As we developed Figma, we recognized that the design market was rapidly growing, contrary to our initial belief that it was small.

Despite early growth, we faced challenges in fundraising, pitching to 150 investors, with most rejecting us due to the perceived unsexiness of our content-focused approach.

At HireArt, I faced a moment of potential failure when we hadn't raised any funding while others had, but my co-founders encouraged me to keep pitching until we found an investor who believed in our mission.

Initially, Figma faced skepticism, but over time, it demonstrated its value and potential for collaboration among designers and engineers.

We actively dogfooded Figma internally, which helped us identify and fix user experience issues before launching to the public.

Our first customers were minimalists who appreciated Figma's simplicity, while others were drawn to its cloud-first, high-performance capabilities.

Initially, we experimented with various ideas, including meme generation, which ultimately led us to realize that Figma's direction was not aligned with our goals.

Despite initial struggles, we showed some growth, prompting an investor to suggest we raise a Series A round, which I eagerly prepared for.

We learned that finding investors who specialize in hardware was crucial, as they understood our vision and supported us.