Adopting Figma's playbook for ConvertKit

Last week I shared my breakdown of how Figma was so successful in beating out competitors like Photoshop and Invision. Today I'm speculating on what it would look like to apply that same playbook to ConvertKit.

1. Make our free plan amazing

We would try to capture as much of the market as possible and not worry about short-term revenue. The goal would be to make ConvertKit the default choice for every creator under a certain size by adding automations to the free plan (maybe capped at 1-3 automations), enabling the API and integrations, and possibly even raising the subscriber limit.
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Figma made a better product than their competitors and said, “it’s completely free for individuals. We’ll get teams to pay for it” and it worked.
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​Counterpoint: ConvertKit doesn’t focus on teams the same way that Figma and Notion do. So what could we charge for instead to still get creators to upgrade? Right now automations are a primary driver of creators switching to a paid plan. We are customer-funded rather than VC backed, so we don’t have the same luxury of delaying revenue for years.

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​2. Make it Extensible

Build a plug-in architecture so the community can build on top of and extend ConvertKit. Features like polls, countdown timers, referral programs, text messaging, integrations, and more should be made by the community—always extending and improving the product.
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​Counterpoint: This is very hard to pull off and a 5+ year bet.. Most companies that launch app ecosystems don’t end up with the next Shopify or WordPress.
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3. Improve collaboration

Figma has an incredible multi-player feel where you can collaborate to make something together. Today ConvertKit allows you to invite other users, but you can’t edit the same thing (landing page, email, automation, etc) at the same time without potentially colliding.
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We could further add network effects by allowing you to do things that are only possible if two creators are both using ConvertKit:

1) Share snippets across accounts
2) Share segments across accounts
3) Make it easy for creators to partner with each other
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​Counterpoint: real time collaboration is a tough feature to build. Do enough creators have teams to make it a higher priority feature to build than other top requests?
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4. Build the community & hire creator advocates

Actively build the community of creators making content and resources for ConvertKit. We have shared automations, but they aren’t really getting used. You should have people saying, “I wish I could use that resource, but I’m not on ConvertKit. I guess I’ll switch for it.”
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Both Figma and Notion do this really well. We have a handful of wonderful creators doing this (Brennan Dunn, Jason Resnick, Matt Ragland, etc), but we could provide them with more support and actively recruit more community leaders.
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​Counterpoint: I don’t have one. We should definitely do this.

5. Help the community earn money by talking about ConvertKit

Right now you can earn money through ConvertKit’s affiliate program…and that’s about it. To build a strong community we need creators to be able to get paid by the community to improve the ecosystem: selling automations, landing page designs, email templates, training, professional services, and more. If someone can make $50k selling Notion templates they’ll make a lot of Notion templates. If they can build an agency off the dealflow from our certified experts program they’ll work to really scale the number of clients they serve.
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The bigger the community you have the more value there is to create designs, templates, and plugins for that product.

6. Improve our speed and quality of development

I’m sure Figma had a lot of very hard technical engineering problems to overcome (and a ton of technical debt), but they’ve managed to build a first class engineering organization that ships very quickly. We need to keep that focus as a north star shared by the entire team. That will mean paying off our technical debt, hiring a lot more engineers, protecting the team from distractions, and emphasizing a culture of shipping.
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This is something we’ve actively worked on for the last couple years and are really seeing momentum.

7. Make it very easy to start

Right now, if you don’t already have a website, it’s harder than it should be to start publishing a newsletter on ConvertKit than it should be. That means creators are still starting on a different platform and then migrating or integrating ConvertKit later. You can run a full business on ConvertKit—as I’ve demonstrated with From Boise—but the experience to set it up isn’t as clear as it could be. We’re about to release a new Creator Profile feature to make this easier.
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This has focused a lot on features and community, but really the way to copy Figma’s playbook is through innovation and rethinking everything from a creators’ perspective. One example is our ConvertKit Sponsor Network. If you think of us as an email marketing tool it doesn’t make any sense. But if you set out to solve problems from the creators’ perspective it’s a logical next step.

What else would you add?

Have a great week,

Nathan

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