😸 Figma's path to going public

gm legends. It’s Sunday funday.

In this edition: how Figma went from Product Hunt launch to publicly traded company, getting your product seen by LLMs (and actual humans), a last-minute call for YC, and the most popular products that went live this week. 

Don’t stop now, frens. There’s a lot to unpack.

P.S. Launching soon? We’d love to hear about it → editorial@producthunt.co 🫶

In 2022, Figma had some big news: It was being acquired by its Goliath competitor, Adobe, which was tired of the collaborative design software smacking it with its slingshot. The price Adobe would pay to make the pain stop? A whopping $20 billion, which would have been one of the most expensive startup acquisitions ever.

Would have been.

Because it never happened. Fifteen months later, the companies went their separate ways, unmerged, ostensibly over regulatory issues—and founder Dylan Field went back to the proverbial drawing board to figure out how to grow.

Along the way, he discovered that missing out on $20B isn’t a big deal in the scheme of things. Not when you can IPO, have your share price skyrocket, and end up with a market cap of $67B instead. That’s what happened Thursday, when the design platform went public on the New York Stock Exchange.

Now, this may be shocking, but Figma was not always destined for the Fortune 500. It started, as several other companies have, with a Product Hunt launch. After years in stealth, it introduced itself to the PH community with a preview in 2015. 

We’ve seen a lot of Figma since then: Version 1.0 launched in September 2016, followed by a 2.0 the next year. There was the FigJam online whiteboard in 2021, its iPad-loving cousin in 2022, its AI-integrated nephew in 2023. Widgets, slides, dev mode — it’s all been on Product Hunt. 

Figma succeeded by drawing up a great idea, designing a more collaborative future, and editing its way into the picture. 

The question is: What’s next?

Figma stood out by letting designers and non-designers alike create awesome-looking sites and apps. Netflix uses it, but so do small teams. Obviously, AI tools are coming hard for this space, hoping to pry away users who don’t sweat over every pixel: Why mock up what’s in your head when you can vibe-code something close enough into existence? 

Nobody in this arena is standing still. Figma and Adobe are both integrating AI. As CFO Praveer Melwani pointed out: "We've embedded different flavors of AI — both to lower the floor (and) allow more people to participate in the design process — while also raising the ceiling for individuals (and) for companies to be able to have even more high craft in what they're creating.”

For now, Figma gets to take the public win, but there's no time for a victory lap when the race never stops.

Three tactics you can use to reach your audience – drawn by building Square’s brand from beta to IPO, finding stories in deep tech at Facebook, and advising 3,000+ YC startups

In 2010, I became the first comms hire at Square. We went public five years later.

In 2018, I helped Facebook reach and recruit a global engineering audience — and got the media to care about multiple data center announcements, way before frontier labs made that kind of thing cool.

By 2024, I had advised more than 3,000 Y Combinator startups on how to launch, tell their story, and reach the right audience.

Now, I advise both YC and non-YC startups, and two things have never been more true in my career of helping top-tier startups and companies tell their stories. First, AI has made it easier than ever to start a company. And, second, breaking through the noise has never been harder. Audiences are fragmented, attention is scarce, and it’s difficult to land media coverage. And really, does media coverage even matter anymore, in the era of “go direct”? (Spoiler alert, it does, but not just for the reasons you might think.) 

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, of course, but here are three tactics from my personal playbook to stand out in a crowded market and get noticed by the LLMs:

Rajiv helpfully pointed out almost two weeks ago that the “YC deadline [is] in <2 weeks; Who's applying?”

Okay, so we forgot to give you the message, just like we forgot to tell our sister her boyfriend Derek called. But the important thing is: We’re reminding you now, and you’ve still got until Monday, August 4. 

In case you’re worried the juice won’t be worth the squeeze, Rajiv (S19 with Tandem) says you’ve never tasted orange juice like this: 

• Partners who actually help
• A massive alumni network that can help you get to market
• Exposure to the punishing speed at which top founders grind

We're not totally sure about that last one, but there's only one way to find out.