figmaJul 20, 2025

Mike Krieger and Luis von Ahn join Figma’s Board of Directors | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Figma announced that Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer and Instagram co-founder, and Luis von Ahn, Duolingo’s co-founder and CEO, have joined its Board of Directors. Both bring experience scaling widely used products and championing strong design, product quality, and innovation. Figma expects their perspectives to support its evolution into an AI-powered platform for collaborative product development. ## Mike Krieger’s Product and Infrastructure Experience - Krieger oversees product engineering, management, and design at Anthropic. - As Instagram’s co-founder and CTO, he scaled its infrastructure from a few million users to more than 1 billion monthly active users. - He later co-founded Artifact, a personalized news app acquired by Yahoo. - Figma CEO Dylan Field praised Krieger’s combination of broad product vision and meticulous execution. - Krieger was also an early angel investor in Figma. ## Luis von Ahn’s Design and Growth Expertise - Von Ahn co-founded Duolingo in 2011 and has led its growth to more than 100 million monthly active users. - Duolingo provides language education in over 40 languages and is known for its approachable, engaging design. - Before Duolingo, von Ahn co-created CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, including a crowdsourced approach to internet security. - Field highlighted von Ahn’s close collaboration with Duolingo’s design team and his advocacy for design despite his computer science background. ## Figma’s Expanding Board - Krieger and von Ahn join existing directors including Dylan Field, Mamoon Hamid, Kelly Kramer, John Lilly, Bill McDermott, Andrew Reed, Danny Rimer, and Lynn Vojvodich Radakovich. - The appointments add expertise in AI, consumer products, education, infrastructure, enterprise software, and design-led growth. - Figma describes itself as an AI-powered platform supporting the full process from ideation and design through development and shipping. Figma’s board additions reinforce its focus on product craft, design, AI, and large-scale user growth as it expands beyond design tooling into a broader product-development platform.

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figmaApr 3, 2018

How Figma helped Sounds app reach 150k likes on Facebook | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Sounds app grew its Facebook page from a neglected channel with 14,000 fans and roughly 20 likes per post to more than 150,000 likes in under five months. Instead of hiring an agency, the company used audience research, reusable Figma templates, and modest targeted ad spending to create more engaging content in-house. The result was stronger organic reach at a fraction of the projected agency cost. ## Starting with Limited Resources - Sounds app’s marketing lead also handled community management, artist relations, and customer support. - An outside agency would have cost approximately $3,000–$5,000 or more per month, excluding advertising. - Facebook initially produced about 20 likes per post and reached only around 500 of the page’s 14,000 followers. ## Building a Repeatable Content Process - The team analyzed successful Facebook pages in the music, media, and app categories to identify high-performing content formats. - The designer created branded templates that could be quickly adapted with different artist images. - Templates were built in Figma rather than Photoshop so a non-designer could edit them easily. ## Figma Enabled Faster Collaboration - Figma worked across platforms, avoided expensive software licenses, and offered an approachable interface. - After a Slack session and a short screen-recorded tutorial, the marketing lead could create and publish content independently. - This eliminated delays caused by coordinating with a designer in another time zone and made it possible to act on ideas immediately. ## Measuring Results with Small Ad Budgets - The team began publishing Figma-created content in late October 2017 and used custom Branch links to track app downloads. - Posts that previously received 10–20 likes began generating thousands of likes, comments, and shares. - Weekly reach exceeded one million, and Facebook page likes grew to 60,000 by February 2018 and more than 150,000 the following month. - The team typically spent about $5 per post, increasing to $10 for especially successful content, with daily Facebook and Instagram spending capped at $25. - Paid reach generated additional organic sharing, increasing overall visibility. ## Lessons for Small Marketing Teams - Non-designers can produce effective social content when given channel-specific templates and accessible tools. - Successful social marketing depends more on understanding the audience and its preferred content than on formal marketing credentials. - Limited budgets can still produce substantial growth when teams experiment, measure results, and refine their approach. - The in-house strategy cost less than $3,000 in ad spending, compared with an estimated $20,000 for an agency over the same period. For lean teams, the article recommends combining reusable templates, audience research, tracking links, and controlled experimentation instead of assuming social growth requires an expensive agency.

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