The Story of Canva 🎨

How do you build a $40 billion design juggernaut out of Australia with:

• Zero Silicon Valley connections

• No technical background

• 100+ investor rejections

It’s by having product-market fit and an ambitious vision.

That’s exactly what Melanie Perkins, Clifford Obrecht, and Cameron Adams had when building Canva.

Let’s get into it. This is the Story of Canva 🎨✨

It’s 2006. Melanie Perkins is studying at the University of Western Australia and teaching as a technical assistant. She’s also a tutor for design courses and provides technical support for software such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Flash, and iMovie. But Melanie doesn’t understand why design software requires an entire semester to learn.

With this in mind, Melanie had a big vision for the future of design: “to take the entire design ecosystem, integrate it into one page, and then make it accessible to the whole world”.

To realize this vision, in 2008, she teamed up with her boyfriend and fellow student, Clifford Obrecht, to build Fusion Books.

But instead of a design platform, they started with something way simpler…

Given Melanie’s and Clifford’s lack of technical skills and funding, Fusion Books was aimed at a narrower product than full design.

Melanie’s mother had been a teacher, so growing up, she would observe the time and effort that was required for her mother to create yearbooks. As a result, Fusion Books was focused on enabling students and teachers in Australia to easily create and design their own yearbooks.

By 2011, Fusion Books became the largest yearbook company in Australia and expanded to New Zealand and France. The co-founders realized that the engine behind Fusion Books had the potential to enable anyone without a design background to design any publication, not just yearbooks.

But they needed something else to realize their vision👇

Today’s Startup Story is brought to you by the Founder of HubSpot:

At this stage, to launch the full vision of Canva, they needed more funding. But how do you do that if you live in Australia, you’re not technical, live far away from Silicon Valley, and have zero connections to investors?

Well, all it takes is one person to get in. And this is when angel investor Bill Tai comes into the picture. Melanie first saw him at an event in Australia and quickly went to San Francisco to meet him in person and pitch Canva.

He introduced her to Lars Rasmussen the Co-Founder of Google Maps. Bill also agreed to invest, but only if she could build an engineering team that met the standards of Lars.

While living on the floor of her brother’s SF apartment, for one year she cold-called, handed out flyers, and attended conferences to find engineers that would meet his standards, but all candidates failed.

Finally, in 2012, she was introduced to Cameron Adams, a UI designer at Google who joined the team as the third Co-Founder. She was also introduced to Dave Hearnden, a Senior Engineer at Google who refused at first but then agreed to join thanks to the famous “Bizarre Pitch Deck” Melanie created to recruit him.

With this top engineering team, they raised a $3 million seed round including $100K from Bill Tai.

And on the 28th of June 2012, Melanie, Cliff, and Cameron founded Canva. With a fresh new entity, cash in the bank, and a founding team — they were ready to get to work on changing how the world would design things.

Now with this bigger vision in mind, Melanie and Cliff knew there was this massive, growing, and underserved market of amateur/consumer designs. And they picked designers of school yearbooks as their beachhead.

Fusion Books (a super niche product) was then transformed into Canva (a much more widely applicable tool).

But as we see above, the middle segment (consumer designers) isn’t exactly niche. In fact, it’s massive. So where do you start and who do you target first?

They narrowed it down to a specific use case — social media marketers who needed to create lots of beautiful visual content for Facebook but didn’t have any design experience.

Distribution was done by creating Facebook templates that drove referrals as users invited their colleagues to collaborate. It also drove word of mouth because when people posted a Canva graphic on Facebook, others would ask how they made it.

Plus, Canva made it super easy for users to share the design (with one click) on Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter. By doing this, a small number of users opened up a much larger audience.

This graphic from Canva’s seed deck illustrates this strategy perfectly.

And they continued to invest in mechanisms of virality — like one-click sharing of designs to social media, referrals, and generally building an easy-to-use product people wanted to use and talk about.

This is how they kickstarted their early growth and built up an impressive user base of 150K in less than 24 months.

But to 1000X that and reach 170M users in 2024 they mainly focused on these 4 things:

• Product-led growth

• Sales-led motion to move upstream

• Using content and winning SEO via backlinks

• Localizing and partnering to expand geographically

Today, Canva boasts 170M active users across 190 countries while making 2 billion dollars annually.

In short, Canva is a collaborative graphic design software platform intended to make design accessible to anyone.

Whereas incumbents like Adobe have traditionally served individuals and companies with technical backgrounds, Canva has carved a niche in the market to serve everyone else with no design experience.

On top of that, in September 2022, Canva announced the launch of the Visual Worksuite, competing against Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.

Personally, I love Canva and have created everything with it for years now. In my opinion, Canva’s future looks bright.

Thank you for taking the time to read the story of Canva.

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— Mehmet Karakus