We built Marathon (then Mast) nearly four years ago, after growing frustrated with our agency's fragmented feedback, task and discussions systems.

The intial goal was simple: capture all the discussions happening in Figma, and track their status. And for the past four years, it's done an incredible job at that. In that time, we've doubled our agency's revenue and team size with zero additional managers. I put this purely down to how Marathon has let us automate so much of the admin drudgery and communication requirements that plague any agency owner.

Screenshot of Marathon's kanban project board

Over the years Marathon has expanded its product footprint. First it was time tracking – to help reduce team member context switching and manual timesheet admin. It let us just hit 'play' when we began a task. Next was more strategic project planning. We added Sprints, Document management, AI task assignment, Slack automations for sending updates to clients automatically. It snowballed.

But at its core, the main thing that kept us and the other teams using Marathon loving it, was its deep, two-way Figma integration. And as our agency's team has grown and our processes matured, we've started to outgrow Marathon as a project tool.

This left us at a fork in the road. Should we continue developing Marathon and turn it into the project tool of our dreams? Or should we shift to a dedicated project app.

I spent about 6 months pondering this, and then I saw a tweet from Karri Saarinen – CEO of Linear. They'd integrated AI Agents across the product.

When I saw this, I knew instantly that it wasn't worth continuing to build our own project app. This is a realisation that it seems almost everybody who creates a project app as a side project eventually realises. E.g. Andrew Wilkinson, who lost $10M building Flow.

So, a few months ago I set to work figuring out what our agency tooling would look like going forward. I tried every project app under the sun, but ultimately decided we wanted something hackable, and that's at the absolute forefront of AI so that we can leverage it as best as possible. There were really only two options: Notion and Linear.

But both of these are missing something. While they both have integrations with Figma, they still don't help us with our core challenge: how to capture conversations happening across our design files, and track their status. And this is where the idea for the new Marathon came to light.

Marathon's new incarnation is a totally new product. Essentially, we've lifted the old two-way Figma comment syncing functionality and placed it in a new, simpler app, which lets you see all your comments in an inbox, and send them into the apps of your choice – currently Notion, Linear and 8,000 more via Zapier.

The new Marathon

We can now keep the core of what we loved about Marathon, but use a project tool that's going to grow with us for hopefully decades to come.

Personally, I'm a little sad to sunset the old Marathon (which we're now calling Marathon Classic). We'll continue supporting it and making critical updates for the foreseeable future for the teams still using it, but our focus is shifting to making the new, more focused experience of Marathon the best Figma workflow assistant you've ever seen.

You can sign up for the new Marathon at onmarathon.com