How Canva Grew From 1K to 10M Users Without Paid Advertising

I was at university and I was teaching design programs and students would struggle learning the very basics. And so what I wanted to do was to make design really simple and easy. So we had this big grand vision of how we're going to make the entire design ecosystem integrated into one page. But the funny thing was I was 19 and had absolutely no business experience or experience building software or anything like that.

Do you want to impact the world and still turn a profit? Then you're in the right place. Welcome to Growth Everywhere. This is the The show where you'll find real conversations with real entrepreneurs. They'll share everything from their biggest struggle to the exact strategies they use on a daily basis. So if you're ready for a value-packed interview, listen on. Here's your host, Eric Siu.

Before we jump into today's interview, if you guys could leave a review and a rating and also subscribe as well, that would be a huge help to the podcast. So if you actually enjoy the content and you'd like to hear more of it, please support us by leaving us a review and subscribe to the podcast as well. Thanks so much. All right, everybody. Today we have Melanie Perkins, who is from Canva, which makes design simple for everyone. And we use it as a marketing agency. We love it. And Canva now has over 10 million users and has the backing of investors Like Guy Kawasaki. Melanie, how's it going?

It's going really well. Thank you so much for having me on your show.

Yeah, thanks for being here. So why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are exactly and what you do over there at Canva?

So I am the co-founder and CEO at Canva, and we make it very simple to create awesome designs, if that's for presentations or pitch decks or social media graphics. Anything you can think of, you can design very easily, even if you've had no design experience with Canva.

And I know that, you know, getting to where Canva is at today, I mean, It sounds like you started something at age 19 and then went through a couple iterations before you kind of settled into Canva. I mean, what's that story look like? How did you settle into Canva?

Yeah, so I was at university and I was teaching design programs and students would struggle learning the very basics. It would take a very long time just to design, learn where the buttons were, learn how to actually design anything. And so what I wanted to do was to make design really simple and easy. So we had this big grand vision of how we're going to make the the entire design ecosystem integrated into one page. But the funny thing was I was 19 and had absolutely no business experience or experience building software or anything like that. So rather than trying to take on the entire world of design at the same time, my boyfriend became my business partner and we took over my mom's living room and launched the big concept but for the niche market of school yearbooks in Australia. And I think that was really fortunate because rather than trying to take on a huge market, we were able to really concentrate our efforts one area and do really well at that. So that grew very quickly, expanded across Australia, launched in France, New Zealand, and a few years into that, we really wanted to take Canva to the next— we really realized that there was still nothing in the market that enabled everyone to design everything, and so we wanted to take that concept to a much broader market. And so we set out on the adventures of Canva, which took a very, very long time. So we thought, oh, it's better profitable company. We've been able to do this before. Raising money would be really easy to take on this bigger market. But that definitely wasn't the case. Ended up spending a very long time in San Francisco, 3 months firstly living on my brother's floor trying to pitch investors, pitch technical co-founders. And then it was another year later that we actually ended up finally raising investment, which was 3 years after meeting our first investor. So it was a very long time in the making. And then once we finally landed our We hired our technical team, landed the investment. It was another year of development before we launched Canva. So we launched Canva just over 3 years ago, and fortunately it's been growing very, very rapidly across the globe.

That's interesting. So it sounds like, you know, you guys had what you said, it was what, 2, 3 years until you got your next investment. So I guess what kept you guys going? How did you know it was the right idea when all these investors just kept passing?

Yeah. So our first company, we actually funded completely organically. So we had no outside investment for that, which was a really great benefit because we learned how to solve a problem. We learned how to build a product, and we learned how to actually make money, which is a bit atypical in Silicon Valley sometimes. And so, but then for Canva, it was 3 years between meeting our first investor and actually landing investment. So it was a very long road to get to the point of landing investment. As to your question about how we kept going, it was tough. It was like a really tough experience being rejected so much. But I think that now in retrospect, it was really beneficial because it meant that we got to get incredibly strong on the strategy. Our strategy became very refined. We ended up with an excellent pitch deck that we've now used when we're trying to explain our concept to customers or explain our concept to team members. And so we learned some really important skills. It was like a very, very long boot camp. Like an intense strategy for a few years, which meant that by the time that we eventually landed investment, they really knew what we were doing and we were able to hit the ground running.

Got it. Okay. So you guys invested in the— you guys bootstrapped basically the first thing, right?

Yeah, exactly.

And so I'm assuming to get through that 3 years of really not being able to raise, you guys were able to— you guys were bringing in revenue already and you guys were able to keep the lights on for feed yourselves and things like that.

Yeah, that's exactly right. So the first company was still growing every year, which was pretty awesome. And so while I was in San Francisco, my co-founder was in Perth working on Fusion Books. And then it was really great to be able to have both of those things happening in parallel.

Awesome.

If we don't raise investment, we're just gonna go and fund it ourselves. That would have been a lot harder, right? Because you've ended up having to raise quite a large amount of investment.

Awesome. And I think for you too, there's an interesting story about how you were based You kept hearing nos from everyone, but you basically went through a, I guess, having to learn kiteboarding to basically raise capital. Can you talk about that?

Yeah. So during that period of time, we literally did anything to try to get in touch with investors. So I was taking meetings at like any time. So I was catching the Caltrain down for a meeting at 4:30 in the morning. The meeting was at 7:30 in the morning, but I was like up walking to Caltrain at 4:30 in the morning in San Francisco. So when the opportunity came to go to a kite surfing entrepreneur conference where there are a lot of investors, I was like, okay, well, that's an opportunity too good to pass up. So I learned to kiteboard despite the fact that it is one of the most dangerous sports in the world. It was very well worthwhile because it meant that we got to get in contact with a lot of investors. I think I'm from Perth, which happens to be the most isolated city in the world, and so being able to actually go to a conference Like, and get that foot in the door to be able to start to build our network was an incredibly important thing for us. It was a really great opportunity to meet a lot of investors, to pitch our idea, again, to get rejected a bit, but eventually that community really helped to expand Canva and to lay the foundations for a lot of our investors. So Mai Tai was an incredibly helpful opportunity for us. But I think that you just have to keep on planting seeds and eventually one of them will sprout. A lot of them won't, but the one that does is The thing that matters the most.

Yeah, and the thing about these events, I was just at Summit at Sea a couple weeks back. When you have a lot of seeds in one area, I think you have a lot of incredible people in one area, I think it makes things a lot easier. But it's really hard to get into these kind of events, I think. But I guess the key thing is you talk about being everywhere and kind of networking and building relationships. I think that's really important. And basically never giving up. And I don't want to keep talking about raising funds here. But one other question I had was, you know, because you were getting rejected so much, I mean, why— what were investors missing? How, you know, what did they not get and what were they like saying about it?

Well, I think it was kind of a fantastical idea. So our concept was that we were going to take the entire design ecosystem, so stock photography, font libraries, layout libraries, illustration libraries, and like all these different things, actual design tools themselves, and then take that entire design ecosystem and wrap it up and give it to make it very, very accessible to everyone. Despite the fact, for me, this seemed like an incredibly obvious inevitability of the future that this was what was going to happen, it definitely wasn't as apparent to other people, which totally makes sense. We were just like 2 people that had done it in the yearbook market, but it seemed a little bit like of a crazy idea. As we've gone along, So the first people invested in Canva really had to take a leap of faith that they believed in our vision of what the future would look like. But then at each stage of our company's journey, it's become more and more apparent that we're not completely crazy. We're probably still slightly mad, but it's become a lot more inevitable that it's actually something that could happen. So the first stage, we just had the idea, and then the next stage, we had a tech team, and the next stage, we had investment— not investment, we had an actual product. And then the next stage, we had lots of graphs that went up and to the right. And then the next stage, we had lots of graphs that went up and to the right, and they were revenue graphs. And so each stage of our company's growth, there's been different investors who take a leap of faith. And perhaps the leap of faith becomes a little bit less scary as we've grown because it's not just this crazy idea.

Awesome. So I think it was over time, and this is, this is a trend that's happening more in Silicon Valley now where, you know, people are looking more for revenues and they're looking for even more traction than before versus just an idea. And I think you guys just kept building on it, you guys kept showing it, and that's why people started to believe, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Got it. Okay, so 10 million users, that's incredible in the last, what, 3 years or so, right? So how did you guys go about acquiring, let's just say, your first 1,000 customers?

So when we first started, we were doing absolutely everything. Like, I was going to a lot of tech conferences, a lot of blogger conferences, really just trying to move the needle in even like In the early days, getting 10 people on was like, ooh, yay, this is awesome. We were fortunate that before we launched Canva, because of the investment that we'd raised, we were able to get a bit of media when we actually launched the product. We sort of were in stealth. We had a few announcements in stealth, and then we launched, which meant that we launched to a bit more fanfare than when we launched our first company and our parents were the only people that cared. But then it was really about— I think the most important thing for any company is to solve an important problem. And so if you solve a problem that affects a lot of people, it really helps. Well, firstly, you have an audience when you launch your product because they actually care about the thing. And then secondly, they'll tell other people because they care about that problem too. And so for social media marketers and bloggers, they had a really significant problem that they had to create a lot of visual content without having had any design experience typically. And so what we were able to do with Canva was really tap into their needs, solve their problem very specifically, and then not only do they use our product, but they then help to spread it. And so in our early days, we spent a lot of time working with social media marketers and bloggers to help spread the word about Canva and to get them on board and excited and to engage them as part of our community. And so I think that that was a really important thing. Also to think about the frequency of needs. So social media marketers and bloggers have a very frequent need for visual design, and so they were a perfect network to tap into in our early days. And then from there, we've really had— and even today, most of our traffic is still coming from word of mouth. We've had, I think, 17,000 videos made and 15,000 blogs written by just the community about Canva, not to mention all of the tweets and Facebook posts. So I think that that all really just comes back to if you solve a problem that really affects a lot of people, it dramatically helps In your marketing because people then spread the word about it, but then also tapping into frequent users when you're choosing the market that you want to pursue.

Right, and I can hear people saying, oh, you know, that's— word of mouth is so hard, but I think in this scenario it's definitely true because even 3 years back, even today I think, there's not a lot of tools out there that can help you pump out social media images quickly or do infographics very quickly too, and you don't have to have any design experience, and that's why we love Canva and that's why we use it. But the other thing is we actually, on my other podcast with Neil, our marketing podcast, we talk about tools all the time and Canva's in there. And it's not because we're affiliated or anything like that. It's just because it's a great product, right? So word of mouth is great. You guys have a great product. I guess my other question would be, you know, what's the most effective thing other than word of mouth that's working for you in terms of customer acquisition today?

It's quite funny. Word of mouth has been our strongest driver. We're not doing any paid acquisition at all. We aren't even doing affiliate programs or paid sponsorship or anything actually. We have a nonprofit program which has been growing really rapidly. So we have over 7,000 nonprofits on the program where we give our paid product away for free, which is an incredibly awesome thing for the nonprofit community because they're able to create awesome graphics to help spread their word and raise funds for their charities. We also have a lot of people that are finding about Canva because they're actually searching for for Canva. They've got design needs, whether that's to create a poster or a social media graphic, and then of course we're there to meet those needs when they come across them. But we're actually very fortunate— oh, one other cool thing we're doing is internationalizing. So this year we launched in 20 languages.

Oh, wow.

We've launched in 15 so far, and 5 are coming out in the coming couple of weeks, I believe. And so that's been really cool as well, because it has meant that we've been able to get Canva into more people's hands across the globe. Design is such a globally important thing that everyone needs to design, and so making that accessible has been really important. Then we have launched an iPad app and an iPhone app, and we have an Android app coming out soon in the not too distant future. Then, yeah, so I guess getting Canva to the point that it can be in every language on every device, that's a key priority because, of course, to access Because there are 3 billion people on the internet, we need to be in their languages and on their devices.

Alright. So, it sounds like it's a big, you know, the products out there you guys are doing, it's a big content or SEO play too, right? Because you guys are internationalizing right now. I can't even say the word right now, maybe because it's Thanksgiving. But anyway, you get my point.

I can't hear.

Yeah. So, okay. What else are you guys— I know you guys are— I've seen a lot of your content online. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you guys are doing in terms of content marketing/SEO?

Yeah, sure. So our design school has been really fantastic. So we have lots and lots of— we have over a million users a month coming to our design school, and we are teaching everything from color theory to font pairing to how to create combinations or layouts that look good. But then we're also teaching a lot about best strategies for, or top strategies for social media marketing, or top strategies for all sorts of other things. And that's been really effective and popular. And so when people are sharing our content, then of course that helps people to find out more about Canva and gives people who are enjoying our product the opportunity to see— the opportunity to spread the word more. So they can't post every day about how much they like Canva, but they can share our blog posts more frequently.

Awesome.

Okay, yeah, I'm just looking through your SEO stats right now. You guys are doing really well right now. Tons of links, tons of keywords, and your domain authority is really high. Just nerding out right now because I know like Content's a big play for you guys. But that's great. So I guess this actually takes me into the next point. So your background, are you technical?

So I was studying communications psychology and commerce at uni and then started my first company before I graduated. So I'm— while I'm not an engineer, I've spent a lot of time working with engineers.

Right. And that brings me to my next point about building an awesome team. So, you know, tell me about how you built such a great team. You know, where do you go find all the great people and some other tips and tricks that you have?

Yeah, I wish there was a magical tip or trick that helps you to find an amazing tech team. It was a year of looking to find our first technical— to find our co-founder and our tech lead, literally going to every single conference I could under the sun, cold-calling people, emailing people, connecting with everyone on LinkedIn, just trying to do anything I possibly could. Eventually landed some amazing people. One of the first people I met in San Francisco was Lars Rasmussen, who co-founded Google Maps. And he very kindly offered to be our technical advisor. And so what that actually meant was a year of bringing resumes to people, sending LinkedIn things, and him rejecting everyone, which was incredibly frustrating at the time because it meant that we couldn't get started on Canva. I was like, we need to do this now. It was so frustrating. But very awesomely, he'd ended up introducing us to both our co-founder and our CTO, and they helped set the bar for an incredible tech team that we have today. So we've got over 150 people on our team now across our 2 offices. One's here in Sydney, Australia, and the other is in Manila, the Philippines. And we've been very fortunate to have an incredibly talented and motivated and passionate team that's helping to build out this crazy, crazy product.

That's incredible. So how do you go about meeting the co-founder of Google Maps? Is it just going to conferences, networking? Because a lot of people are probably wondering that right now. If you have an advisor like that that can block you from making, you know, a lot of mistakes, that's huge.

Yeah, it was huge. So I seem to have a lot of bizarre stories. I'll tell you another one.

We—

I was at a conference. So we were WA inventor, runner-up inventor of the year back in 2008. I think it was— no, 2009. And then, the following year, I met Bill Tai, who runs the conference, Mai Tai, when he was in Perth for— he was there to go kitesurfing, but he was at the Inventor of the Year Conference. So, we had a 5-minute chat. He said if I went to Silicon Valley, he'd be happy to meet up. I went to Silicon Valley the following year, and then, he introduced me to Lars Rasmussen. So, that was how that bizarre story unfolded.

Got it. Okay, great. So sounds like, you know, a lot of people talk about how, you know, they don't go to conferences, conferences are a time suck. It seems like you're able to maximize, you know, the value that you've gotten from going to conferences.

Yeah, I think it's really important to be selective about what you're going to. And if you've got a particular purpose or a particular reason, then it's worthwhile. I think that it is easy in the startup community for people to get sucked into going to conferences all the time and spend a lot more time networking than building a company. I think it's important to do like a 98%, 2% thing, or depending on the stage of the company. So like in our early days, we didn't go to any tech conferences. We were just like really focused on building out our product. And then so it sort of swings in roundabouts, but sometimes it's really important if you're trying to find tech teams or find investors, then conferences are a really great place to go. But then it's also really important to sort of go back and hibernate and actually do the, do the work, or go back into your shell.

Totally agree with that. So one thing is, you know, one of my One of my close friends actually started working with his wife. So, and you know, how does it— how do you go about working with your, your significant other, we should say?

Yeah, I feel incredibly fortunate to have been able to work with him for now 10 years almost, I think. Because it's meant that as things are like a crazy roller coaster and you come across all these challenges, you have someone who understands exactly what you're going through. And are able to bounce off each other. Of course, it can be challenging at times because we work together and we live together, so we're essentially spending 24 hours a day together, 7 days a week. So, it is important to sometimes give yourself a little bit of separation, but I think it's been an incredibly awesome thing to be able to do together, especially like in the early days when I was in San Francisco and he was running the company. It was like— It was a really awesome thing to be able to just have complete trust in each other.

Alright. So, yeah, it sounds like complete trust is the tip there. I'm not going to try to look for or fish for any tips on that one. Tell me about one big struggle you faced while growing the business. It sounds like, you know, there's the raising funds thing, there's finding that technical co-founder. What's another big struggle you had?

There's constantly big struggles at every single stage of the company. The struggles that we have now is we're growing really rapidly on every single front, which might sound like, oh, poor me.

What a bad struggle. I'm just kidding.

Oh no, it is. It's fair. I would have— I think I would have laughed at myself hysterically if I'd heard myself saying that years ago. But it is really important to get this company structure right, to get the culture right. I think that we're doing a lot of things really right, but there's always so much room for improvement. There's always so many things I want to work on. So we did a company survey, culture survey the other week, and it was like 96% of people are proud to work at Canva, which is really awesome. But I'm like, what about those other 4%? So it's like, that sounds silly. Let me give you a better one. I think that it's just challenging. Every time the company grows in size, you have to completely reinvent the way we do things. So for example, this is going to sound like a trivial example, but then you spread this across the entire company. So in the very early days, we would have standups and every week everyone would create a Canva design and say what they've been working on for the week. And then we got to the point that We had too many people that that was going on for like an hour. And then we had each team present. And then we were like, okay, this is cool. Each team can present. It will mean that we can roll it up much more quickly. But then people can still get to communicate every week all the important things. And then we got to the point that we had too many teams and that was taking too long. And so then we had to change it again to having deep dives. So we'd have 5 teams doing a deep dive on what they're working on each week. And then that was able to be, again, a lot more efficient. But like that, across the entire company, is that like you get to a point, the current systems that you have in place will break, and then you have to reinvent the systems, and then those systems will break, and then you have to reinvent the systems again.

Right.

And it's just this constant process. So every single stage of the company, everything's breaking, and then you're having to fix everything again. But it's fun. I like challenges.

It's the structure that sets you free ultimately. People are probably thinking, oh, process is so boring. We're not in business to do process. We're here to have fun. But the thing is, you have to constantly— like you mentioned, you have to constantly reinvent yourself. Things are changing every quarter, so it's not every year. And if you want to grow, you have to have the right process, right?

Yeah, definitely.

Okay, cool. So what's one big change you personally made that has impacted your business? or yourself in the last year?

That's a good question. One of the big things that we did was move into small teams. And so towards the end of last year, we had a growing team, but it didn't feel like we were shipping things as rapidly as we had been per person in the early stages. And so what we did was move into this model of little startups where each team is as self-contained as possible. So having engineers and product designers and growth people all within the one team, and then they have a really big objective and then try to figure out a way to meet that big objective. And so, for example, one of those teams was internationalization. Their goal this year was to launch in 20 languages, and they'll fortunately hit that goal. And then we've got another team whose goal was to increase the activation rate, and another team's goal whose goal was to increase the retention rate. And then across the whole company, everyone has these really big goals that they're trying to shoot for. And that's been really, really effective because it's meant that people can sink their creative juices into the product or the project that they're working on, and as we expand, people can still have that ownership. It feels like we're now at the next inflection point that we have so many teams that we're now trying to take the best practices from teams that have been able to be really successful at Canva and then help to spread those best practices across the newer teams.

And so it's a constant work in progress, but the little startup So to clarify, it sounds like, you know, when you are working on these, these other projects, new projects, you have little teams broken up, like, you know, perhaps a couple of people to work on these initiatives. Is that what I'm hearing?

Sorry, I didn't quite understand that.

So let me give you an example. So, you know, I was actually reading a post from 37signals about a year— or not a year, about a week or two ago— about how when they have new projects, they'll assign 3 people maximum. There might be a designer leading the project and there might be 2 developers working on it, but that's it. And then Jeff Bezos has his 2-pizza teams where his teams are really small, but I think those teams are more dedicated towards something. And I guess my question is, are you creating these new teams all the time to work on new initiatives, or are you creating more small teams that are set on certain initiatives?

I see, yeah. So there's some teams that are constant teams, And then there's other teams that spin up for a new initiative. And so our teams are generally about 4 engineers, 1 product designer, 1 growth person. So that's for the product teams. And then we have other teams that are comprised of growth people or other teams that are— like our accounts team's a little team as well. So between about 4 to 8 people per team is the general goal. Some of the teams are a little bit smaller than that, but that's the— That's great.

And so for a company of your size, you have how many team members right now?

156, I think the latest number was.

156, awesome. So I'm going to ask, I guess, you know, this is more centered around tools, but I'm going to keep it even more specific. So how do you guys, as a 156-person team, how do you manage your projects? What kind of project management tool do you use or process do you guys use?

We use spreadsheets an uncanny amount. Obviously Gmail and Slack. We use Canva a lot. They're the main things that we do.

Got it. Okay, cool. And one other question, if you had to pick one book, just one, what's one must-read book that you recommend to the audience?

One of my favorite books I read during my very challenging days in San Francisco, actually, was a book called Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman. And it just talks about designing things that actually solve problems, making it really obvious to use, making your users feel really smart when they're using your product. And I think that a lot of the concepts from that book has really infiltrated what we're trying to do here at Canva and the product that we're building. So I'd strongly recommend that book.

All right, great. And final thing, This has been awesome. Melanie, what's the best way for people to find you online?

You can find me on Twitter. My handle is @MelanieCanva, or that's probably the best spot.

All right, great. Well, everyone, make sure that you check out Canva. There's a free option. You can at least try it out. I think, you know, if you do any type of stuff on the internet, you should probably be checking out Canva. Melanie, thanks so much for doing this.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Growth Everywhere. If you loved what you heard, be sure to head back to growtheverywhere.com For today's show notes and a ton of additional resources. But before you go, hit the subscribe button to avoid missing out on next week's value-packed interview. Enjoy the rest of your week and remember to take action and continue growing.