They were in the first 10, and the co-founders of Fivetran and I went through Y Combinator 10 years ago. Fivetran is one of our earliest customers. People who were doing B2B that I knew living in the Valley for a while. Sean was like, ‘Hey, let’s go talk to all these ex-Dropbox people who are at new companies and see what they think.’ The Dropbox mafia turned out to be the perfect fit for Census because most ended up at new product-led companies and wanted to do it better than Dropbox.
Everybody knows Sean, and Sean knows everyone. “ Most of our early growth had to do with being in San Francisco and from our loose network of friends. ”įor Census, all of their early customers came through the founders’ networks-mostly one super-connected co-founder: All were recruited one or two steps out from friends of the company. Box, which was an early customer, came through our head of recruiting, Kenny. Another was a tech company that my co-founder, Alex, started. One was a jewelry shop run by one of our employee’s wives. Then we recruited our next set of customers. Eventually, however, this led us to rework the entire product.
“My former colleague Noam Lovinsky was starting a company, and I said to him, ‘Hey, would you use Krypton ?’ His company started using it, and for a while, it went well. But it worked.”Ĭoda had the same experience-finding their early customers through former colleagues and early employee connections: It wasn’t even about selling to them, since we already knew them. Our third or fourth employee was a part-time contractor out of the Bay Area, and he called the people he knew, like at Greenhouse Software, where he had consulted and had buddies, and asked if they wanted to try it out. “ All of the first dozen customers were some sort of personal connection, either through or myself or other people we later brought on. Gong ’s founders found their early customers through connections of theirs, along with connections of their early employees: Dylan and Shishir knew each other from before.”
#Figma crunchbase code#
The first company that used Figma is a company that at the time was going by the code name Krypton and now is known as Coda- Shishir’s company. Dylan’s the kind of guy who’s always been a mover and shaker, with connected people in the industry ever since he was a teenager.
“ The early batch of alpha customers were just mostly friends, and friends of friends, of Dylan. You won’t find a more supportive group to start with (though there’s a downside to this, as you’ll see below).įor Figma, Dylan Field reached out to design-oriented founders who he knew from previous projects: Do any fit your ideal customer profile? This group will have the most innate trust (and the lowest amount of skepticism) about your idea. Think about your friends-and their friends. Part 6: How, and when, to hire your early teamĪ huge thank-you to Akshay Kothari (COO of Notion), Ali Ghodsi (CEO of Databricks), Barry McCardel (CEO of Hex), Boris Jabes (CEO of Census), Calvin French-Owen (co-founder of Segment), Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO of Canva), Christina Cacioppo (CEO of Vanta), David Hsu (CEO of Retool), Eilon Reshef (CPO of Gong), Eric Glyman (CEO of Ramp), Guy Podjarny (CEO of Snyk), Jori Lallo (co-founder of Linear), Julianna Lamb and Reed McGinley-Stempel (co-founders of Stytch), Mathilde Collin (CEO of Front), Rick Song (CEO of Persona), Rujul Zaparde and Lu Cheng (co-founders of Zip), Ryan Glasgow (CEO of Sprig), Shahed Khan (co-founder of Loom), Shishir Mehrotra (CEO of Coda), Sho Kuwamoto (VP of Product of Figma), Spenser Skates (co-founder and CEO of Amplitude), and Tomer London (co-founder and CPO of Gusto) for contributing to this series.
#Figma crunchbase how to#
Part 5: How to know when you’ve found product-market fit Part 4 : How to find and win your first 10 customers ← This post Part 1: How to come up with a great B2B startup idea
#Figma crunchbase series#
Welcome to part four of our series on how to kickstart and scale a B2B business:
0 kommentar(er)
