Figma had been building quietly for years by the time it needed to launch. The team knew early that the one feature that would make designers switch tools was multiplayer, the ability to edit the same file live with someone else instead of emailing versions back and forth and losing track of which one was current, the exact pain Sketch users lived with. Multiplayer still wasn't finished when the team decided they'd waited long enough, so they shipped a closed beta in 2015 anyway and kept building the hardest feature in public, alongside the people already using it.
Before that beta even opened, Figma had no community of its own, so the team built one relationship at a time inside the design community that already existed. "In stealth, you don't have your own community because you don't exist in the real world yet," said Claire Butler, Figma's first business hire. "It's about building individual relationships with people in communities that have already taken shape." She spent her early months sitting in on customer conversations with cofounder and CEO Dylan Field, and they skipped the usual sales pitch to go straight to a product demo, because designers wanted their hands on the tool, not a conversation about their problems.
On launch day, the team had mapped the design community on Twitter by influence, who the typographers, illustrators, and product designers with real reach were, then reached out to them individually. One team member who had attended the Rhode Island School of Design contacted its dean at the time, John Maeda, and asked him to look at Figma. Figma's head of engineering, who had previously worked at Medium, reached out to Ev Williams.
Soon after, Figma tweeted an invite for closed beta users to come by the office for pizza. About ten people showed up. One of them, Brent, loved the product enough to join as Figma's first design advocate and became the face of the company to other designers, running a weekly live competition called Pixel Pong with his own circle of designer friends.
Figma also stayed completely free for two years after launch, so anyone could use it for a side project even if their employer wouldn't pay for it yet, and come back to it on their own terms. Years later, Figma said 87% of new users had been invited by a colleague, the clearest sign that the product itself, not a campaign, was the acquisition channel.
- Shipped a closed beta before the signature multiplayer feature was finished, then kept building it in public with early users.
- Skipped the sales pitch in every early conversation and led with a live product demo instead.
- Mapped the design community on Twitter by influence and reached out to specific people individually on launch day.
- Turned an enthusiastic beta user into a paid design advocate who ran his own recurring community event.