The Story Behind the New Knak Figma Plugin

Knak continually improves and adjusts its products, but we hadn’t launched a new product since 2019.

Until recently.

Our new Knak Figma Plugin has just come out, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Not only does it deal with a significant pain point at the very start of the marketing process, but it also expands Knak’s offering and positions us for growth.

To me, the really interesting story is how – 10 years after Knak was founded – we came to realize the Knak Figma Plugin was necessary, and that we should build it.

That’s the story I want to tell here.

How we identified the problem

Every solution starts with a problem.

Knak itself started as a solution to a problem I was encountering.

As a young marketer, I had to put together emails. Except I didn’t know how to code.

At that time there was no way to build an email without farming out the technical part of the job to people who knew how to code. That made my job difficult, and left me (like most marketers) frustrated.

Knak solved my problem by allowing for codeless email and landing page creation. Marketers didn’t have to learn how to code! Hooray!

But we eventually realized that Knak’s solutions didn’t go far enough.

This became apparent while we were rebranding Knak using our own product.

In our desire to find a solution for email marketers, we realized we’d overlooked the needs of a company’s other teams.

That’s because, when you are building a brand-new email or landing page, while the process usually starts with a brief from the marketing team, the build starts with the designer.

And those people use a design platform to do what they do – a platform that is completely distinct from the marketing automation tools (Marketo, for example) that Knak was designed to work with.

Most design and creative teams use design platforms like Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch and Miro. And at one point we realized there was no Knak interface for any of those.

I made a point of asking our creative director to please tell me truthfully whether he would rather use Knak or Figma to design emails.

And he said Figma! He told the CEO of Knak he would rather use Figma?! That’s when I knew we needed to do something.

I had a look at our rebranding process and saw how we could make it run more smoothly.

Knak’s design and creative teams had used Figma for our own rebranding.

Our design and creative people worked their magic and we gave them feedback (in Figma) until we were ready to pass the new material over to our Marketing Ops team.

And that’s where the problem arose: We found our marketers had to take the design team’s Figma file and have our Marketing Ops team completely rebuild it inside Knak.

It was a long and cumbersome process – even if our marketers didn’t need to know how to code to do it, and even if a lot of material could be transferred by simple drag-and-drop, which is much faster than hand-coding.

We found it would take our marketers many hours to rebuild a Figma asset in Knak.

That made no sense! They were just duplicating work someone else had already done!

We’d solved the coding problem only to discover another challenge: marketing ops rebuilding designs within Knak.

The Knak Figma Plugin was built to help designers and marketing operations professionals work better together.

Why pleasing yourself will usually please your customers

Now this is where for me, as the CEO of a software company, things get interesting.

We’d gone nearly 10 years before realizing we could improve the lives of the design and creative teams.

Why was that?

In other words, for any company looking to improve and grow, how do you know what to build?

Should you rely on your customers to tell you what they want and need?

Yes – to a point.

We regularly ask our customers for their feedback and for their ideas. And we ourselves can often figure out what’s important for them.

But no one had suggested something like the Knak Figma Plugin.

So there are obviously times when a company like Knak really needs to go against its instinct and build what we think is really important. The Knak Figma Plugin was one of those occasions.

We should have built it sooner, but it wasn’t until we experienced the issue ourselves that the lightbulb went off in our heads.

This is an important lesson.

Rick Rubin, an American record executive and author of The Creative Act: A Way of Being, says that creative success comes not from trying to please an audience or a potential customer, but from trying to please oneself.

“It turns out that when you make something truly for yourself, you are doing the best thing you possibly can for the audience,” he noted in an interview.

I can see now what Rubin means.

When I started Knak, I was creating something for myself, something that would address my own pain point.

In the case of the Knak Figma Plugin, we discovered a problem because of our decision to rebrand; our solution would help not only us, but our customers as well.

But we don’t always experience our customers’ pain points ourselves. That means we’ve got to get into their heads.

That’s not as easy as it sounds.

Say we ask for feedback.

Ever give feedback to someone more senior than yourself? You are likely to tread lightly. You may not be comfortable being as frank and open and transparent with that person as you need to be.

But you can’t worry about hurting someone’s feelings in cases like these. When the goal is to build the best product possible, you have to give really hard feedback.

In other words, sometimes even feedback doesn’t go as far as it should.

When I told our venture capital investor about our plans for the Knak Figma Plugin, I was asked how many customers I had interviewed to confirm the need for the plugin.

The reality is that I hadn’t done any extensive polling of customers. I was going on instinct.

That’s because I believe that sometimes you have to be bold to build something great.

I do understand the need to talk to customers. In fact, we have an open and transparent product idea community, regular calls with our customers, product roadmap webinars and a customer advisory board to formalize the process.

But I also firmly believe that customers don’t have all the access to information that we do, nor do they know what we are trying to do, or even what we can do for them. So that’s where you have to be bold and decisive.

A start-to-finish solution

Once we told our customers about our plans to create the Knak Figma Plugin, they got as excited as I am right now. They immediately saw how it would help them by speeding up the very start of any marketing campaign, the ideation stage.

Speeding up the initial process for creating any product speeds up development downstream. That’s why help at the start of the process is both powerful and super valuable. And nothing in any campaign happens before the ideation stage.

So I think we can now say that Knak has a start-to-finish solution for marketers.

It’s funny, but when I helped create Knak, I thought marketing operations was where emails and landing pages all started. But marketing ops was actually downstream from the design team, which comes up with the original designs. Which just goes to show how perspective matters.

In fact, as we talked to customers we learned that roughly half of a marketing team’s emails originate with the design team, which destroyed our assumption that marketing was where it all started.

Once we realized we could do the Figma Plugin, I naturally wanted us to move fast – and we did. I’m very proud of that. We launched it at the Adobe Summit in March of this year.

Now that it’s available, we want to tell the world about it – or at least, make sure existing and prospective customers know what the Knak Figma Plugin can do.

And as with all our products, we are continually improving and refining it. So here’s a shoutout to the designers who are using our plugin: We welcome your feedback. (Be honest!)

With the Knak Figma Plugin, we are an official Figma partner now, and part of their annual Config conference in San Francisco.

It’s exciting to get involved with a whole new community of people and provide something for a company’s design and creative teams, teams that are adjacent to those we usually work with.

We want to make this THE email plugin; anyone building emails in Figma needs to know that it will help them do their work in the easiest way possible.

By the way, we have another new product coming soon. It’s for the teams that manage a company’s internal communications. Keep an eye out for it!