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Ryan McCready

25 Oct, 8 tweets, 4 min read

The design world is an EXTRA competitive niche.

So how did Figma grow by 5x in less than a year?

As well as hitting a $10B valuation in less than 5 years.

Well, it came down to 5 simple words.

Let's break it down.

🧵

@figmadesign

@figmadesign has seen rocketship-level growth over the past few years.

Growing from a $2B to a $10B valuation in the past year.

They did it in an extremely competitive industry while battling a ton of entrenched brands like Adobe, Microsoft, & more.

So how did they do this?

Well, on the surface it might be a little opaque.

They didn't really invest in SEO or build a fancy advertising campaign.

However, once you land on their About Us page...everything starts to make sense.

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

They want the future of design to be:

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

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

You can see these five values in everything they do.

From their homepage to their pricing page & all the way down to their obscure help documents.

Collaborative...
Borderless...
Transparent...
Community-Driven...
Open Sourced...

It's everywhere.

Even one of their first landing pages:

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

Like "Don't be evil."

But Figma adheres to these 5 values like no other brand I have seen.

And by sticking to those values they have been able to take on design giants like Adobe & more.

Want to see EXACTLY how Figma built a rocket ship...

Just by tying everything back to those 5 simple words?

Well, sign up for our weekly newsletter to be the first one to read it tomorrow!

Subscribers get first access to all our company teardowns!

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More from @RyanMcCready1

Ryan McCready

@RyanMcCready1

19 Oct

Building a following is tough these days.

However, you can drive a ton of growth just by asking your followers a...question.

We used this hack to boost our Twitter following by 30% in 2 months.

And increase impressions by 300% in 30 days.

Let's break it down.

🧵

Literally all you have to do is ask your followers a question.

Or two. Or twelve.

Sounds easy, right?

Wrong!

First, you have to ask the RIGHT type of questions.

At Foundation, we try to keep the questions extremely focused on marketing or social media.

Asking people what they had for dinner or what type of coffee they like...never really took off.

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Ryan McCready

@RyanMcCready1

27 Sep

Zapier drives 5+ million sessions to its "Best Of" listicles each year.

It's a super impressive metric.

But that doesn't mean anything if they CAN'T convert those readers.

Zapier has that figured out too.

And every great content writer should want to know their secrets...

🧵

Over the past 5+ years, Zapier has built an incredible SEO moat with these listicles.

These ~100 listicles currently drive over 455k sessions per month & rank on 287k keywords.

From the best note-taking apps to the best URL shorteners, they have a listicle for it.

They rank in the top spots for things like:

🔗 URL Shortener - 85k searches/month
✅ To-Do List - 54k searches/month
💻 Link Shortener - 49k searches/month
📆 Calendar App - 10k searches/month

Yet, they don't produce any apps that are related to those keywords.

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Ryan McCready

@RyanMcCready1

14 Sep

Would you create a separate homepage for .0042% of your customers?

Probably not.

What if they drove 33% of your revenue?

🧵

Coursera has over 77+ million users across the globe.

Yet, they drive 1/3rd of their revenue is from only about 3,000 accounts.

Who are these mega spenders?

Businesses!

It hasn't always been like this.

Coursera started by targeting basically everyone who wanted to learn.

Now they use a hybrid model that targets both businesses & individual learners.

They wanted to become a "university for companies" instead of just offering general courses

Read 10 tweets

Ryan McCready

@RyanMcCready1

9 Sep

A few weeks ago someone told me "marketing doesn't really matter as long as you have a great product."

So why does Sony, Nike & Apple even have marketing teams?

🧵

In 2020, Adobe was reported to spend $3.6 Billion on sales & marketing.

Even though they produce & sell "great products."

statista.com/statistics/122…

In 2020, Amazon spent about $22 Billion on marketing expenses.

Even though they produce & sell "great products."

statista.com/statistics/506…

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Ryan McCready

@RyanMcCready1

7 Sep

Coursera has over 77+ million users.

Yet, 1/3rd of their revenue comes from about 3,000 accounts.

Who are these mega spenders?

🧵

@coursera

Businesses!

You might not have even known there was a @coursera For Business.

But it brought in a whopping $136M+ in revenue for last year.

From around 3k different companies.

And that revenue share is going to get even larger next year as the company doubles down.

It hasn't always been like this.

Coursera started as a strictly B2C business targeting individual learners.

However, with this model, they weren't going to be able to drive massive yearly growth.

Especially because their main market was students.

And students don't spend 💰.

Read 16 tweets

Ryan McCready

@RyanMcCready1

1 Sep

@Grammarly

I usually hate automated emails from brands.

But I recently got one from @Grammarly that was almost perfect.

It even made me move them to my Primary inbox.

Because it was actually valuable.

🧵

The first thing I noticed about this email was the subject line.

I mean, that's what got me to click the email in the first place!

It wasn't salesly or trying too hard to get your attention.

Instead, Grammarly starts the whole interaction on a positive & friendly note.

Next, they keep the positivity rolling with a writing badge.

I got ""Tolstoy-Like"" for writing 7 weeks in a row.

This gamification might seem silly.

But it's a great way to give your users a pat on the back.

Especially for super-engaged users, like myself & other writers.

Read 8 tweets

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