disconnected projects:

• Color Lines

• Poisson Blending on the CPU

• Image Cutting

• Photo Editor

and wait for it... The team spent a week building a meme generator, which Dylan calls "the worst week of Figma".

He asked himself if it was worth dropping out of Brown University for this? The team lacked focus. Everyone in the company had a different vision for what they were building. 

Investor John Lilly passed on the Seed round. He was honest with Dylan. He told him, “I just don’t think you know what you’re doing yet”.

So one day, Dylan sat down with everyone at the company to decide on a focus. They killed off several features, including: 

• animation

• 3D design

• photo editing

• paint 

The early Figma team chose to focus on interface design. But building it into a good product people loved using was a different story…

It took them 3 years of building and iterating in stealth mode before launching on September 27, 2016. Contrary to the common startup advice of “launch fast and early” this is how they got there👇

3 years is a long time. Morale dropped in this period. In all those user discovery sessions, it wasn’t even clear their vision made sense.

These were actual things designers testing Figma said:

• “Tripping over each other on one artboard is an extremely hostile assault on our virtual system and workflow.”

• “If this is the future of design, I’m changing careers.”

• “Cool idea, but seems non-practical.”

On top of the negative user feedback, it didn’t help that Dylan was pushing the team hard and held a high-quality bar.

So Dylan brought in Sho Kuwamato. Sho acted as a “late co-founder.”

At that point a technology industry vet with 20 years of experience at Macromedia, Adobe, and Medium, he helped bring a dose of adult leadership to the young team.

Meanwhile, to get to launch readiness, the team focused on getting one customer to use Figma full-time.

They eventually found that customer in Coda.

Once they had Coda, they were maniacal about offering quality service to make sure that customers liked Figma. As Claire Butler explains:

With their first customer on board, they were getting ready to launch. The next step was to select which features to include and which ones to leave out. Most people don’t know this, but Figma didn’t launch with multiplayer.

As Sho explains:

After 3 crazy years of development, Figma launched its Closed Beta in December 2015.

The team went so far as to put multiplayer at the center of their messaging — even though it wasn’t ready yet:

The press release for the launch was a banger. Dylan called out his larger rival and made his roadmap clear:

The stealth company managed to get TechCrunch and VentureBeat features on launch day. On top of that, they did an all-out social media blitz.

But just because you have a lot of buzz, it doesn’t mean your future is secure and you will grow automatically…

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As the closed beta members gave Figma feedback, they took it more than seriously.

Even after Figma hired a dedicated support team, designers and developers were still staying close to customers. Engineers were spending more than 20% of their time on customer support.

This allowed them unique insight to quickly iterate the product to a great state.

On top of that, the team nailed it with the next launches:

1. Slack integration

2. Vector editing

3. Sketch Import

4. Real-time simultaneous editing

All these features put together worked. They created major market demand for the product.

It helped that Figma was free through 2017. It was the PLG model to a degree most companies can’t even dream of.

But when Figma finally started charging, that didn’t hinder growth in the slightest.

In fact, Dylan tells the anecdote of a Microsoft executive who asked them to start charging so they could adopt the product more widely:

So Figma went from a 10% market share in 2017 to 90% in 5 years:

It’s hard to overstate how quickly the shift happened.

Here’s what someone from the front lines had to say - former InVision founder and CEO Clark Valberg:

Over the years, there have been a number of important core product releases, from components (2016) and team libraries (2017) to Figma 2.0 (2017) and Plugins (2019).

Figma was a “core product” company for the first few years. But in the 2018-2020 period, it accelerated those market share gains by building out its growth motion.

2 key components were:

1. Enterprise sales team (2018): this team navigated the long sales cycles of B2B, worked with central procurement departments, and executed a prototypical product-led sales motion.

2. Growth product team (2020): this team iterated on pricing & packaging, developed Figma’s experimentation and localization platforms, and grew to 3 product squads with over 24 engineers.

All these efforts set Figma up to be ready for the 2020 Covid pandemic. As teams were all going remote, Figma had built the core product up to a level for massive enterprises and startups alike to make the shift to Figma.

If collaboration had to be remote, companies had to choose the best remote collaboration tools. And for design, Figma was clearly that.

All this put together culminated in Figma owning the interface design market 🦄

In short, Figma has an inspiring story…

From building various features and not knowing what they are doing to $20B and dominating the market with 90% market share in just a few years.

Usually, founders launch quickly and iterate but in this case, Figma stayed patient and wanted to really build something super useful for 1 area.

It’s still fascinating how they had the conviction to keep going during those 3 years and keep on doing product discovery without pivoting to another industry or idea.

They also mastered the GTM Strategies of Product-Led, Sales-Led, and Community-Led Sales similar to Notion.

It all almost came together when Adobe tried to acquire Figma for $20B when they realized they couldn’t compete and Figma was the dominant player in design.

Now with AI on the horizon, it looks like it will be even easier to build amazing designs with the power of AI.

Thank you for taking the time to read the story of Figma.

I went back to the original format based on the previous polls but tried to keep the text shorter and include more quotes, images, and videos. I hope it helped and inspired you.

— Mehmet Karakus