The missing piece that this perspective leaves out is that Figma's success is at least partially due to timing of the rise of flat design. I wrote about this in my analysis of software transitions, here's the relevant section (https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...):
> In the section on Photoshop to Sketch, we discussed an underappreciated factor in Sketch’s, and by extension, Figma’s, success: That flat design shifted the category of design software from professional creative software to something more akin to an office suite app (presentation software, like Google Slides, being the closest sibling). By the time work was starting on Figma in 2012, office suite software had already been long available and popular on the web, Google Docs was first released in 2006. This explains why no other application has been able to follow in Figma’s footsteps by bringing creative software to the web: Figma didn’t blaze a trail for other professional creative software to move to the web, instead Sketch blazed a trail for design software to become office suite software, a category that was already successful on the web.
It's still difficult for me to wrap my head around that this has actually happened, because it's unheard of in other media editing industries for software to go backwards in capabilities. I always compare it to if movies suddenly stopped needing special effects, then of course the entire existing movie-making pipeline would be re-evaluated.
this downplays what they've actually built. Their technology is first-mover and incredibly impressive in the enterprise app space, and they've built a big business around it.
That was certainly not my intention. Nothing but respect for what they’ve built. Only pointing out that they entered a crowded space that already had “winners” in it, and succeeded.
Except it was not a crowded space. They did a bunch of stuff no one else was (or is) doing right from the start. Being entirely in the browser, real-time collaboration, vector networks…
You can define any space as "not crowded" if you narrow it down enough. That was the point really, they entered a crowded space & re-defined it with their offering.
> You can define any space as "not crowded" if you narrow it down enough.
I mean, you’re technically correct¹ but that’s not exactly helpful because the inverse is also true: You can define any space as “crowded” if you widen it enough.
That is to say it is perfectly plausible I am wrong and the space was crowded, but that argument doesn’t really prove or disprove it.
> That was the point really, they entered a crowded space & re-defined it with their offering.
Especially if you allow someone in the space to redefine it. At that point all bets are off and anyone can claim anything.
The product space they entered, UX design tooling, was very crowded. Sketch and InVision were the kings and there were a dozen other reasonable options to choose from (including ones in browser with real time collab and other interesting tech).
Figma entered that market later and won on a combination of technology and product innovation aka execution.
> Let it be a lesson for anyone worried that “their idea has been taken” or “there already solutions for this” out there.
I have nothing but respect for Figma's tech, but I'm not really sure this lesson is generalizable to 99.9% of other people. By all accounts Evan Wallace has skills and talent the vast majority of software developers don't have and never will have. The reason Figma was able to succeed in this space is that their engineering team was like the 90s-era Chicago Bulls of software development.
And to emphasize, that's one reason I'm very happy for Figma's success. Figma didn't succeed because they "got lucky", or just happened to be in the right place at the right time, or had great marketing. They succeeded because they were able to create a brilliant technical solution to a problem that lesser engineers and engineering teams were simply not able to solve.
Yea I'm not trying to take away from any of that, nor provide generalized advice. Only addressing the crowd of people who will shy away from pursuing (or poo poo others) when their idea isn't some sort of original innovation that nobody's ever thought of before.
Every successful company had some sort of edge. Some sort of advantage that other companies in the space don't have. For Figma that was high level tech execution. For something like, say, LaunchDarkly, that was a killer enterprise sales team. For something like Liquid Death, it was pure marketing and positioning. Just to use some other examples of companies that launched into crowded spaces and succeeded.
It could be anything, but it's always something, and no advice should be generalized.
> The reason Figma was able to succeed in this space is that their engineering team was like the 90s-era Chicago Bulls of software development.
Huge contracts are built to extract as much wealth from the customer as possible without letting the victim know. Not by engineering talent. Huge contracts are what make Figma a success story.
That's such an unfair, pessimistic, and "economics-free" take. The giant enterprises with "huge contracts" as you point out are not "victims" - it's not like they're hapless newbies who don't know how enterprise contracts work. Especially in the case of Figma, where there are loads of competitive products (which was the point of the comment I was responding to), clients have plenty of other options. They chose and continue to choose Figma because they believe it gives them value over other possibilities.
