The 4 phases of Bottoms-up GTM
Part 3: Tactics and metrics to focus on depending on where you're at in your growth journey
Welcome to the final installment of my Bottoms-up GTM series. In the two months since leaving Figma, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to early stage startup founders. One question consistently comes up: “We are a PLG company and want to do a Bottoms-up GTM. Where do we start?” That is where this post comes in.
As a reminder, this the last of a three-part series.
Part 3: The 4 phases of Bottoms-up GTM (this post)
In Part 1, I defined the Bottoms-up GTM and in Part 2 gave a more in-depth framework for measurement of this motion, especially at scale. But what you do tactically when you’re pre-PMF vs. selling enterprise in this GTM looks very different. I lived through this journey at Figma as we created and scaled this playbook from zero revenue to millions of users, and I’ve since watched other companies as they walk down this path. There are some patterns.
Here are the simplified 4 phases we’ll go through:
For each phase I’ll discuss tactically how to incorporate the Bottoms-up GTM model introduced in Part 1 (empowering individual advocates to drive growth to the community and their orgs) and what you should be focused on. But remember, this GTM motion isn’t for everyone. There are certain prerequisites that need to exist for it to be applicable. Ok, let’s get into the 4 phases. I’ll talk about my experience at Figma and share examples from other companies.
Phase 1: Pre PMF / Validation
Welcome to the grind. The team is small, you don’t have any real users yet, and every day is an existential crisis. I’ve been there. This phase is hard. Figma was in this phase for a long time. It was a technology first tool, discovering the powers of WebGL on the browser then later finding its ideal customer. Even after, getting any team to use the tool full time was a huge challenge. Designers have a high quality bar, especially when they spend 8+ hours a day in a tool. Getting those first teams was hand-to-hand combat.
So in this phase you need to live 100% in the advocate ring of the Bottoms-up GTM framework, finding the one person who loves the product, learning from them, and making their life so much better they can’t imagine going back. Nothing is scalable and nothing else – metrics, funnels, “community building”-- matters until the first (few) believer(s) exists.
Goal → cultivate a small group of true advocates
✅ Do:
Target ideal users outbound: Map 25–50 dream users and slide into their DMs.
Focus: Make your first users happy, at all costs.
❌ Don’t
Chase funnel metrics or ROI yet. Avoid the phrase “but how does this scale” at all costs.
Stand up a public community. No one cares about you yet!
Delegate user comms or hide behind a handle. The founder should be the face of the brand, as themselves on channels.
📝 In practice
Figma: To target ideal outbound users, Dylan made a node network of all of the most influential designers on twitter, then figured out how to connect to them, and those people were our alpha users. Many of these people became core Figma advocates, eventually.
Mintlify: I love this story about how the CEO and CTO moonlighted as technical writers to close their first 10 customers for their dev docs tool, offering so much value the early customers couldn’t say no.
Once a handful of people love your product and use it the way you envision, you’re ready for Phase 2.
Phase 2: Early users
You have some traction, but there are probably more haters than advocates. A few dozen (maybe a few hundred) people are poking at your product. I remember this phase at Figma. We launched out of stealth and were in beta for a year before charging. We still had a lot of technical gaps before most teams would adopt the tool full time. So we had to give people reasons to sign back again and again as we continued to launch more features, even if they weren’t ready to advocate for their entire team to adopt us yet.
Here in our Bottoms-up GTM model you’re still living 80% in Advocate, but you’ve begun to peek 20% into Community. In this phase you want to deepen 1:1 bonds while showing early social proof in the places your users already hang out, finding reasons to re engage them.
Goal → turn early users into repeat advocates
✅ Do:
Keep the circle tight and personal. DM updates, host tiny office hours, send plain-text emails from the founder.
Launches = re-engagement moments. Each feature drop is a reason to ping churned users; share a behind-the-scenes post that makes them curious even if they aren’t ready to convert.
Go to them. Engage (as a human) on X/Twitter, Discord, Reddit, niche Slack groups—no one will join your space yet.
Listen to haters. Passion beats apathy. Skeptics often flip into passionate advocates once you fix their blocker.
❌ Don’t
Stand up your own forum/Slack. Better to stick with 1:1 conversations.
Automate nurture emails or complex funnels. Authenticity > scale.
Obsess over metrics or scale growth programs.
📝 In practice
Figma: For designers 2015-2022, this space was twitter. We always considered social to be a community space. We could engage and reach users much more easily where they already spent time rather than trying to get them to sign in somewhere else.
Linear: Reengages users with a weekly “changelog Tuesday” tweet + in-app feed to nudge dormant accounts. This has the additional benefit of reinforcing the idea that they listen to their users, fix their bugs, and ship fast.
When early users return weekly and recommend you unprompted, move to Phase 3.
Phase 3: SMB+ small team adoption
You are monetizing. Small teams or small pockets of a team inside a larger company are swiping credit cards without looping in procurement. At this stage in Figma’s journey, advocacy volume became too high to rely on 1:1 outreach by any one person. We had passionate users with tons of energy but nowhere to channel it. That’s when we added programmatic layers to our advocacy motion to surface every champion and to guide their enthusiasm toward activities that mattered most.
So you need to move from hand-to-hand advocacy to programs, enabling those advocates to advocate for you. So 60 % Advocate, 40 % Community. Still personal, but now there are programmatic elements to help you scale.
Goal → power up scattered passionate users into a group that can start advocating for you.
✅ Do:
Identify more advocates. Look at social channels, people who are creating content about you organically, and product usage data to increase your surface area.
Feed the inner circle. Add your advocates to early betas, roadmap previews, AMAs with leadership, (good/ high quality) swag. Make them feel closer to the company than anyone else.
Hand advocates the megaphone. Amplify your advocates and give them credibility by supporting and amplifying them as speakers at events, hosts, retweeting them when they write content about you, etc . Make it as easy and appreciated as possible for them to advocate for you. This is where their credibility and energy outmatches your own.
❌ Don’t
Open a public “everyone welcome” forum. It will devolve to feature requests.
Walk away from 1:1. It's just that more people at the company are doing that 1:1 connection, not just the founder.
Make all advocates fit one model. Encourage multiple ways they can advocate for you, allowing for differences while still adding programmatic elements.
📝 In practice
Notion: Created an Ambassador program at this phase to host events, create templates, and monetize as consultants. They did NOT force them all into one model. Notion then supported these people to be successful as much as they could - amplifying and supporting them.
Cursor: To find more advocates, Ben Lang cold emails the top 1% of most active users 1:1 and does outbound tweets to find the right people.
When this is working, your advocates start doing marketing for you in a much more authentic way than it would be coming directly for you, but they have more resources to do it at scale. They host city meetups, tweet about launches, and answer support questions and do things you’d never think of.
Phase 4: Early Enterprise
Up to this point, we’ve been largely focused on building and solidifying relationships with our individual advocates, with some early ways of enabling and encouraging them to spread the word into the larger community.
But the magic of the bottoms-up motion is that every advocate also represents an org or larger team, if you can harness those relationships. In this phase the focus should be: 40 % Advocate, 40 % Org, 20 % Community. In this phase you expand from only nurturing single champions to activating whole companies. But remember, you have to keep feeding the core advocates here or you will lose them, and then lose the orgs and communities they represent.
Goal → turn advocate-led usage into repeatable land-and-expand deals
✅ Do:
Map organic adoption inside target accounts. Ask data science to surface pockets of usage inside one email domain and track who invited who. You’ll usually see one “patient zero” who was spreading the tool in the org. That is the person to build a relationship with.
Co-sell with the advocate. Bring the advocate with you on sales calls. They understand the org better and can also be a co-seller with you, with more credibility than you with the people who own the budget.
Train-the-trainer. Once the deal closes, arm your internal advocate with resources and encouragement to onboard others and drive expansion. They can host office hours, answer questions in Slack, and become the de-facto “tool admin.” They’ll spread adoption faster than a CSM.
❌ Don’t
Forget about the core advocates. If you lose them you will lose the people they influence, eventually.
Over-engineer community. It should still feel authentic and human-based.
Hide behind the brand or processes. Nothing erodes the bond faster than sending people to a nameless “support@” address or during incidents. People should still take the lead.
📝 In practice
Asana: The Asana Together program turns internal champions into certified trainers, providing slide decks, curricula, and a private support slack. Champions run hundreds of in-house workshops and answers millions of slack DMs (I know, I always pinged our internal Asana expert) that drive seat expansion with more credibility because they’re internal.
Figma: When we first launched our user conference Config at Figma in 2020 we thought of it as the basis of our community. We used Config to bring our most passionate users together and ‘feed’ them to go advocate for us even more.We didn’t over-engineer it for MQLs, it simply felt like everyone coming together and meeting each other IRL.
When internal champions are running trainings for you and upsell ARR starts outpacing new-logo ARR you’ve nailed Phase 4 and can start thinking about scale metrics, localization and new product expansion.
If you’re just getting started, first make sure Bottoms-up GTM is right for you. If it is, pinpoint where you are on the ladder and look at that stage’s advice. If you realize skipped a step, its better to back track and do some of the earlier tactics than fail at your current phase because you don’t have solid foundations.
If you want more specific examples of how we did this at Figma in the various phases, check out the podcast and post I did a while back with the First Round Review.
Thanks for joining in on all three parts of this series! Bottoms-up GTM isn’t magic, but it does run opposite to a lot of traditional marketing advice. If you remember one thing let it be that real growth comes from human connection, intuition, and the courage to break a few rules. This is the way.
Good luck out there! 🍻