4 Business Lessons from the $40 Billion Journey of Canva

Launched in 2013, Canva is one of the most used designing tools, having 75 Million plus monthly active users, from 190 countries, with more than 2500 employees. Started as a school book project by Melanie and her partner Cliff, Canva is now valued at $40 Billion!

Let’s dissect the journey of Canva from an idea into the global tech company that it is now and see what lessons we can learn. 

1.  Solve a real problem that customers are facing: Melanie Perkins realized it was challenging to use designing software and design something basic while teaching the students of the University of Western Australia. “It could take a whole semester to learn the basics," she says. "Even the simplest tasks, like exporting a high-quality PDF file, could take 22 clicks."

Melanie spotted a real problem here and wanted to solve it. She decided to launch an online platform to make designing as easy as possible for users. Instead of using different software for design-related activities, she wanted to bring them all into one platform. A platform where users can complete all their design works within a few clicks. She realized that designing was going to be completely different in the future. It would be online, collaborative, and simple. Melanie wanted to build this design platform and solve the real problem.

There are many other design platforms. What makes Canva special, according to Melanie, is “it solves a problem which affects a lot of people. Design can be complicated and daunting for non-designers. Coupled with the pressure today where people are expected to produce professional-quality designs - from creating a presentation, marketing materials, graphics for social media, and even a resume - there is a dire need to change design from being such a complicated process to a skill that is attainable and accessible for everyone.”

This is one of the essential elements of any successful business - identifying what challenges the customers are facing and solving them. Find something that is truly significant that is faced by lots of people. This was the beginning spark of Canva, around which the entire platform was developed.  

2.  Start Now and focus on execution: Melanie decided to test her business idea on a small scale. She and her boyfriend Cliff Obrecht founded “Fusion Books,”  a website that allows high schools to design their yearbooks online. It was like a beta version of what Melanie wanted to build. 

 They set up a ‘shop’ in her mother's living room. Borrowed money from friends and family and got the platform developed by a freelance software developer. They started from zero without any technical expertise or business skills. They didn’t know anything about startups or venture capital funds then. They had an idea, and they started executing it.

The burning desire to build something special helped them to face all the difficulties along the way. Over the next few years, Fusion grew into Australia's largest yearbook publisher and expanded to France and New Zealand.

Another crucial element that separates winning businesses from others is the focus on execution. Ideas are worthless if they are not executed properly. The winning enterprises implement the ideas well and quickly. They always keep the focus on the proper execution of ideas.

3. Build the team: Melanie and Cliff got the confidence that Fusion could be applied beyond yearbooks. Now to expand the operation, they required more resources. During this time, Melanie learned about venture capital investors and the benefits of having an investor to support their startup. She decided to bring investors on board. In 2010 she flew to California to pitch the idea for Canva to potential investors. Her pitch deck was titled ‘Future of Publishing.’ She started meeting investors and raising capital but got rejected by all of the seed firms and angel investors. 

Then the fateful meeting with Mr. Tai happened. He agreed to invest in Melanie’s startup if she could build a ‘capable’ tech team. Then Melanie and Cliff started their search for engineers and software developers. They spent months meeting every engineer they could, going to conferences, hackathons, LinkedIn searches, anything and everything. 

Eventually, Melanie and Cliff got their tech co-founder, Cameron Adams. Later they got their tech lead, David Hearnden, working at Google when they first met each other. Almost a year after, he joined the Canva team. Building the team took a long time, but Melanie got some of the best people in the respective fields. Building this founding team was one of the most critical success elements of Canva.

Building a team of great people who believe in your vision is essential to a great company. Author Jim Collins has explained this concept 'First Who, Then What' in the book Good to Great. He says, "Those who build great organizations ensure they have the right people on the bus and the right people in the key seats before they figure out where to drive the bus. They always think first about who and then about what. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.” 

This is what helped Melanie build Canva from a printing website based in her mother’s living room to the $40 billion tech company it is today - having the right people in the right place.

4. Keep on learning and Improving:  "It was three years between first pitching to an investor and landing an investment. This is an incredibly long period, and we had hundreds of rejections along the way.” Melanie recalls. "But I think that process was really helpful because it meant we had to refine our pitch and get our strategy down before we started. So when we landed that investment, we could execute quite quickly and effectively." 

This constant learning and improvement are key traits of Melanie. It has helped her grow from being a college student to a global tech company leader. Now Canva has more than 2500 employees. Almost half of them are recruited during the last two years. Melanie had to learn and grow to be a better leader to lead in such a considerable magnitude. She developed herself stage by stage, from a two-partner team to having co-founders and investors, to larger units, and now to this global tech company. 

In one of her interviews, Melanie said that she learned how to create online experiences that people find easy, intuitive, and enjoyable to use from reading a book called Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman.

If you look into the founders or leaders of all successful businesses, you can see that they are voracious leaders. Elon Musk built Tesla and SpaceX primarily by reading books related to those industries. Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet are great examples of readers becoming leaders. 

So you must keep reading and learning to improve yourself to achieve tremendous business success. Again to quote Jim Collins from his book Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0: "Are you willing to do what it takes to grow into the leader your unit, organization, company, or cause needs? As your company scales from 1X to 2X to 5X to 10X, will you scale your leadership from 1X to 2X to 5X to 10X? Will you mature your leadership from version 1.0 into 2.0 and from version 2.0 into 3.0? Will you settle for being just a good leader, or will you never stop growing into a great leader?"

Are you ready to grow? 

(Author is a Business Consultant and Startup Specialist at AK & Partners Auditors and Chartered Accountants. AK & Partners is one of the leading audit firms in Qatar. Please send your comments and suggestions to habeeb@akauditors.com)