Figma is an extremely successful startup that creates a way for designers to work on designs together in the browser. Their June 2021 venture raise valued them at $10 billion:
But they faced significant pushback in their earlier days, from the very users they were going after. Cofounder and CEO Dylan Field tracks Figma’s story here:
The big pushback came from Figma’s idea that you should make it easy for people to collaborate on design, and do it in the browser. Field writes:
We didn’t realize that launching Figma was heresy, a generational assault on top-down, siloed models of decision making and a challenge to the identity of many designers. While some immediately understood the potential of building design software in the browser, our vision elicited an immediate and negative reaction from others. Some even told us that if this was the future of design, they were changing careers.
This is a pretty brutal response from people in your target audience. But Figma persisted.