The Two-Step Bottom-Up GTM Motion
Make individual contributors love you, then arm them to spread you inside their company.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 95%
Figma's go-to-market is deliberately two-step: first get the practitioner ICs who live in the tool all day to genuinely love the product, then remove every obstacle to those ICs spreading it inside their organization until the org itself asks to pay. Revenue arrives inbound — a champion contacts sales to unblock procurement, not the other way round. Figma ran with no sales team for three years on this motion, and even after hiring sales, its qualified leads still originated from free and Pro users.
Origin
Developed at Figma from 2015 onward by Claire Butler, the company's 10th employee and first go-to-market hire, working alongside founder Dylan Field. Butler notes it was intuitive at the time and only reverse-engineered into a repeatable motion in hindsight; the team variously called it product-led and community-led before settling on this IC-first framing.
Core principles
- 01Practitioners, not executives, are the buyer's conscience for technical tools — an exec often doesn't care what tool the team uses.
- 02Mere usage is not enough: only love converts a user into a champion, because championing costs them social capital.
- 03The champion, not the salesperson, drives the deal inside the organization.
- 04Adoption should be visible as a spread graph — patient zero, then clusters, then org-wide.
- 05Sales exists to unblock security and procurement for an already-won internal advocate, not to persuade a buyer cold.
How to run it
- 1
Identify the IC who lives in your product
Name the practitioner persona who would use the tool for hours every day (for Figma, designers). This is the audience the entire motion serves, not the budget-holder.
Pro tip Obsess over the core editing surface for that IC — even removing one click from an eight-hour-a-day workflow is a meaningful win.
Watch out If no IC would voluntarily spend hours in your product alone, this motion likely will not fire.
- 2
Earn IC love before asking for anything
Build credibility, build the product with them, meet them in the channel they already inhabit, and be transparent — the four keys. Do not sell; ask for feedback.
Pro tip Ask for feedback rather than pitching; the feedback conversation ends up selling the product for you.
Watch out Traditional marketing language (efficiency, collaboration, buzzwords) actively destroys credibility with technical audiences.
- 3
Remove the gates to sharing
Make it trivially easy to sign up, try, and share with colleagues for free for a long time — long enough for a team to build confidence before anyone must pay.
Pro tip Price on the constrained resource (editors/seats), not on the number of collaborators or viewers.
Watch out Any paywall that caps collaborators throttles the exact mechanism that grows you.
- 4
Let internal champions drive the org-wide sale
Wait for widespread free/self-serve use to create an internal champion who comes inbound to ask for help with security and procurement. Serve that request rather than generating cold demand.
Pro tip Instrument spread with a node graph per organization so you can see patient zero, the clusters, and who the real champions are.
Watch out Do not layer top-down enterprise sales on so early that it suffocates the self-serve spread that got you there.
- 5
Keep the relationship with champions alive forever
Champions do not go away and sometimes get angry publicly. Maintain direct contact, and give them something beyond the tool — speaking slots, amplification, career growth.
Pro tip Amplified champions become external credibility, which feeds step 2 again — the loop closes.
Watch out As the company scales and new people arrive, it is easy to quietly break the thing that was working.
In the wild
The Xamarin team inside Microsoft became patient zero on Figma. Pockets of usage spread organically across the org, all still on individual credit cards, with no salesperson and no Enterprise product in existence. Eventually Microsoft itself came to Figma asking for security, account management and procurement because the tool was popping up everywhere outside their control.
→ Microsoft effectively demanded to pay, forcing Figma to build an Enterprise product; Dylan Field cited this as the moment he knew Figma had product-market fit.
Figma shipped paid plans that were entirely self-serve: an IC or a manager put Figma on a credit card. The company focused on technical features for users rather than procurement-facing enterprise features, and spent essentially nothing on paid or programmatic marketing.
→ All sales leads arrived through a website form from existing free or Pro users asking to be unblocked internally — a fundamentally different, cheaper sales conversation.
Common mistakes
Selling top-down to an executive buyer
For technical tools, the practitioner has to love it. An executive may not care which tool the team uses, and a mandated tool the ICs resent will not stick.
Assuming usage equals advocacy
Spreading a tool inside a company means putting your professional reputation on the line. People do not take that risk for a tool they merely use — only for one they love.
Adding sales and top-down motion and letting the bottom-up engine atrophy
The bottom-up motion is hard to measure and not intuitive to new hires, so it gets deprioritized in favour of provable ROI channels — and the growth engine quietly dies.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and first GTM hires at technical B2B SaaS products whose daily users are practitioners (designers, engineers, analysts) rather than executives
Not ideal for
Products with no single-player value, non-technical audiences indifferent to their tools, or purchases that are genuinely executive-only decisions
From the transcript
“you have all these individual contributors who love you but then they also work at these big companies and these big Orcs And they become…”
“we actually didn't have a sales team for the first three years”
“I think with technical tools especially like this becomes really important the practitioners have to love it”
“just using it isn't enough to get someone over that stage of going from just like a user to a champion”
From the episode
An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion
Claire Butler (first GTM hire)