Claire Butler
Head of Go-to-Market & Growth at Figma
10th employee and first marketing hire at Figma, joining while still in stealth; led the original launch, go-to-market, branding, positioning, and messaging; continues to lead bottom-up growth, community, events, and Figma for education after eight years.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Claire Butler, Figma's 10th employee and first marketing hire, tells the inside story of growing Figma from stealth to a multi-billion dollar company through bottom-up growth, community building, and relentless user obsession. She shares the legendary story of driving to fix a customer's laptop just to keep their first user, and explains how early-stage marketing requires oscillating between strategic positioning work and hands-on grunt work.
Leadership Principles
- → Your first user matters so much that you'll drive an engineer to their office to fix their laptop just to get them using the product
- → At an early startup, you oscillate between high-level strategic decisions and total grunt work — both are equally important
- → Bottom-up growth requires genuine community building, social advocacy, and education — not top-down enterprise selling
Notable Quotes
"Coda was our first user. Their designer Jeremy said, 'Yes, we'll take this on full time.' We were so excited. Then we got back and Jeremy texts, 'I tried to share this with Philippe, my engineer, and he can't get the file to open.' Dylan was like, 'Everybody drop everything. We have to fix this.' Then they realized it was Philippe's MacBook, so Dylan had to drive Evan to Palo Alto to fix the MacBook just to get them to use the product."
— On Figma's legendary obsession with their first user
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