Introduction
It’s one thing to start a company. It’s quite another to start one that competes with tech titans like Microsoft and Adobe, but that’s exactly what Australian entrepreneur Melanie Perkins did when she built Canva, a free-to-use online design platform to rival tech giants. “Our goal is to take the entire design ecosystem, integrate it into one page, and then make it accessible to the whole world,” she said.
The young founder started the company in Australia in 2013 in a bid to make design accessible to all — be it for logos, business cards or presentations. Within five years, she made headlines as one of tech’s youngest female CEOs, at just 30. Today, Canva is now worth billions with 80% of Fortune 500 companies using their services.
Let us delve into her success story, and see what we could learn from her experiences.
Founding Story of Canva
The idea came about in 2006 when Melanie was just 19 years-old when she was studying in university. She would earn some side income by teaching other students graph designs, she noticed the software developed by Microsoft and Adobe such as Photoshop was very difficult to use with a steep learning curve. “People would have to spend an entire semester learning where the buttons were, and that seemed completely ridiculous,” Melanie said. She believed there must be a better way for people to design and collaborate, and so she and her partner, Cliff Obrecht, began working on making that vision a reality.
With few resources and virtually no business experience behind them, the couple had to find a way to test their idea. One day, Melanie noticed her mother who was a teacher was helping her school’s yearbook, she told Melanie that she had to spend a lot of time and effort every year in making these yearbooks. Melanie immediately knew this is it. Eventually the couple started Fusion Books, an online school yearbook design software to test their idea. The website offered students to collaborate and design their yearbook pages, then the company would print them out and deliver them to schools across Australia. Fusion Books allowed students to design their own school yearbooks by using a simple drag-and-drop tool equipped with a library of design templates that could be populated with photos, illustrations, and fonts. The business was a major success, with over 100 schools signed up by the third year of operation and expansion into New Zealand and France. However, Melanie knew that Fusion Books was only the first step towards her big dream. In order to make her dream a reality, she would need funding, so she began finding investors.
In 2011, Melanie met Silicon Valley investor Bill Tai at a conference in Perth. Intrigued by the concept of Canva, Bill invited her to San Francisco to pitch her idea. Despite being entirely new to Silicon Valley and feeling out of place, Melanie impressed Bill with her idea. He offered to connect the couple with his friends at MaiTai, his circle of investors and kitesurfing enthusiasts. The couple had to learn kitesurfing quickly to fit in, but the new skill helped them win over major investors and secure funding.
By the end of their first funding round in 2012, Canva was oversubscribed and had raised over USD 1.6 million from angel investors. They were even able to secure a USD 1.4 million grant from the Australian government in a bid to keep the company within Australia. In 2013, Canva finally went live, allowing users to create a variety of online designs for free. Within one year, the company reached one million users, and by 2015, they had six million.
Today, Canva has over 100 million people using the website each month and offers its services to users in more than 190 countries. The company has grown exponentially since its founding and has become a go-to platform for people looking to design everything from social media graphics to marketing materials to business cards. The success of Canva can be attributed to Melanie’s initial vision for a simple and user-friendly design platform, as well as her determination and persistence in securing funding and building a talented team.
What is Canva?
Prior to Canva, creating high-quality designs required expensive software and specialized skills, making it inaccessible to most people. Canva recognized this problem and sought to make design accessible to everyone, regardless of their skill level or budget.
Canva’s solution was to create a user-friendly platform that offered a wide range of design tools and templates. The platform was designed with the average user in mind, and the user interface was intuitive and easy to use. This made it possible for people with little to no design experience to create professional-looking designs quickly and easily.
In addition to its user-friendly design, Canva also offered a vast library of templates and graphics that users could customize to fit their needs. This saved users a significant amount of time and effort, as they no longer had to create designs from scratch. Their library includes templates for creating engaging videos, interactive pitch desks, inspiring classroom presentations, captivating personal websites, collaborative whiteboards, etc.
Canva has also focused on making its platform accessible to businesses and teams. The platform includes collaboration tools that allow multiple users to work on the same design at the same time, making it easy for teams to collaborate on projects. Canva also offers the ability to create custom branding kits, which allows businesses to create a consistent brand identity across all of their designs.
Business Model
So, how does Canva make money? Canva operates a freemium business model, it is free to use, with subscription plans that offer additional features, images, and templates.
Canva Free
In its free version, Canva provides its users with thousands of design templates, graphics, and fonts, alongside millions of free pictures and up to 5GB cloud storage, allowing beginners and non-professionals use Canva for their personal needs.
Canva Pro and Canva for Teams
Canva Pro is a premium subscription plan charging USD 12.99+ per month. This plan provides the user with some add-on features along with the basic features, including millions of premium stock photos, videos, audios, and graphics, and the ability to create custom branding kits, and for users to upload their own fonts and logos. The pro plan is more suited towards professional designers or small teams who wish to collaborate and coordinate by working together.
Canva Print
Canva has also partnered with printers to print and deliver the material to countries around the world. Users can make their designs in the applications and receive the physical material at their address. Canva charges the service according to the type of product, order volume, and location for delivery.
Design School
Canva also has a Design School, by which the company offers online and in-person classes, about design, branding, and social media, hosted by Canva’s experts. The online courses are provided free of charge by Canva, and the physical courses start from as low as $5.
Canva Marketplace
In addition to its subscription plans, Canva also has a marketplace for paid graphics and templates. This marketplace allows designers to sell their own designs to Canva users, creating a new revenue stream for both Canva and independent designers. These designs are available for as low as $1. In return for providing a platform to the designers to list their designs, Canva charges a 35% commission for each design sold.
Today
Today, Canva has helped create close to 2 billion designs in 190 countries, with 85% of Fortune 500 companies already using her platform.
In September 2021, Canva successfully raised USD 200 million at a USD 40 billion valuation, from top venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital, T. Rowe Price, Franklin Templeton, Blackbird, etc., making it one of the world’s most valuable startups.
Conclusion
Overall, Canva’s success can be attributed to its ability to solve a major problem in the design industry by making design accessible to everyone. Its user-friendly platform, vast library of templates and graphics, freemium business model, and focus on user feedback have all contributed to its success. Canva has revolutionized the way people create designs, and its founders can be proud of the impact they have had on the design industry.
