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Is Figma's self-service model for higher tier organization plan a unique advantage or a growing trend among SaaS companies?
Anonymous
PLG-focused VC
I don't think that that's unusual these days. For best-in-class companies, it used to be the case that security features like SSO or whatever would be reserved for enterprise plans, which salespeople had to be involved with. That would be the tier where there'd be a "contact sales" button and you could get SSO then, and it was really used both as a carrot and a stick to get people to upgrade. It was, "You get this extra feature, but also if you need this feature, you have to talk to us to upgrade." I think that's becoming less common over time because it's becoming more of a standard, people just expect that it'll be available.
I think it's useful to distinguish between "enterprise" plans, which are the most expensive self-serve plan that you're talking about with Figma, and an "invoiced" plan, which is a plan where the sales team needs to be involved because they're negotiating with the procurement team, they're doing a security review, they're putting in a bunch of legwork, they might be negotiating different per-seat pricing or whatever it might be based on the specific needs of the customer. The stuff that is impossible to self-serve and is a requirement once you're at a certain deal size or certain types of organizations. Those conversations are required. There's no way you could self-serve into it. I'd be curious for Figma, presumably, there are some of those types of deals out there and how are they managing those? Is there something unique about that? I think their enterprise plan is best in class, but it's not wholly unique. I think there are a lot of other PLG companies that are doing a similar thing.