Thread by @RyanMcCready1

Could you boil your company vision down to just 5 simple words?

Figma has.

And in my opinion, it helped them grow 5x in less than a year.

How did they turn those 5 words into a $10B valuation?

Let's break it down.

🧵

Those 5 simple words are:

⭐️Collaborative
⭐️Borderless
⭐️Transparent
⭐️Community-driven
⭐️Open-sourced

They might not mean anything by themselves.

But they are literally a checklist that @figmadesign wants to use to build the future of design.

At its core, Figma wants to make design accessible to everyone.

These 5 words explain exactly how they plan to do that.

And when you take a look at their company as a whole, you can see these values everywhere.

From their homepage all the way down to their help documents.

A lot of companies can say they stick to certain values.

But Figma adheres to them like no other brand I have seen.

Need some examples?

Well, I am SWIMMING in examples.

Let's get it.

⭐️ Collaborative

Figma has preached the need for easy design collaboration since its founding.

It was built from the ground up with collaboration at its core.

Other brands added collaboration features later on.

Adobe just announced online collaboration... a few days ago.

And when I say from the beginning...I mean it.

Here is their homepage back in 2016:

Figma’s current home page shows exactly how much they value & understand collaboration to this day.

They know how now how tedious & time-consuming the design process can be

Especially when there are more than a few stakeholders involved.

But Figma makes it seem like all your problems will just melt away as soon as you start using their platform.

They position their product as a solution to improve the entire process.

Not just help someone create a new graphic or mockup.

While most of the other brands focus on creating a single design with their collection of templates.

Figma is selling a revolutionary new way to create & collaborate.

And instead of selling features on their home page, they focus on outcomes:

With this positioning, a decision-maker at any company can understand the value of signing up for Figma without knowing much about design.

This might not sound like a big deal, but it’s the mark of a company that truly knows its value and how it fits in the market.

⭐️⭐️ Borderless

Figma has built a design tool that anyone can use, regardless of their location, financial situation, or design experience.

If you have a computer that can access the internet, you can both learn design skills & turn those skills into a career.

A majority of SaaS companies can now run on any browser or computer and from any location.

That wasn’t always the case.

MacBooks were a designer’s best friend for a long time because it could handle the massive requirements of older downloadable design software.

But Figma is built in the cloud, so almost anyone can use it.

No updates.
No patches.
No specialists.
No MacBooks.
No downloads.
Nothing.

You click the Sign-Up Button & start using Figma.

It’s that easy.

From anywhere, at any time.

Figma is also smashing a financial “border” so more people can use powerful design software.

Guess how much their education plan for students & educators costs...

Zero...
Zilch...
Nada...

As long as you can prove that you are a student or teacher, you can use Figma for free.

Additionally, Figma has a very solid Freemium plan, & you can do a lot without paying a cent.

So, even if you aren’t a student, you can still get a lot of value from the platform.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ Transparent

Transparent can have two meanings.

The first meaning is that Figma makes the whole design process more transparent for everyone.

For a long time, this process was pretty opaque, with files existing on a single device.

Now anyone can jump into a design, add comments, fix a problem, or update another stakeholder from anywhere in the world.

Since we covered a lot of these practices above, let’s jump right into the second meaning.

Figma is also very transparent with its users.

It doesn't try to hide anything from potential new customers or longtime vets.

Any new product update, pricing adjustment, new plugin, or change that will impact their users is communicated very effectively & openly.

The pricing for FigJam is a great example of this idea in practice.

They state exactly how much it will cost after it exits beta & when that will happen.

And explain in a blog post why they selected that price point.

When Figma does ship updates or new plugins, they are just as transparent with their users.

It appears that Figma wants to help their customers achieve their design goals, not just sell them a product.

And honestly, it’s very refreshing.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Community-driven

Figma has one of the strongest communities I have seen.

People love Figma like really love it.

At its core, Figma’s community is so strong because they actually invest in it.

The most visible part of this is their Community page, & it provides their users with an incredible amount of value.

On this page, any user can share or use templates, plugins, widgets, plugins, & a whole lot more.

With a single click.

It's that easy.

Unless you’ve used other design platforms you may not know how hard it is to find templates, fonts, & more.

But with Figma, you click Duplicate or Install & it’s added directly to your library.

From there you can basically do anything you want with it.

Unsplash, Microsoft, Icon8, Google, & more have published content on the Community page:

Figma also doesn’t have an ego.

They will happily promote work from other creators above its own with Fig Picks.

They know that for their community as a whole to thrive, they need to give their users the best tools to get the job done.

Even if they didn't create them.

Let’s take a quick look at how the community is supported off-site too.

There are 100s of Friends of Figma groups across the world.

There is also an incredibly active Reddit page, Slack communities & Discord servers.

As well as the community on Twitter, LinkedIn & more.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Open-sourced

People are always going to have custom needs, especially in the creative world.

And Figma's open-sourced approach helps any user build their own perfect design tool.

How did they build an open-sourced utopia?

First, Figma has an open API that anyone can use.

This means any user can build a plugin, template, or tool on top of that API.

Next, most of the content on the Figma Community page is licensed under Attribution 4.0 International by Creative Commons.

This basically means that you can use the content however you see fit, as long as you credit the original creator.

For creators, this is a big deal.

The worst thing is when you use something you thought you had permission to use, & get a copyright claim.

This site-wide approach puts users at ease, & likely pushes them to use more plugins & files in the future.

Finally, anyone can build on top of a plugin, template & more.

And when a user can turn Figma into their own solution to meet their exact needs with a few clicks, it creates a ton of happy customers.

Figma has embraced the open-sourced mindset, & it has helped them attract a very diverse group of creators.

As they continue to roll out new features, I’m convinced that mindset is going to help them become a household name.

Wow, that was a journey!

However, this is only half of what I cover in the full teardown.

If you want to read the full teardown with even more examples of branding excellence from @figmadesign, start here: foundationinc.co/lab/figma-comm…