An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire)

**Claire Butler** (0:00)
We had Coda, they were our first user, and they were based in Palo Alto.
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 this on full time. And I remember we were both like, what, really, we will?
That was like the first person who said yes to us. And so we were like so excited. This was like a huge milestone. We were just so stoked. And then we got back to the office, and I think Dylan gets a text from Jeremy being like, oh yeah, I tried this gym, this was the lead, my engineer and he can't get the file to open, and so I guess we can't use it. And we're like, what is it? What happened? And this is finally got someone. And I remember Dylan was like, everybody drop everything, we have to fix this. And after some, you know, looking at the servers and things, they were like, nothing's wrong. And then they realized this problem with the Leap's MacBook.
And Evan, Evan had a car, so Dylan had to drive Evan down to Palo Alto to fix the MacBook of the Leap, just to get them to use the product.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:54)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Claire Butler. Claire started at Figma while they were still in stealth as their 10th employee and their first ever marketing hire. She led their original launch and go-to-market and also their branding and positioning and messaging work.
And eight years in, she continues to lead their go-to-market and bottom-up growth motion along with community, events, social, advocacy and Figma for education teams. In our conversation, we get the first ever in-depth glimpse into how Figma grew and continues to grow. Claire shares her two-part go-to-market strategy, which involves getting ICs at a company to love you and then enabling them to spread the product within the organization. She shares tons of amazing stories and examples and lessons from how the Figma team executed the strategy and how you can apply it to your own product. This is an incredible episode with so many gold nuggets of wisdom, you'll probably want to listen to it more than once.
With that, I bring you Claire Butler after a short word from our sponsors.
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Claire, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Lenny.

**Claire Butler** (3:54)
I'm excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:55)
You've been on my wishlist of guests for a long time, and so I'm really excited to be finally chatting. You were the 10th employee at Figma, which is now worth tens of billions of dollars, depending on which valuation you look at, and probably thousands of employees. I don't even know, but many, many.
And you joined before the product even launched. And so I have a 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, fun, tangible of just like what it was like to work at Figma in the early days?