How FigJam Leverages Content Growth Loops at Scale?

Breaking down 6 FigJam content loops examples.

Disclaimer: Any numbers mentioned in this write-up are made up or available in public sources; any strategy pieces in this write-up are based on outcomes of my deep thinking or publicly available frameworks. Enjoy!

FigJam was born as Figma’s Horizontal expansion move, scaling its visual collaboration offering to the entire cross-functional team, not only designers. Leveraging ‘Content Growth Loops’ at scale has been a key driver of its success. This is why I believe it’s a great of great value to explore this strategy in depth by breaking down 6 actual FigJam content loops.

But first, let’s align on terminology. 😉

What are ‘Content Loops‘ and why do we need them?

1. Content loops drive both PLG Acquisition and PLG Retention.

2. Content loops generate and distribute content, hence, ‘Content Loops.’ 😂

3. Moreover, Content loops also supply sales with leads, out of scope for this write-up.

What types of Content Loops are there?

We differentiate Content loops by looking at the following:

1. Who generates the content? (and ‘How?’)

2. Who distributes the content? (and ‘How?’)

   1. → UGUD - User Generated User Distributed

   2. → UGCD - User Generated Company Distributed

   3. → CGUD - Company Generated User Distributed

   4. → CGCD - Company Generated Company Distributed

3. What type of content is distributed? (Boards, Templates, etc.)

FYI - The above abbrevations were coined by Reforge! Those guys rock! ❤️

How do we know which Content Loop is best?

Some of the factors that impact the strength of each content loop are:

1. Development, content generation, and distribution costs.

2. Operational scalability potential.

3. Relevancy, Reach, and Performance of a content piece and the distribution channels dynamics.

Let’s start! 💪

Now, let’s see all that in action by breaking down six FigJam content loops:

1. Share Boards (UGUD Loop)

2. Embed Boards (UGUD Loop)

3. Activity Summary (UGCD Loop)

4. Community Templates (UGCD Loop)

5. FigJam Templates (CGCD Loop)

6. FigJam Social (CGUD Loop)

1. Share FigJam Boards (UGUD Loop)

Cost: Users do both content generation and distribution. Seat back and enjoy. Some investment in initial and continuous work is required to enable and optimize the sharing experience (from sharing to landing).

Impact: Ultra high-intent, high-relevant content shared one-to-one or one-to-few manner (not one-to-many). It’s FigJam’s core direct network effect around collaboration.

2. FigJam Live Embeds (UGUD Loop)

Cost: Again, users do both content generation and distribution. However, integration (and continuous maintenance) work per platform (Slack, Atlassian, etc.) is required for the embed to work.

Impact: High-intent content is shared in mostly a one-to-few, one-to-many manner. There are more eyeballs per share than the ‘Share Boards’ loop. However, the relevancy per eyeball is lower.

3. Activity Summary (UGCD Loop)

Cost: Initial dev investment to build and optimize the lifecycle notifications. Focusing on increasing its relevancy and usefulness. In addition, there is minimal distribution cost per delivery channel (i.e., Email).

Impact: Low-intent content is shared one-to-one every T time (Day, Week, etc.) per every active user. Sounds good; however, it tends to get high spam / low open rates.

4. Public Community Templates (UGCD Loop)

Cost: It is a high investment, especially in the beginning, to spin up the community motion and provide the tools to create, submit, review (by FigJam), and rate the Templates. Once it runs, the cost is low because the community does the content generation.

Impact: Low to high-intent content is shared in a one-to-many manner. FigJam doesn't control the Template's topics (= it's the community's topic choice). The impact increases as more use cases are covered, and Public Templates bubble up in Google search (takes time...).

5. FigJam Templates (CGCD Loop)

Cost: A high investment in creating high-intent content in a non-scalable way (one by one by FigJam’s team); the distribution part is cheap but takes time. Search engines... You know.

Impact: High-intent content is shared in a one-to-many manner. The impact increases as those Templates bubble up in the search results. At some point, we get diminishing returns after covering all the core FigJam’s use cases. This is why layering Public Templates on top of FigJam Templates makes sense (lower content generation cost).

6. Figma (FigJam) Social (CGUD Loop)

Cost: It's a medium investment in generating frequent social content. This is why leveraging guest writers makes sense. The cost per content goes down with time as the reach increases (the audience size).

Impact: Low to Medium-intent content is shared in a one-to-many manner. However, the impact of each published content goes down fast (if it’s Linkedin, not the case on YouTube). Social requires a high publishing frequency. You stop, you die.

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