11 ms·
Figma will IPO on July 31
- TriangleEdge 1y agoCan AI replace Figma workflows?
- mschuster91 1y ago[flagged]
- jordanscales 1y agoHard to imagine that interaction not being an immediate disqualifier for every single tech employee.
- mschuster91 1y agoThe name of the company certainly does raise eyebrows. And from what I 'member from back in ye day, the Musk controversy actually helped them to raise users in the end because everyone and their dog was talking about Musk and him assuming getting hit by a "ligma" joke. That thing was all over the Internet.
- fastball 1y agoHow is that at all relevant? Can we please stop injecting Elon Musk into every single HN conversation?
- raincole 1y agoSo what's the alternative? Is open source solutions catching up?
- serverlessmania 1y agoWhy what's happening with Figma?
- iambateman 1y agoThe thinking is that an IPO will encourage them to reduce the app’s functionality except for enterprise tiers. The technical term is enshittification.
- scarface_74 1y agoCharging more money for features is not enshittificaton. Making the product worse like adding advertisements would be. A full professional seat is $16 for individual, $55 for organizations and $90 for enterprises. Either price is a nothing burger for a professional tool.
- rhet0rica 1y agoThere are plenty of textbook cases of enshittification that are covered by price increases—just look at Adobe and AutoCAD selling credits that are used just to launch the program. As long as it fits with the "claw back value from your customers and partners to feed your investors" pattern, ∂shit > 0.
- scarface_74 1y agoI looked up adobe credits. Aren’t they just used to buy licensed assets like pictures and videos. But not for the core app?
- rhet0rica 1y agoYou're right; unfortunately I can't edit my comment to remove Adobe from it. Though they are plenty guilty of 'adding value' in the worst possible ways.
- mschuster91 1y agoI 'member Adobe's Creative Suite costing hundreds of dollars. Photoshop alone clocked in at 699$, the full CS6 was 2599$ [1]. Either you were a professional and paid dearly every odd year or you were a student and used a cracked/keygen'd CS6. Today? The full CC license is 70$ a month for individuals (30$ for students) and 100$ a month for businesses. Despite inflation, assuming a two year upgrade cycle you still get the same price for the full Adobe package when comparing CS vs CC. One may complain a lot about Adobe (RIP Flash, and anything Gen AI can go to hell for all I care), but "enshittification" is one thing that can't reasonably be thrown at them. As for Adobe Credits, AFAIK that's credits for fonts and assets - and again, I vastly prefer dealing with one storefront (Adobe) than having to buy and license individual font files or stock photos. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/23/2968192/adobe-cs6-pricing-availability-creative-cloud-announcement https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/23/2968192/adobe-cs6-pricing...
- freefruit 1y agohttps://penpot.app/ https://penpot.app/ is doing pretty well and quite well featured!
- bryanhogan 1y agoThere's Penpot[1], but it's not as good as Figma, currently. [1]: https://penpot.app/ https://penpot.app/
- rendaw 1y agoIn what ways?
- omnimus 1y agoOne main difference is performance. Penpot becomes unusuably laggy in some situations (like when you use raster images). Penpot made bet on .svg rendered directly using browsers. They thought these engines will become fast enough. Figma renders everything with webgl in their own engine and has 0 performance issues. AFAIK penpot is now working on same approach.
- mortenjorck 1y agoI randomly came across an app called Lunacy the other day, from stock vector and image marketplace Icons8. I decided to give it a try. It’s pitched as a Figma alternative, but as essentially an expensive advertisement for Icons8 (the stock marketplace is built into the app), I didn’t have very high expectations. Honestly, I was blown away. As a product designer who relies on a lot of advanced Figma functionality, I wouldn’t rely on it as my daily driver, but for a side project? I would choose it over Sketch. It covers all the basics of a modern UI design application, and even a few of the more recent additions to Figma like color variables. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more coverage of it.
- ethan_smith 1y agoPenpot (open source, web-based) has gained significant traction with a 4.0 release this year that added real-time collaboration and improved developer handoff features, while Inkscape and Krita continue to mature as desktop alternatives.
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoI'd love to see a thousand good canvas systems bloom. Congrats to Figma on building well the first time though! The deliberately craft thought out web architecture made a difference!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- artur_makly 1y agowho's buying?
- owlninja 1y agoI'm sure plenty of people will make plenty of money. We don't work for them and we won't be able to buy at the IPO price, but the wheel keeps on turning.
- edoceo 1y agoPrediction: in 180 days it's below first tick Edit: I said IPO but I meant first tick.
- levocardia 1y agohow strongly do you believe that prediction? Strongly enough to short?
- matwood 1y agoThe first trade price and not the IPO price? That's likely because the IPO is so over subscribed it's likely to pop 40-50% on it's first trade. If you're talking about the IPO price, I think that's unlikely without some exogenous event.
- edoceo 1y agoNote to future me: IPO priced at $33; first tick at $85; closed at $115.50
- bredren 1y agoCongratulations to everyone who made this company go. That said, this company's growth seems threatened by AI adoption rather than boosted by it.
- reactordev 1y agoThey’re adopting AI so that designers within figma can create. I don’t know whether this is good or bad (I don’t design) but if the tool everyone uses to mock things up gains coding abilities, we’re cooked. You’ll be able to go from figma to production in weeks.
- echelon 1y agoIt won't just be figma. The market is already filling up with lots of players in this space. There may be no moats. Just distribution winners.
- reactordev 1y agoNever underestimate the power of market share. Adobe has had a bunch of competitors but still dominates design.
- tonyhart7 1y agoadobe moat is complex desktop software Figma is a whole lot easier to replace actually you can now actually with a self host OSS that came up with and bring your own api key from antrophic or open ai
- reactordev 1y agoWhile technically, Figma is just a web app tool. Replacing it would be hard. It has a ton of features, it’s well designed, it exports working wireframe mock ups you can use to demonstrate functionality. It’s good software.
- neko_ranger 1y ago[flagged]
- neom 1y agoGood readings: https://madebyevan.com/figma/ https://madebyevan.com/figma/ https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web/ https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-design-... https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-by-3x/ https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-... (old but interesting still)
- rvz 1y agoGreat outcome for everyone involved (as predicted) from the insiders, VCs and the early employees. Now, the enshittification, price increases and lock-in begins when they ring the opening bell to list on the NYSE. What an incredible journey!
- iTokio 1y agoThat’s the tool that is used everywhere nowadays, from prototypes, mockups, concept designs to specs from designers to developers. I personally think that a key fact that is driving adoption, is that from the very beginning they used a web app instead of going native with a heavy desktop app. Thanks to this, you can share designs with just a link and everyone can access it, users interact with a mockup, devs look up the styles and components. …and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products. Their secret sauce seems to be making a complex web app fast and snappy with webassembly and an ecosystem of plugins secured with quickjs sandboxes.
- tiffanyh 1y agoNetwork effects create strong moats. Just look at FB, GitHub, LinkedIn, etc…
- nvr219 1y agoGreat analysis.
- SV_BubbleTime 1y agoAnd this all only kind of reads like an ad.
- worthless-trash 1y agoGlad i'm not the only one who saw it that way.
- knuckleheads 1y ago"Write me a comment for a hacker news comment that explains what figma is and why it's such a great business"
- darkwater 1y agoWell, I've asked ChatGPT with your prompt and came out with a very long comment. Asking to shorten it, we get: "Figma is basically Google Docs for design — a fast, browser-based tool where multiple people can edit the same UI file in real time. No installs, no emailing files around. Its magic as a business is the frictionless onboarding (just share a link), viral team adoption, and a freemium model that naturally expands into enterprise contracts. Works cross‑platform, so it spreads fast. That combo — great product + viral growth + strong enterprise lock‑in — is why it became the design platform and why Adobe was ready to pay billions for it." In the longer form it was also enthusiastic about the WASM part, but that didn't make the cut.
- BSOhealth 1y agoThe current product _must_ simply be a funding mechanism for whatever AI solution will ultimately define them. The idea that we’ll continue to have rigidly defined design mockups and specification seems relatively naive compared to generative UX defined by the user and their interaction preferences.
- xwolfi 1y agoImagine in that future world you describe, how immensely valuable a human artist will be: originality, wit, brilliance, their design will completely conquer any competitor generating the slop you dream of.
- grapesodaaaaa 1y agoAgreed. I do still worry that this will upend the status quo. As with any ecosystem: slow changes are fine, but fast changes can be catastrophic. I’ve worked with many people over the years who are good enough at their job, but will be replaced by AI (management’s choice, not mine). I’m probably one of those people as a mediocre engineer who prioritized family over career. I have some backup plans, but it’s still tough and going to affect lots of people.
- Gracana 1y agoThat will always be valuable, but I don’t think that’s what most designers are doing. If AI can copy flat design and Corporate Memphis style, it’ll compete just fine with the average designer.
- simgt 1y agoAs much as a skilled potter making fancy coffee cups conquers IKEA. Most people don't care about craftsmanship, and our economy nudges everyone towards convenient slop.
- entropsilk 1y agoWe must live in different realities because most design has almost no creativity or originality at all. "Good design" means the website/design looks exactly the same as everything else. We have the tools to do anything imaginable with film and video but the top box office films right now in the US are all completely derivative, non-creative human slop. "Good design" is so trivial to do with generative AI. We hardly live in 1910 Paris with all the cool people drinking absinthe in between cranking out all these artistic masterpieces.
- mrcwinn 1y agoMost of the offering is from current shareholders, not new shares issued. That’s non-dilutive I presume but also raises less funds for the company. Who has the privilege of selling at offer time? Employees I imagine are locked up and the stock will take a dump in 6 months.
- twothreeone 1y agoNo you absolutely can sell as employee. For that you have employees determine how many shares they would be willing to offer up for sale initially as part of the roadshow. The catch is that shares sold during the roadshow will then not have a price yet, because the price per share in the IPO is determined by the demand and what underwriters are willing to pay during roadshow negotiations. The lockup period starts after. Additionally, insiders can negotiate structured sales during the lockup (e.g. in the event the PPS gains significantly), but they again have to say how much they would be willing to sell without knowing the exact price.
- reactordev 1y agoAnd it turns out that price is $33/share.
- cluckindan 1y agoSo not as much an IPO as an exit through the greater fool.
- reactordev 1y agoThere’s a lot of fools in the world, all you have to make sure of is that you are not the last one.
- cluckindan 1y ago— P.T. Barnum
- dostick 1y agoFigma is one of the worst evils of capitalism. Considered a leader in UIUX design software while its own UIUX is abysmal, full of amateur level mistakes, inconsistencies and bad patterns. We have now a generation of designers that take Figma’s UX as an example to learn from and implement in their designs. To be a good designer today you have to learn to actively reject what Figma teaches you. what else you could expect - Figma was born out of founder’s need to find a proof of concept test case for real-time collaboration JavaScript engine they created. They stumbled on this idea. Back then everyone used Sketch and wanted better prototyping and interaction design, and Figma appeared with its real time collaboration as major point which you used once just to try and never again. For occasional demos and in large organisations maybe it is useful, but with your average design team size is one person it’s not a problem to solve first. And yet despite having this real time collaboration you still couldn’t collaboratively present your design. You have to shout all the time “and now, what screen you’re on, what do you see?, yes click on that button on the left”. It shows how to this day, the UX is not at the table at Figma. They focus on opening offices all over the world and courting big clients. Because need growth, IPO. Figma was first to employ an army of customer support “yes men” with sole task to answer in support forums and defuse frustrations this way, thus allowing Figma instead of fixing embarrassing bugs for years, to divert development resources to products nobody asked for, to fuel that growth. Figma has became a product for investors rather than designers. And doing that it poisoned the design community, normalised bad UX and business practices.
- sacredSatan 1y agoAbout collaborative presentation, can't you click on the user icon (usually top right) for whoever's leading and figma will follow the screen to their cursor? I distinctly remember that it's possible in Miro, and I'm pretty sure figma too. I think the problem you bring up has been pretty much solved.
- Fraterkes 1y agoI recently tried Sketch for the first time, and was kind of blown away by how Figma looks identical to it. Did Figma exactly copy the Sketch ui or did they copy eachother and slowly grow closer?
- preommr 1y agoSketch was the market leader in ui design tools. Before that, it was photoshop. Only a step away from using something like blender or after efffects tbh. It was also mac only. And desktop only. It turns out design is one of those things that people like to see, and is not insrcrutable like code. So stakeholders asked to see your ui and you would send them... this file. They would then have to download the application, and deal with all the joys that come with different platforms, asking how to install the thing, security complians, licenses, etc. Figma came in with a web app that made designing and sharing as easy as sending a link. They also had... let's say creatively viral approaches to licensing where anyone that edited a file automatically got added as a seat. But unlike those desktop applications, you could also leave notes - that's editing! So it wasn't just for designers the way photoshop or sketch was. Now instead of your team of 2-3 designers, it's like half the company. It's beautiful in a way that the latter group is way more numerous and uses <1% of the software features, yet gets charged just as much. Beautiful. And lucrative. Anyways, they're similar because Figma made a web-based ui tool, and the base model for the workflow was already established by Sketch, so their fundamentals are very very similar.
- cluckindan 1y agoSketch also had a cloud service for sharing designs and prototypes, and commenting on them. You could also get a constraints plugin for Sketch. That’s built-in on Figma.
- afandian 1y agoThat model reminds me of Gitlab. You need all these features so a seat has to be expensive. But you need a seat for even the smallest interaction with repos, whether you’re a dev or you just want to raise issues. Left a bad taste in the mouth.
- 1y ago
- october8140 1y agoCan't wait for "increasing shareholder value" to run it into the ground.
- ygritte 1y agoIs this the start signal for impending enshittification? Now that the actual customers of Figma are the shareholders? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44737346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44737346
- jbs789 1y agoThere have always been shareholders. Now you can be one too, if you would like.
- nottorp 1y agoEntshittification incoming August 1 then?
- robotnikman 1y agoIt may take a bit longer than that, but don't worry, it will happen eventually.
- perfmode 1y agoCongratulations to Dylan and Evan and everyone who built this company.
- raduan 1y agoThat was quite fast - they filed an S1 in the beginning of July...
- rcstank 1y agoIs that a bad thing?
- egorfine 1y agoHow many months do we have to migrate until complete enshittification? Can we realistically expect like 6 more months of life?
- xucian 1y agoI see people, surely more versed in ipos than me, mention enshittification. is this happening with most ipos? what green flags should we look at as hits that "this company is different"?
- GreenWatermelon 1y ago> green flags should we look at as hits that "this company is different"? The only possible green flag os "Did not ipo"
- xucian 1y agoin your exp, what % of ipo'd companies are still goated?
- GreenWatermelon 1y ago0 One of the greatest companies, Valve, is privately owned. I also respect 37signals, which isn't publicly owned. Those are the two companies that crop in my head when I think "Good company"
- RamblingCTO 1y agothe main driver of enshittificiation is that you need to grow profits. the problem is: your user adoption will have peaked at some point. you can then raise prices, which will also plateau. the last step is to enshittify your products to increase the margin by providing less for the same money and "reduce costs" (kick out the people/services that made the product good in the first place). the profit driven growth chasing will then kill off the product and the "capital" (shareholders) will move off to the next thing to gut and kill off for a bit of revenue. it's sustainable if it doesn't need growth (and market beating growth at that). that would be a green flag.
- xucian 1y agothanks, that sounds like a good approximation of reality it's a sad reality, I wish we've found the cure already, or perhaps nothing is broken and I just have to zoom out (for ex., smaller bow-and-arrow players now have a chance to take down the nerfed mastodon)
- msephton 1y agoI remember the first viral blog posts about the drawing tools made for Figma. It was amazing to see so much love and attention to detail with the basic tools done so right. It reminded me more of FreeHand or Canvas or Xara than Adobe, which was a great thing. But those diamonds are now lost in the rough of a bad user interface and an app that has become progressively slower over the years. And we're still missing basic tools that the classic apps I mentioned had 35 years ago.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoIn the age of AI following Figma UI mock-ups has become a bottleneck; I spend more time on wrestling with styles than on actual functionality. Figma could have provided a way to integrate with LLMs, but the only thing they have is an MCP server which is behind the paid subscription and requires their desktop app...
- msephton 1y agoStyle management is a huge time sink with so much repetitive busy work. Interestingly, they could foresee this even in their earliest whiteboard plans. https://twitter.com/soleio/status/1950817111116312808 https://twitter.com/soleio/status/1950817111116312808
- anonymous344 1y agowasn't figma like the "new kid" 6 years ago and now it's the second adobe? who is the new new kid? was there something called miro or mira or..?
- usaar333 1y ago$19.8 billion market cap to save everyone from doing research
- Nazzareno 1y agoS-1 SEC file here: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025033742/figma-sx1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025...
- Fendy 1y agoI am not a designer but i used figma a lot for website projects. It is good but it took sooooooo long to load the files... even though I downloaded a desktop, still very slow.. anybody met with the same issue?
- adidoit 1y agoGreat product. How they adapt AI in a way that doesn't alienate but empowers their core ICP will be important I don't think they can afford to be a follower on AI but being a leader will also be untenable.
- paxys 1y agoThe IPO price started from $25 last week and ended at $33 due to increased demand. If it opens at the high range the company would be worth exactly what Adobe bid for it ($20B).
- a1371 1y ago> Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Allen & Company LLC, and J.P. Morgan are acting as joint lead book-running managers for the offering Can someone explain the advantage of simultaneously having these four massive companies as book runners?
- mitchell_h 1y agoCouple reasons, spread the risk and increase the possible people to sell to.
- vismit2000 1y agoMore IBs (Syndicate) => More book building through more connections
- belter 1y agoStock is up 227% on base price. Figma wasn’t reliably profitable until very recently. Generated real cash in 2022, posted an inflated paper profit in 2023, took a one-time GAAP loss in 2024. We are in a bubble.
- ToDougie 1y agoWell it looks like I missed the boat. Current price $137.