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

1. Implement Bottom-Up GTM

Focus your go-to-market strategy on individual contributors (ICs) by building a deep relationship with them, aiming for them to “love” your product so much they become internal champions willing to spread it throughout their organizations.

2. Obsess Over Tool Quality

For technical tools, prioritize the quality and craft of the core editor/tool itself, as individual contributors who spend hours daily in the product highly value even small improvements.

3. Aim for User “Love”

Strive for users to deeply “love” your product, not just use it, because this profound passion is essential for them to become champions willing to risk their social capital to spread it within their organizations.

4. Integrate Technical Advocates

Hire “advocates” (e.g., designer advocates, developer advocates) who are technical experts and passionate users from your target audience to build credibility, gather feedback, create authentic content, and significantly boost sales deal close rates.

5. Structure Free Tier for Collaboration

Design your product’s free tier to prioritize unlimited collaboration (e.g., unlimited viewers, many collaborators on limited files) over unlimited individual features, removing friction for team adoption and enabling product spread.

6. Turn Blockers into Advantages

Identify significant blockers to product adoption (e.g., missing key features for large organizations) and strategically invest in transforming them into core features or advantages that drive upgrades and widespread organizational use.

7. Go Where Users Are

Instead of trying to attract users to your own channels, actively engage with them on platforms where your target community already congregates (e.g., Twitter for designers) to build connections and gather feedback.

8. Build Credibility with Technical Content

For technical audiences, avoid traditional marketing fluff; instead, build credibility and authenticity by focusing on deep technical content, feature explanations, and detailed insights into how the product works.

9. Building with Users: Everyone Does Support

In the early days, have everyone, including engineers and founders, directly engage with user support to quickly debug issues, gather feedback, and foster strong user relationships, making users feel invested.

10. Building with Users: Foster Ownership

Actively communicate to users when their feedback has led to product improvements, fostering a sense of ownership and strengthening their relationship with your product.

11. Building with Users: Scale with “Little Big Updates”

Implement “quality weeks” where engineers fix small, user-reported annoyances, then package and launch these “little big updates” together to demonstrate ongoing commitment to user experience and quality of life.

12. Building with Users: Empower Engineers to Pick Fixes

During quality sprints, empower engineers to choose which small bugs or annoyances to fix, allowing them to feel ownership and directly address user feedback from sources like Twitter or support.

13. Maintain Champion Relationships

Continuously nurture relationships with internal champions, addressing their concerns and supporting their success, as they remain critical for ongoing product spread and advocacy within organizations.

14. Amplify Champion Careers

Support and amplify your internal champions’ professional growth by offering opportunities like speaking at events, social media amplification, and thought leadership platforms, creating a mutually beneficial relationship.

15. Transparency: Public Postmortems

When critical issues like downtime occur, issue public postmortems that explain what happened, the technical reasons, and how it was fixed, taking full accountability to maintain user trust.

16. Transparency: Direct User Forums

In high-stakes or controversial situations, host open, direct forums (e.g., Twitter Spaces) where users can ask questions and leadership can be honest and transparent, fostering trust and turning the tide of sentiment.

17. Protect Core GTM as You Scale

As a company scales and introduces traditional top-down motions, actively advocate for and protect the core bottom-up strategies that drove initial success, ensuring they continue to thrive alongside new approaches.

18. Prioritize Signal Over Metrics (Early Stage)

In early stages, prioritize qualitative “signal” (e.g., a few users loving the product, emotional reactions) over quantitative metrics, as small numbers make metrics less reliable for determining product-market fit.

19. Launch for Momentum & Feedback

Don’t stay in stealth too long; launch to gain momentum, provide a team milestone, and gather crucial user feedback, even if a key feature is still a year away, by observing strong emotional user reactions.

20. Embrace “Do Things That Don’t Scale”

Focus intensely on acquiring and retaining the very first users, even if it requires highly manual, unscalable efforts like fixing a single user’s technical issues, to ensure their success.

21. Ensure Executive Belief in GTM

To successfully implement a bottom-up GTM, secure executive leadership who deeply believes in the approach and trusts intuition over immediate, clear metrics, especially when scaling challenges arise.

22. Prerequisites: Technical IC Audience

This bottom-up GTM model is most effective for products with a technical individual contributor (IC) audience who deeply care about their craft and can derive significant value from the tool independently.

23. Prerequisites: Leverage Existing Communities

A pre-existing, active community for your target audience (e.g., on social media) can significantly accelerate bottom-up adoption by providing a ready-made distribution channel.

24. Prerequisites: Seek Collaborative IC Roles

The bottom-up model thrives when the target individual contributor role is inherently collaborative, naturally leading them to share and spread the product within their organization.

25. Choose Startup: Logical Idea

When deciding which startup to join, ensure the basic premise of the product or company immediately and logically clicks for you.

26. Choose Startup: Trusted Social Proof

When evaluating a startup, look for social proof from people you trust, such as respected investors or former colleagues, who believe in the company.

27. Choose Startup: Impressive Founder

Consider joining a startup where you are deeply impressed by the founder’s persuasiveness, drive, and ability to overcome obstacles.

28. Unify Product & Company Branding

Consolidate branding to a single, ownable name for your product and company to build strong equity and avoid confusion, especially in early stages.

29. Make Fast Decisions with Ownership

In early startups, empower individuals with ownership to make decisions quickly and run with them, driving rapid progress and adapting to new information.

30. Trust Your Intuition as Sole Role

When you’re the sole person in a role at a startup, build confidence by trusting your intuition and just “going for it,” as external gut checks may be limited.

31. Scrappy User Acquisition

Employ highly scrappy and unconventional networking methods, like leveraging personal connections or chance encounters, to get early users and gather feedback.

32. Life Motto: Consistent Pressure

Adopt a mindset of “consistent pressure over time,” focusing on sustained effort and grit rather than immediate accomplishments, to achieve long-term goals and manage pressure.

33. Parenting Tip: Don’t Overextrapolate

As a new parent, avoid overextrapolating individual challenging moments or problems, and instead, practice letting go, recognizing that not every issue will necessarily persist.