On September 15th, Figma CEO Dylan Field released a message: Today, Figma announced that it has accepted Adobe's acquisition...
Adobe acquired Figma for approximately $20 billion, the largest acquisition in the company's history. What kind of magic was that, so that Figma was acquired by Adobe? The following is a further analysis and disassembly of Figma based on positioning (users, products, markets, etc.) and PLG growth dimensions.
1. What is Figma?
Figma is an online design collaboration tool founded in 2012 by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace . Figma simplifies the collaborative process in the design process for thousands of companies. Its team size is about 1,200 people. Currently, it has accumulated 4 million users including designers, development engineers, and product managers.
Just as Zoom serves remote conferencing, GitHub serves code management, it can be understood that Figma serves design collaboration.
Figma's vision: to make design accessible to everyone. The original words of the official website are as follows:
make design accessible to everyone.
It can be seen from the vision that the user group is not just designers. According to statistics, 65% of Figma users are not designers.
The last round of financing was in June 2021. After completing the financing of 200 million US dollars, the valuation reached 10 billion US dollars. Knowing that the valuation in 2020 is $2 billion, its growth is simply magic. According to the statistics of the three parties, the 2020 revenue has reached 35.1 million US dollars, the 2021 revenue has reached 51.1 million US dollars, and the 2022 revenue is expected to be 81.1 million US dollars, an increase of about 50%.
Next, from the positioning dimension, answer what product is Figma? Why is growth so magical?
2. Figma Positioning
user positioning
First, according to UXTools statistics: the proportion of mainstream UI design tools in recent years. Figma has outgrown other similar products in terms of UI design tools.
From the above vision, we can see that the user group is not only for designers. The original words of the official website are as follows:
Figma connects everyone in the design process so teams can deliver better products, faster. Brainstorm -> Design -> Build
It can be understood as: in the design workflow, from idea conception, to execution process, to review. Almost any design-related work can be done in Figma. The whole process includes the creation phase and the iteration phase, and then continuously repeats:
There are different user groups related to design, here are some common ones:
- Product Manager: Use Figma for product brainstorming, product workshops, prototyping, and more
- Designers: Use Figma for design workshops, design draft output, design reviews, design sprints, etc.
- Development Engineer: Use Figma to conduct online mutual evaluation, view reference code snippets corresponding to design drafts, etc.
- Managers: Use Figma to view reports for work insight, team planning, team review, ice breaking, etc.
It is characterized by real-time, sharing, collaboration, traceability, and transparent management. Figma also comes with a variety of templates to adapt to interactive meetings in different scenarios. As long as you have the ability to create, you can do anything on the Figma online whiteboard to suit different scenarios.
Divided by scene, it is divided into two product lines: FigJam and Figma
- FigJam (coming 2021): Online collaborative whiteboard for teams
- Figma: Team all-in-one design collaboration platform
Market positioning
The global team collaboration software market size was valued at USD 21.69 billion in 2021 and is projected to expand at a CAGR of 9.5% from 2022 to 2030. The promising growth prospects of the market can be attributed to the evolution of modern workplaces and the increasing need to integrate effective means of cross-organizational team collaboration. Lockdowns and restrictions forced global businesses to implement remote working models in 2020, increasing demand for team collaboration software for virtual communication. (Data source: Report ID GVR-2-68038-633-2)
In 2021, the market size of China's enterprise team collaboration software will be US$380 million, a year-on-year increase of 39.1%. Among them, the scale of enterprise team collaboration software in the SaaS model was US$150 million, a year-on-year increase of 41.4%. In the future, the growth rate of the enterprise team collaboration SaaS market will be much higher than that of the local deployment model. It is estimated that in 2022, the enterprise team collaboration software market will reach 460 million US dollars. (Data source: compiled by IDC and China Business Industry Research Institute)
The market development of the design software industry is roughly as follows:
- The era of traditional design software: PS and other software realize design requirements, but there is no content precipitation and interactive collaboration
- The era of design cloud files: software such as document sharing implements cloud files to achieve design content precipitation, but there is no interactive collaboration
- Design collaboration era: all in one integrated cloud service
Therefore, the positioning of Figma products is design collaboration, design + collaboration scenarios all in one .
Product Positioning
Figma's roadmap
It can be seen from the official release record of Figma (releases.figma.com):
- It was officially launched in 2015, solving the pain points of designers and achieving direct network effects in the designer community
- In the next few years, we will focus on team collaboration and let non-designers of the team participate in it to form a cross-border network effect
- Then, more characters that need to be designed can use Figma to form an internal penetration of the enterprise
- Finally, after the internal penetration of the enterprise is realized, cross-enterprise collaboration is considered to form a network effect between B-terminals
Product Advantages of Figma
The advantages of Figma products can be divided into the following dimensions:
- Core functions
- template function
- plug-in function
- widgets gadgets
In some deep business scenarios of the design, Figma support is really in place. For example, the Builder.io plugin can convert HTML to Figma from any competing website. as the picture shows:
This is simply an artifact of the designer. I think of a sentence:
Good artists copy, great artists steal. - Jobs
3. Growth Dimensions (Key PLG)
traffic composition
The current flow of Figma is as follows:
- The number of visits in the last month reached nearly 60 million
- The age characteristics of users are between 18 and 44 years old, accounting for more than 80% of the total
(Data source: similarweb)
Figma's current traffic sources are as follows:
- Direct source accounts for about 80%
- Search sources accounted for around 10%, with approximately 3 million visits from organic and paid search placements
PLG Growth Teardown
From the perspective of traffic sources, direct sources account for the largest proportion, and the core reason is the growth of Product-Led Growth (PLG). The key point of its PLG lies in the synergy mechanism, such as design meetings, design collaboration, and design project management, all of which have synergistic effects, which can be passed on to ten or ten to hundreds.
What is the core of PLG? I think it is relative. Compared with Marketing-led Growth (MLG), there are several points at the core of PLG:
- For product-led growth, the product itself must be easy to use (just like WeChat and Apple mobile phones), including functions, visuals, and interactions
- Product users can experience the core value of the product by themselves : from the simple to the simple, less is more
- Within the product itself, discover and embed growth features. For example, Figma relies on "collaboration", Youzan/WordPress relies on "powered by" and other models to form a network growth effect
- Before users need to pay and take the initiative to contact sales, users have already felt the value and brand power of the product
According to the PLG core, Figma's PLG growth breakdown is as follows:
- Through basic initial promotion (SEO, social, placement, etc.), user registration
- Under the template and novice guidance, use the product in depth and become the target user of the product
- Introduce products into teamwork and form a network effect within the enterprise
- It will also bring the product to another enterprise through certain scenarios. Such as B2B external training, employee resignation and other scenarios
After carefully experiencing Figma products, I found that the user experience of Figma is really extreme:
- From the official website to registration, complete registration in two simple steps: registration supports google third-party registration -> fill in a user name and select a user role.
- After entering, it will also remember the address of the design draft that the browser has visited
- After entering, it comes with several default templates to quickly see the value of the product
- After creating the design content through Figma, the invitation is also very simple
- Other users completed the growth closed loop through the invitation link
Here is for PLG growth, don't misunderstand:
First: product features
The core of PLG is P, which is product power.
- Figma is browser-first, and its WebGL technology leadership makes digital products on browsers possible
- Not only cloud storage, but also cloud editing and team collaboration interaction
- Similarly, Figma has spent a lot of time working closely with users, and has never stopped making products thicker.
- The product is so important, the corresponding product data analysis is also very important
In this way, word-of-mouth communication is satisfied.
Second: Consider whether the product is suitable for PLG to lead
If it is suitable for PLG to lead, according to marketing ROI, then PLG will lead in growth. So dominant is just dominant:
- Then SLG and MLG will not do it, obviously not. Figma has been doing it, and doing it well
- The growth of PLG also requires certain seed users, the more seed users, the better the effect of PLG
In this way, both the collaborative mechanism propagation and the recommendation mechanism propagation are satisfied.
Third: PLG has nothing to do with free
Free mainly, just some kind of strategy. But the value of business is the transaction. A completely free strategy is not advisable. So we must consider the rhythm of commercialization in advance, how to design? In this way, the true portraits of paying user groups can be distinguished as early as possible, which is conducive to subsequent decision-making on growth.
Therefore, the growth of PLG is mainly for better traffic growth, and it also requires sales to follow up and walk on two legs. On the road of growth + sales, we can better achieve commercial results.
Three. Summary
This article roughly summarizes Figma-related market dimensions, user dimensions, product dimensions, and finally dismantling its traffic composition and PLG growth.
To roughly summarize some of the key points of PLG shared:
- PLG products are bottom-up, closer to users and enterprises, and make progress together with users
- PLG products, users can experience the core value of the product by themselves
- For PLG products, users have already felt the value and brand power of the product before they need to pay and take the initiative to contact sales
- Not all products are suitable for PLG
Finally back in China, what are the collaboration tools related to benchmarking Figma design? As shown in the picture:
Original link https://bysocket.com/figma-plg-saas/
Source: Official account "Programmer Mason" Blog: https://bysocket.com/
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