Congrats to the team here. Let it be a lesson for anyone worried that “their idea has been taken” or “there already solutions for this” out there.
> In the section on Photoshop to Sketch, we discussed an underappreciated factor in Sketch’s, and by extension, Figma’s, success: That flat design shifted the category of design software from professional creative software to something more akin to an office suite app (presentation software, like Google Slides, being the closest sibling). By the time work was starting on Figma in 2012, office suite software had already been long available and popular on the web, Google Docs was first released in 2006. This explains why no other application has been able to follow in Figma’s footsteps by bringing creative software to the web: Figma didn’t blaze a trail for other professional creative software to move to the web, instead Sketch blazed a trail for design software to become office suite software, a category that was already successful on the web.
It's still difficult for me to wrap my head around that this has actually happened, because it's unheard of in other media editing industries for software to go backwards in capabilities. I always compare it to if movies suddenly stopped needing special effects, then of course the entire existing movie-making pipeline would be re-evaluated.
I mean, you’re technically correct¹ but that’s not exactly helpful because the inverse is also true: You can define any space as “crowded” if you widen it enough.
That is to say it is perfectly plausible I am wrong and the space was crowded, but that argument doesn’t really prove or disprove it.
> That was the point really, they entered a crowded space & re-defined it with their offering.
Especially if you allow someone in the space to redefine it. At that point all bets are off and anyone can claim anything.
¹ The best kind of correct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hou0lU8WMgo
The product space they entered, UX design tooling, was very crowded. Sketch and InVision were the kings and there were a dozen other reasonable options to choose from (including ones in browser with real time collab and other interesting tech).
Figma entered that market later and won on a combination of technology and product innovation aka execution.
But they absolutely entered a crowded market.
I have nothing but respect for Figma's tech, but I'm not really sure this lesson is generalizable to 99.9% of other people. By all accounts Evan Wallace has skills and talent the vast majority of software developers don't have and never will have. The reason Figma was able to succeed in this space is that their engineering team was like the 90s-era Chicago Bulls of software development.
And to emphasize, that's one reason I'm very happy for Figma's success. Figma didn't succeed because they "got lucky", or just happened to be in the right place at the right time, or had great marketing. They succeeded because they were able to create a brilliant technical solution to a problem that lesser engineers and engineering teams were simply not able to solve.
Huge contracts are built to extract as much wealth from the customer as possible without letting the victim know. Not by engineering talent. Huge contracts are what make Figma a success story.
Every successful company had some sort of edge. Some sort of advantage that other companies in the space don't have. For Figma that was high level tech execution. For something like, say, LaunchDarkly, that was a killer enterprise sales team. For something like Liquid Death, it was pure marketing and positioning. Just to use some other examples of companies that launched into crowded spaces and succeeded.
It could be anything, but it's always something, and no advice should be generalized.