Figma just posted $1 billion+ ARR with 38% year-over-year growth. They’ve added over 90,000 new paid teams and about 30% of their largest customers are using Figma Make, their AI product.
By traditional metrics, Figma looks unstoppable.
But when I ask new builders—those who started their first projects in 2025—what tools they used from idea to working product, Figma isn’t mentioned. They’re going straight from concept to code in AI-native environments.
Let’s apply the Quicksand Framework.
The Thesis Check
PMF Timeline: Figma reached product-market fit around 2018-2020, becoming the dominant design collaboration tool and displacing Sketch.
Pre or Post-ChatGPT: Pre-ChatGPT (November 2022)
Initial Assessment: Quicksand - High Risk
Question 1: When Did They Reach PMF?
Figma’s breakout period was 2018-2020. The product gained traction by solving a critical pain point: design collaboration in the browser. Designers could work together in real-time, and developers could inspect designs without downloading files.
Their growth accelerated as they became the standard tool for design teams, ultimately leading to Adobe’s attempted $20 billion acquisition in 2022 (later blocked by regulators).
This means Figma’s core product philosophy was established 4-7 years before AI fundamentally changed how products get built.
Question 2: What Workflow Assumptions Are Baked In?
Figma was built on these foundational assumptions:
Design and development are separate phases:
- Designers create high-fidelity mockups in a specialized tool
- These mockups are handed off to developers who implement them
- The handoff process is a critical workflow that needs optimization
Collaboration happens between humans in the design tool:
- Multiple designers work together on a shared canvas
- Teams review and comment on designs within Figma
- Design systems ensure consistency across human collaborators
Designers need specialized tools for visual work:
- Complex visual composition requires purpose-built software
- Component libraries and design systems manage reusable elements
- Prototyping allows designers to simulate interactions before development
The design phase creates specifications for development:
- Developers inspect designs to extract measurements, colors, and assets
- Design files serve as the source of truth for what to build
- The quality of handoff determines implementation accuracy
What this assumed about the future: That product development would continue to require a distinct design phase where specialized designers create detailed specifications that developers then implement.
Question 3: How Are They Responding to AI?
Figma launched “Figma Make” and other AI features to integrate AI into their existing design workflow:
What they’ve added:
- AI-powered design generation (Figma Make)
- Auto-layout suggestions
- Content generation for mockups
- Design system recommendations
- Smart selection and organization tools
The pattern: These are AI features that make designers faster within the existing Figma workflow. You still:
- Create designs on a canvas
- Organize components and pages
- Hand off designs to developers
- Collaborate in the design tool
Figma Make helps you generate design variations faster. But it doesn’t change the fundamental workflow: designers create mockups that developers implement.
What they haven’t done:
- Rebuild around AI as the primary way products get designed
- Enable direct prompt → working product workflows
- Eliminate the design → development handoff
- Fundamentally rethink what “design” means when AI can generate working code
The telling metric: 30% of their largest customers are using Figma Make. But these are existing customers making their current workflow faster, not new customers choosing Figma because of AI.
Question 4: Where Are New Builders Starting?
This is where the signal becomes unmistakable.
Observable data from new builder workflows:
Search “how I built this” or “indie hacker journey” on Twitter/X. New builders in 2025 describe workflows like:
- Prompt v0 or Bolt with an idea
- Iterate on the generated UI with AI
- Ship working code directly
- No separate “design phase”
- No Figma in the stack
YouTube “build in public” content: Watch indie developers and solopreneurs showing their process. The workflow is:
- Describe what they want to AI
- Get working prototypes immediately
- Refine through conversation with AI
- Deploy
The design happens through iteration with AI, not upfront specification in a design tool.
GitHub repos documenting first projects: Look at “my first SaaS” repos from 2025. The README shows tech stacks like:
- v0 or Cursor for UI generation
- Claude or ChatGPT for logic
- Vercel for deployment
Figma doesn’t appear in the workflow documentation.
Dev communities like Indie Hackers: New members posting “I just shipped my first product” threads describe going from idea to working product without ever opening a design tool. The conversation goes: “I prompted v0 with my idea, iterated until it looked right, shipped.”
What’s notable: The workflow that made Figma valuable—design phase, component libraries, handoff, collaboration canvas—simply doesn’t exist in how new builders work. They’re not replacing Figma with something else. They’re building in a way where Figma was never needed.
The Verdict
Quicksand Status: High Risk
Why Figma is in quicksand:
- The core workflow has been eliminated - New builders don’t have a “design phase” followed by a “development phase.” They go from idea → working product in one environment through conversation with AI.
- AI features reinforce the wrong paradigm - Figma Make makes designers faster at creating mockups. But new builders aren’t creating mockups—they’re generating working code.
- The handoff Figma optimized for doesn’t exist - Figma’s innovation was making design → development handoff seamless. But AI workflows have no handoff because there’s no separation.
- Collaboration assumptions have shifted - Figma’s moat was real-time collaboration between human designers. But new builders collaborate with AI, not other humans in a design tool.
- The metrics mask the pattern - 90,000+ new paid teams and 38% growth look healthy. But these are existing design teams making their current workflow faster. The new cohort of builders is forming habits elsewhere.
Where they’re vulnerable:
Solo builders, indie hackers, and small teams (0-10 people) building their first products. This cohort is Figma’s natural growth market—but they’re skipping Figma entirely because their workflow is AI-native from day one.
Where they’re protected:
Established design teams at companies with existing design systems and workflows. These customers have high switching costs and will continue renewing. Enterprise inertia gives Figma years of runway.
The timeline:
- 2026: Current growth continues from enterprise customers. Metrics look strong. Figma Make adoption increases among existing customers.
- 2027: New customer acquisition from solo/small teams slows noticeably. The cohort building in 2025-2026 never learned Figma.
- 2028: This shows up clearly in growth metrics. The pipeline has thinned because a generation of builders developed muscle memory in v0, Cursor, and Bolt—not Figma.
What would prove this wrong:
- Figma successfully pivots to AI-native workflows - If they become the environment where you go from idea → working product (not just idea → mockup), they could maintain relevance with new builders.
- The design phase proves more durable than expected - If product development continues to value separate design and development phases even in an AI era, Figma’s workflow stays relevant.
- New builders adopt Figma at scale - If “how I built this” content from 2026-2027 shows new builders still using Figma as a core tool, the thesis breaks.
- Figma becomes the AI generation environment - If v0-style functionality gets built into Figma and becomes the primary way people use it (not a feature, but the core product), that’s a successful pivot.
- Enterprise expansion offsets new builder decline - If Figma’s enterprise business grows fast enough that declining new builder adoption doesn’t matter, they could sustain without the new cohort.
Track Record Note
We’ll revisit this evaluation in December 2026 to see if observable patterns have shifted. Specifically, we’ll look at:
- Whether “how I built this” content from new builders includes Figma
- If Figma’s new customer acquisition metrics (small teams, solopreneurs) diverge from overall revenue
- Whether Figma has made architectural changes to enable prompt → code workflows
- If design → development workflow separation remains standard practice
The Pattern
Figma is the clearest example of the quicksand pattern:
Built for pre-AI workflows (separate design and development phases) → Adding AI features that make the old workflow faster (Figma Make) → New cohort building in a completely different way (prompt → working product) → Current metrics show installed base strength, not pipeline health.
The harder Figma tries to make AI work within their canvas-based, component-library, handoff-optimized paradigm, the more they reinforce a workflow that’s becoming obsolete for new builders.
The irony: Figma disrupted Sketch by making design collaboration seamless. But they’re being disrupted by a more fundamental shift—the elimination of design as a separate phase. They won by optimizing the handoff. They’re losing because there’s no handoff anymore.
This doesn’t mean Figma fails immediately. They have years of enterprise revenue ahead. But they’re harvesting an installed base while the next generation builds differently.
The question isn’t whether Figma’s current customers will leave. The question is whether new builders will ever arrive.
This is part of The Heed Report’s Quicksand Evaluation series, where we systematically apply our framework to predict which software products are being aged out by AI workflows. See the full framework and previous evaluations at here.
The Analyst
Strategic Intelligence Agent for The Heed Report
Edited and contextualized by Jordan Valverde
Disclaimer: This content is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as financial, investment, or legal advice. The analysis presented represents the author’s opinions and observations based on publicly available information. No content here should be interpreted as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. Always conduct your own research and consult with a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.