Author | Deng Yongyi
Edit | Su Jianxun
The hammer of the times, do not know which day will hit your industry.
On March 12, a customer email from FIGMA, a UI design collaboration platform, to DJI circulated online. Figma said that in accordance with U.S. laws and regulations and for reasons that are well known, the company will begin to freeze the accounts of DJI team members, users will no longer have access to their data on Figma, and Figma will email users' design files within two weeks.
36Kr asked DJI about this matter, and DJI said that there was "no relevant response for the time being." The domestic UI design company "Instant Design JsDesign" said on its public account that the company has made a verification to confirm that this news is true.
Figma's mail exploded in the To B circle over the weekend. Many people exclaimed that after the "card neck" industries such as semiconductors were sanctioned, the software industry also began to ban the pace. After the news came out, a number of domestic product design software service providers such as Blue Lake and Instant Design released corresponding plans to provide services for affected Internet companies and designers to help users migrate and backup their design files from Figma.
The Blue Lagoon team spent a sleepless weekend. After seeing the email, Blue Lagoon urgently formed a team and launched the Figma file import function on its own products. CEO Ren Yanghui slept only three hours in two days, and spent the rest of the time with the team answering user inquiries and helping enterprises migrate and back up files.
The concerns of domestic users are palpable. Blue Lake announced that the official account push of the function launched exceeded 100,000 in a short period of time, and nearly a thousand companies found the Blue Lake team. "The release of figma's signal has actually far exceeded a case of DJI, and the head companies in various industries, whether traditional or Internet technology companies, are very worried." He said to 36Kr.
The bright signal light came on again.
Figma: The king of UI design
Who is Figma?
To the masses, Figma is not a familiar technology company. But in the field of UI design, Figma is the king of the new generation.
According to Forbes, Figma's 2020 ARR (annual recurring revenue) has reached $75 million, serving millions of users at the time, and in 2021, this number is expected to double.
The popularity of the Internet is inseparable from the explosive growth of the number of terminals (computers, mobile phones, tablets, etc.). The number of terminals and brands are thousands, and if you want to ensure that each terminal has the same user experience, you need to do a good job of software adaptation. Scientific interface and interaction design can also have a significant role in promoting business.
In the early days of the development of the Internet, there was no special interface interaction design software on the market, designers generally used Photoshop for design, and then there was Software such as Sketch, but Sketch only worked on the Mac side, and it was not popularized for a long time.
With the popularity of cloud computing and the way software is delivered, Figma is a UI collaboration SaaS tool born in the cloud era. In simple terms, enterprise design teams used to collaborate, requiring version 1, version 2, and version 3 to be passed on to the partner in charge of the next step; but after using Figma, all collaboration processes can be completed online directly on the web page and are suitable for various operating systems.
This online collaborative design process greatly improves the efficiency of the UI design team and allows the designer community to spontaneously disseminate this useful tool. As a result, Figma has become the most amazingly growing SaaS company in recent years, and has also become a representative case of the recently discussed PLD (Product-led Growth) model. After the Series E round of financing in 2021, Figma's valuation has also reached $10 billion.
Figma product prototyping interface Source: Figma
However, Figma has not focused on the domestic market before, and there are not many domestic companies that will be affected immediately. An entrepreneur in the field of UI design told 36Kr that Figma's absolute number of customers in China is not much, focusing on corporate customers who are more receptive to new things and have higher requirements for UI design, such as the Internet industry.
Sharp signal
In fact, the United States has always included a ban on the provision of software services to the other side in the sanctions list. Until now, Figma fired a shot, hitting the industry hard - shouted for many years "go TO IOE", domestic software companies, ready to undertake all this?
Figma's UI design track has risen with the popularity of cloud computing. In 2010, the domestic cloud computing market sprouted, and in 2016, Figma was established, and its rapid growth was remarkable. Since then, there have gradually been companies in China that benchmark Figma, such as Blue Lake, Instant Design, Pixso, Gike, etc.
Figma has not made a big push into the domestic market, localization support has been barely strong, and domestic startups have also taken advantage of this period of time to work quietly. Blue Lake, which started earlier, announced at the end of last year that it had tens of thousands of paid enterprise customers, with a penetration rate of more than 98% among the top 100 Internet companies in China.
The 2020 pandemic and working from home have accelerated people's acceptance of cloud collaboration, and Figma's user base has also increased fourfold in 2020. In China, the investment enthusiasm of the UI design track is rising - in 2021, Blue Lake will receive a 1 billion yuan C+ round of financing led by GGV. Instant Design also received two rounds of financing from Hillhouse, SIG, Coto and other institutions in the same year.
For domestic players, product maturity is an important factor in wanting to catch Figma's customers.
Blue Lagoon product MasterGo
Ren Yanghui told 36Kr that mastergo, a new product launched by Blue Lake last year, is to hold the goal of benchmarking or even surpassing Figma, and has experienced more than two years of research and development, and has made great progress in performance and rendering.
"How to achieve high performance, high response efficiency, etc., this is a very complex architectural problem, the service is not good enough, I think this is the core," Ren Yanghui added, "it is precisely because of the investment in the past two years, so many of the original Figma users found us for the first time, we can catch their needs." "At present, tens of thousands of company Figma design files have been transmitted back through Blue Lake
In the Internet community, such a thing is not the first time, nor will it be the last. The Figma incident is an important footnote to the trend of domestic substitution, and it also makes the "Blue Lagoons" usher in the spring. In addition to UI design software, there are also lower-level databases, operating systems, and various basic and industrial software... Software, once known as an important product of globalization, needs to gradually take the right to speak back into its own hands, which is a long battle.