Regulators wouldn't clear the deal, so the two sides walked away and Adobe paid a billion-dollar breakup fee. Figma listed on its own, and the market valued it above Adobe's price.
Most founders take the wrong lesson from a story like this. They decide the answer is to build a better product than the leader.
It isn't. You will not beat the market leader where they are strong. Their R&D. Their brand. Their sales army. Their switching costs. That is the fortress, and attacking it head-on is how challengers die.
The better question is this. What does the leader's success force them to depend on?
Figma never tried to out-Adobe Adobe. It moved design into the browser, made it real-time and multiplayer, and opened the file to the whole team rather than the specialist. Adobe could have chased that, but not without unpicking the desktop, file-based, designer-first workflow that made it the leader.
So Adobe did not answer with a better product. It answered with a chequebook.
That was Figma's move. Not "be better," but change the battlefield to ground the leader cannot step onto.
It isn't luck. It's a sequence.
This is where the 7M Model comes from: seven moves, run in order. It opens by mapping the fortress and then deliberately leaving it alone. It closes on the only question that settles everything, whether the customer will actually move. In between sits the real work, which is the dependency the leader's success created and the point where their every response costs them more than it costs you.
And it matters more now than at any point in my career. The same pattern is running again, faster, because of AI. A wave of tools goes straight from a prompt to a working interface, skipping the design file altogether. That turns Figma's own advantage, the shared file the whole team lives in, into a step some teams no longer need. The disruptor is now on the other side of the fork.
No fortress is permanent. So if your growth plan is a list of ways to be better than the leader, you are still fighting on their battlefield. Find the one move they cannot afford to make, and change the game.
The 7M Model: beat the leader where they can’t follow · PDF, 2 pages. The same case as a visual, made for reading on a phone.
Which constraint is holding your own revenue back?
The 7M Model points this discipline outward, at the leader. The commercial diagnostic points it inward: one constraint in your own numbers, and everything subordinated to relieving it. The first read is free.
Start with the free diagnostic