Lessons Learned Scaling with Canva's CMO Zach Kitschke and SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin

Cool, thanks, Caitlin. Just a few things to kick it off and then I'll let Zach go. We already have quite a few questions that have come in. First of all, fun session for the Saster team. We, we run a lot of Saster on Canva. I did some tweet the other day. It was something like Adobe's a 300 billion dollar company making tools for designers and Canva is a $40 billion tool when your designer won't finish a project. And I know it's a bit of a joke, but I really feel like Canva is our second or third and fourth and fifth designer on Team Saster and we love Canva. Canva is always on time. Canva doesn't complain. Canva has a lot of fresh ideas, so it's always fun to have to have a leader from one of the products that we run a whole global community on here, which is great. And Zach, you were so early at Canva, right? You joined in 2013. That's like, that's close to day zero, wasn't it? Or was it day zero? When did you join?

Yeah, great to be here and awesome to see everyone virtually. I'm sort of here in Sydney at the moment. I wish I could be with some of you over there on the ground there. But yeah, I joined a couple months prior to launch. So I joined and then sort of led our first funding announcement with my kind of early PR hat on and have have been sort of part of the furniture ever since.

Yeah. And you worked here and I want to make sure we got some incredible slides here on lessons learned. But just so we introduce you, you worked your way up, right, from early employee, head of marketing and then to cmo, right. What's, what's a little bit story? And especially these days it seems like CMO has a half life, sometimes measured in single digit months. There's so much turnover at the top, but you're nearing a decade right, at the company. What have you learned and how'd you do it and what have you learned in terms of being enduring in the role?

Yeah, I think I've had an amazing journey and learned so much along the way and I guess I started in a PR role and as you'll see in a little bit, I've sort of hopped around all over the place and had the opportunity to do our customer service and build out our customer service team and then launch our Philippines office. I had my time in product management and worked on what's now Canva Pro, our sort of premium products. Spent a couple of years in building out our people function, so scaling everything that came with that. And then sort of for the last two years, I've been back in the marketing space as we've been really investing in growing things globally there. And for me, it's definitely come back to always kind of jumping onto the next biggest problem that needs to be solved. And, you know, I've definitely loved the ability to kind of learn new things along the way as well. So, yeah, I think it's definitely part of what it sort of takes to grow with a company like Canva. It's sort of a different beast every few months or certainly along the way. So a lot of change.

Let me ask you just one question. And then I do want to make sure we dig into lessons learned in hypergrowth as Canva approaches a stunning billion dollars in ARR. Which is crazy, but it sounds like from your background, I could have this wrong, But I'm just looking at so many startups, you might be the classic overachiever generalist. Now, you came in through communications, you came in through marketing. So that's where you started, right. Close to a decade ago. But we all. Anyone that's been a founder gravitates to a couple folks that they can throw into something like run the Philippines office run people run this because they need that person that's smart, that has the DNA and that can roll with it. Right. It sounds like that's you, but sometimes. Was that you? And then sometimes what I find is those folks get frustrated because as the company gets to be 500,000, 2,000 people, there's not always a clear path for that person anymore. So was that you? And how did you ride that all the way to a billionaire R? Almost a billionaire R?

Yeah.

I don't know.

Like, I definitely, I love learning and I've loved being thrown at new challenges along the way. But, you know, I often get asked, you know, if I miss the early days or, you know, if I have a preference for a particular point in time. And like, I don't know, I have to say I have loved, like, each of the different phases. And actually I'm probably having the most fun I've ever had now. And it's definitely a very different, you know, organization at 2,000 people and comes with, you know, a very different way of building and getting things done. But I don't know, I might be the exception, but I kind of have enjoyed that as well.

Good. All right, well, let's talk about it. I'll be quiet now for a while. Lessons Learned in hypergrowth. So, Zach, share us a little bit of what you've learned on this incredible journey to a billionaire.

R. Just about awesome. Yeah. Let's get into it, I guess. Thanks again for having me. I guess for maybe those of you that are not familiar, Canva, we really started with this mission to ultimately democratize design and really empower everyone around the world by making it accessible to everyone. We've grown a huge amount over the past eight years or so. On the left, you can see that's a very early photo. If you sort of squid, you can see a dorky shot of me.

Wait, hold on. Which one are you?

Very good character in the car.

Okay. Your style has evolved over the years, I see, right?

Yeah, that's right.

Not better or worse. It's just evolved. Yeah.

And then, you know, this is our team, just our Australian team in 2020. So we've grown over the years, I guess, to give you a bit of a snapshot of where things are at today, we now have more than 60 million people creating with Canva every single month all around the world. We've got a global team as well. So there's 2,000 people across Australia, the U.S. the Philippines, China, throughout Europe as well. And as you mentioned, we're on track to reach a billion dollars in revenue towards the end of this year, which is really exciting progress, I guess. As we were sort of talking about what might be the best, the most useful to share today, we thought it might be worth diving into, you know, a few lessons, I guess, learned along the way. So picked five lessons that I'll get into, you know, the next kind of 20 minutes or so. And so, number one, I thought I'd talk a little bit about building community. It's been something that has really been part of our story since day one. And I guess now we're incredibly fortunate to have a phenomenal, incredibly engaged community all around the world. And so on the right there, you can see just a snapshot of some of the video content out there. There's literally millions of pieces of content. Video tutorials on YouTube, blog posts, content being created all of the time online. You jump on that link, Canva, love. You can see this is a Twitter stream of people from our community sharing. And I think this is really something that's been kind of dear to our heart, but also a really key part of ultimately our success. A large part of our. Actually, the majority of our growth still comes from word of mouth and organic, and so that's been a critical lever of growth over the years, I guess some of the things that I think have really helped, you know, unlock that, that really started back in the early days. The photo up at the top there is actually a photo of one of our very first design workshops. And this was our first office in Surry Hills, the very sort of small boardroom. There was a handful of desks outside there as well. And back in the early days, this is pre launch, we'd actually invite members of our community in and sort of give them early access to Canva and basically take them through a sort of design workshop. And this became such an incredible way to get early feedback on the product. And I can definitely tell you there's no better objectivity than seeing people reacting in real time and trying to teach people a product. You see what they understand, what they don't, what they struggle with. And so that really helped us iterate through the sort of early phases through launch. Cliff, myself, Mel, we'd sort of all be in there running workshops and it's really fun to see how that threads really continued as we've scaled the photo down. Below is actually a photo of our bright and shiny new canvas space in our office in Surry Hills in Sydney. And we've actually launched a community cafe and space where we're now offering design workshops all the time and sort of open that up as a community space. So that's been something that has really scaled as we've grown there as well. Another aspect that we really focused on early on was really investing in PR and content marketing. I guess we definitely didn't have any budget back then and had sort of identified the sort of early success that we were having was really with social media marketers and content creators. And so a lot of my time in the early days was spent actually writing content, whether it was about visual communication or building your brand on social media. We were fortunate just through writing content, I guess, to get picked up by some of the blogs in the space, like Social Media examiner and others, and along the way really telling that story of what we were up to. We were definitely a bit of an exception to the rule being an Australian company launching, I think we had the largest seed funding round at that point in time and so really identifying those sort of interesting tidbits and sort of pitching press around those as well.

Was there like back in 2014 when you were in. This was. What was the 10x feature for Canva in the early days? Like, what did you win? Were you doing something on social media that was hard to do in other apps? Or what was that step function that wasn't in the market back then?

Yeah, like the products back then we launched really focused on social media. We call them doctypes, but we had a suite of templates that you could go and choose from. And it was really easy to kind of edit and create things like Facebook posts or your email headers and things like that. And I think it was actually just by making that process really, really easy. You know, Canva had. We launched with this idea of like integrating everything into one page so you could just go to one, one, one place you had the templates. There was stock photography that was free or a dollar to use. It was really easy to kind of publish that, like in the right format for the end state. So I think it was just about really solving that problem really, really well early on. And a little bit later on we launched. I remember when we launched what's now Canva Pro, we came up with this feature called Magic Resize, and that was just like an incredibly popular feature. And it was just something I think, that social media marketers in particular really struggled with. You kind of go and design a Facebook post and then you'd have to resize it manually previously for Instagram or Twitter or TikTok or whatever other formats were around at the time. So it's things like that that I guess saved a lot of time and made it really easy to do some of those things with the cl. And I guess I think that as we're sort of talking about, really comes back to realizing just what a driver of growth your core product can be. We continue to this day to have the vast majority of our community using Canva for free. And it's always been part of the philosophy and the mission. And something really dear to Mel's heart has been that anyone that wants to access Canva, no matter where they are in the world, whether they're employed or not, should be able to use the tools. And so we, you know, you can do pretty much anything that you want to or create anything that you want to in Canva for free. And then we've always had this idea of, you know, offering additional tiers or additional products for people that have a particular use case or, you know, have to have the means to pay. I guess something else that we did early on was really focused on like user testing those early flows. And we did it through things like the workshops where we get people in, but also through tools like UserTesting.com and I'd highly recommend this for any product folks you can basically get people around the world to test out your, you know, applicational products and give you feedback in real time. And we actually put our very first version of the products upon user testing and it tanked like it was. We had terrible feedback. And it was, it was, it was, it was interesting because it wasn't, was not the products itself, like the core functionality was. Right. But we just hadn't nailed some of the UI and the onboarding experience. And so I remember the team and Mel literally going through dozens and dozens and dozens of tests and iterations, if not hundreds of tests and iterations that actually refine that onboarding experience. Which meant by the time we launched, we were getting everyone saying that they loved the product and it was definitely a journey. The last mile to get there. The other example I'd give here, you'll see a few sort of graphics there from Huffington Post. And I like to talk about building your product with your community. This was probably about 2015 and we got a tweet or an email from one of the designers at Huffington Post, basically saying that the team were using Canva and really loving it. But they had this big problem and they were keen to see if we could help solve it. The problem for them was Huffington Post as a newsroom had hundreds of different journalists and social media. It was creating content all the time. And what that meant was things were going out with the wrong colors or fonts or logos. And so they reached out and sort of fortunately was able to get together with them and sort of have a bit of a conversation. And we realized what they really needed was templates and to be able to create, you know, a set templates or on brand for their team. And this kind of coincided with the time that we're actually building our premium version. And so we ended up piloting the concept or testing the concept of templates with them. So hacked together this WordPress page that you can see and those designs, they made it easy for their team internally to basically click on one of those and leverage a template. And that actually became a bit of a prototype for that early product as well. And it's fantastic to have Huffington Post along for that on that journey, giving us feedback as we went there as well. Number two, the second lesson, I guess is prioritizing just in time learning. So we touched a little bit about this earlier. I guess I've had probably a non typical journey at Canva and that's meant moving from PR and comms into products, spending some time building our people, organization, hr, internal comms, Coaching, recruitment, things like that. And then more recently stepping back into marketing as we've been investing in scaling that. And I guess something, just something that couldn't be more true for a company like Canva and many startups is change is the norm. And what that really requires I think is a culture of learning. Something I think that has been really important for me and I guess we really try and foster with the team is no matter who you are, you always need to be learning and growing. And an analogy I like to use is you might be the best person at specific field and sort of join the team today to lead, might be an individual contributor or you might be leading a team of 10, but in two years that team might be 40 people. And literally for everyone across Canva, you'll very soon be in the biggest role of your life if you're not already. And the only way to sort of succeed and thrive and grow there is to approach things as a beginner and, and really be open to learning and growing. And that's a critical part of scaling along the way. And there's this great saying, there's actually an awesome blog post about this from, I think it's on first round, but this saying of handing over your Lego being just such a critical part of, of growing at a startup and I couldn't echo that more truly. I guess it's definitely been true for me. Back in the early days, I did all of our customer service when we first launched and I remember that started to take up an hour each day and then before long I was taking up half my day. Cliff said to me, we really need you to focus on, you know, the next things. We need to figure out how to, how to get someone else to take that on. And so very, very fortunately we had the incredible Hazel who is still with us today in the Philippines. And so her and I started to work together and she took on a lot of the customer service. And then we ended up opening the office in the Philippines and there's now an incredible team of hundreds of people doing that every day. And so handing over the Lego, I guess the creative team, something similar to where we decided as we were scaling marketing that that was something really important to keep in house. But we built that with our Cat, our creative director and others literally from us kind of hacking together and piloting our first ads when we launched and to now having some of the best people in terms of video and production and design and really having a world class agency. And so that's a constant part of the Journey. The other point I'd make here is just you really need to pick your next goal and focus on testing and learning and then rapidly scaling, I guess. In 2013 we were in one language, which was English. And in 2015, I remember as a company, we set this kind of seemingly crazy goal in the next year of being in 20 languages. And I remember the goal just kind of blew my mind at the time because it just seemed so big and unachievable. And then what we did was actually set the goal of, you know, on the path to being in 20 languages. We need to launch in one language and so set the goal of launching in Spanish by the end of 2015. And what that did was it gave, you know, the whole team and the whole company something to rally towards. It was something that wasn't too big and impossible, but in solving for Spanish, it actually meant we had to build, you know, a translation and localization infrastructure. We had to re engineer the code base, we had to hire translators. And so we figured out a lot of the processes and the systems and then tackled the 20 languages. And then by 2017 that goal reached 100 languages. But really it was a sort of great example of you have to start with something and figure it out before you can scale.

Was the goal to expand in other GEOs or was it for customers and users that were multilingual? Right. That had a multilingual readership or user base, which was the primary driver?

Yeah, good question. It was. For us, it was about reaching a much broader community around the world, I guess, you know, we, as we were looking at what was going to unlock the next level of growth for us over the next few years, it was very apparent that by being in English we were limited, you know, to kind of 20% of the world, 25% of the world. And so, yeah, it was really, really about that. And the mission for Canva all the way along has been to empower the whole world to design. And so being available in all those countries and languages was a big part of that mission number three, I guess building on what we were sort of talking about with social media, I guess is just this idea of really focusing in, on a niche or a niche, apologies for my Australian accent there, but really focusing on a specific use case. And so for us, early on, that was social media content. This is the very first version of Canva, which you'll notice looks a little bit outdated these days. I guess going from social media to over time we've really expanded the product. You can now create anything from presentations to print products, websites, infographics, et cetera. And it's really exciting these days to see things like presentations is actually our largest use case and our fastest growing alongside things like video and other content types as well. And I guess what this kind of comes back to is just finding something you can solve extremely well before you move on to the next thing. So for us, focusing on social media marketers meant we really immersed ourself in that community and went to lots of social media events and big social media conference in San Diego at the time and creating templates that were perfect, making sure we're building features and use cases, doing content marketing, really understanding that holistically. And then once we did that, we're able to scale things out. And we've now replicated that across a whole bunch of different industries, One really good example of which is newsrooms, media and newsrooms. And so about two years ago, we really identified that this was another awesome use case for Canva. Following the sort of Huffington Post example, newsrooms have an incredible amount of content that they're needing to produce. They're generally understaffed and struggle with the volume that needs to be created. And so we saw Canva as a perfect use case. We actually hired this fantastic journalist, ex journalist, ex foreign correspondent here in Australia, Jonathan, and his. His kind of crazy big goal that was set was to reach or to get Canberra to every newsroom in Australia in that year. And he did an exceptional job of that. And we're now used in newsrooms around the world, as you can see here. And it was the same approach, really get in, have people that someone like Jonathan that really understands that world, spend time in user, building templates, content, educational materials, figuring out the whole journey there and really tailoring the products for those folks. Number four, designing for the future. And so we touched on this just before, but something that struck us a few years ago as we were thinking about what was the next chapter for Canva, was this stat that the vast majority of people don't use Canva in English. And actually more and more people are coming onto the Internet for the first time every day, and the majority of them coming on in languages other than English too. And I guess, you know, very proud to share that these days, more than 80% of our community use Canva in a language other than English. So our community is truly global these days with markets like Brazil and India and others really being right up there. And I guess that's come back from focusing on that in terms of language localization. But Also more deeply in the product experience. So investing in building out our content and template libraries, making sure that we have the right integrations and the right user experience, you know, building the right to left experience for Arabic and things like that. So translation is definitely just scratching the surface and like that's been a journey that we've continued to build on over the past few years. But from those foundations that we laid.

Canva Pro and Enterprise, are you pushing them as much in these other languages and other GEOs as much as you do in English based?

It's a mix. So I guess we, you know, we definitely see different markets being at different stages and also different markets having, you know, different audiences. For example, in India a lot of our successes come with small business owners. You know, people kind of running, running a business on their phone. You know, it's a very different kind of category to, to say Australia or the US where we're really starting to see and invest a lot more in the enterprise and the organizational level. And then you pick another market like Mexico and we've had just phenomenal uptake in education there. So schools and universities have really taken to our education product and experience. So it is definitely, there's definitely different patterns and sort of different use cases that we're seeing.

And how many do you have different product marketing teams in these different geos and different GMs how if it's your team or otherwise, how do you divide that up at scale?

Yeah, we've I guess definitely focused on what are the things that we can do globally and really focused on that infrastructure. And I think that that's really been you know, a key part of building the engine to localize content and make sure that the product's available. And then we've definitely invested in sort of local teams as well. Whether it's the team in the Philippines have done an amazing job over the past 18 months of really focusing in on that market and have done a great amount in terms of the education space and the small business and freelancer community there building that. In China we've got a team on the ground as well and other teams in different markets around the world as well. I guess we have this little heuristic internally which I really love as just a mental model as well around this idea of building and scaling. And we talk about these two axes of growth for Canva. On one hand it's picking fruit and that's kind of, to use the analogy that's like these sort of short term optimizations or really leveraging what you've built in the past for growth this year or this month or whatever it might be. And a lot of our success today actually comes from things that we lay the foundations for months, if not years earlier. And it's really important to kind of balance doing that in the short term, in the here and now, with also planting the next seeds for the future and thinking about what's ahead and what are the spaces that we need to be building product for or really setting the foundations for. And we so use that mental model to prioritise and make sure that we're investing on both fronts. I guess one piece of advice I'd have as well is just not being afraid to challenge the status quo. And I guess every company and organization is different. And I know that there can be the temptation to sort of copy what you see from other organizations. Or there's this great, great quote I love too of not comparing your behind the scenes real with another company sort of high prl. What you see from other organizations publicly will always look a little different to the reality internally as well. And so just focusing on what's right for you and your culture and your team as well. And I guess that's been something that's been really intentional for Canva as well. We've baked in a lot of those philosophies internally. We very much have a focus on teams internally and have done ever since the early days. And so it's all about teams really working together and having a shared big goal for each team across the organization. We view any kind of hierarchy, or we call it coaching internally, but your role as a coach is actually to make your team and the people that you support successful and maintaining that sort of agility and really having teams that can adapt and grow has been a big part of our culture. Again. Yeah, a good quote I think just sort of reflecting on comes from Jeff Bezos, but the fact that results today are actually baked in years ago and some things take a long time as well. So I guess some advice here is really just thinking about your industry or your vertical and where it will be in a few years from now. And I think that that was definitely what shone the light for us on international and localization equally from a product point of view. We knew back in 2013 that the future of design would be online and then it'd be collaborative as well. But that was a huge technical feat. And so it was actually there was this. You can see some tweets here. It was actually feature we launched which meant that people for the first Time could collaborate in real time on Canva. And it was actually something that our CTO Dave, had set as a goal eight years earlier. And it just been this kind of incredible technical feat to get there and was a huge milestone. And obviously our community couldn't have been happier to have the feature launch, but definitely one of those things that required persistence and perseverance and really making sure we knew where we needed to get to. We're sort of investing in planting those seeds there. And then I guess just finally the last lesson that I wanted to touch on was really just around culture and just how important building the right culture for your startup is. I guess I'd love to get a bit of a show of hands or any comments. If anyone's read this book, the Power of Moments. I know I look.

It does look good.

It does look good, yeah. If there's one sort of thing I'd leave you with, I highly recommend checking out this book. It's guided so much of how we've thought about creating experience for our community and the journey, both for the team internally, but also for our users as well. And I guess the core premise is that people are actually willing to put up with a lot of stuff if there's these really outstanding moments in an experience. And I guess there's this fantastic example that is given in the book. So the Magic Castle Hotel up there was actually one of the top hotels on TripAdvisor for many, many years. I think it was like the number three hotel in la. And looking at it, you wouldn't have thought. So it was kind of like average hotel rooms. It was nothing super special, at least the outside. But what this hotel did and the reason that it was so popular was it really focused on the experiences. And so you go to check in and there'd be a magician at the foyer, entertaining the kids. You know, down by the pool, there was a. They called it like the Popsicle hotline. You could. You could pick up this red phone and order like any flavored Popsicle, you know, delivered to your poolside. There was like this library of DVDs and board games and all sorts of stuff for the kids to use. And it was like actually through thinking through the experience, this hotel did an amazing job and became really, really popular. And I guess it's something that we've kind of carried through to thinking about how we create those moments internally. I guess one of our. One of our goals. Sorry, one of our values internally is to set crazy big goals and then make them happen. I like to Kind of flip that and talk about set crazy big goals and then make sure you celebrate them. It's been something we've done all the way along. We used to go out when we hit our first million users. Actually, I think the question got put out to someone on the team, what do you think we should do to celebrate? And the idea was to go out for a lunch and have schnitzels. And it actually became a bit of a tradition for the first few million users. We'd get the team out, get together for every million users, and before long there was too many of us and we couldn't fit in the restaurant. And so we had to kind of iterate and evolve that celebration, you know, for scale, I guess. Another example, when we all shifted online last year, it was also a big moment in time for our marketing team as well. We launched our very first advertising globally and launched firstly with a TV test in the us. And so to do something fun and celebrate, after a whole lot of hard work, we actually decided to do a virtual road trip, stopping at each of the 10 cities that we were on airing and had someone from the team do a sort of a zoom tour of the city. And we made cocktails and did an art class and all sorts of things along the way, which is a whole stack of fun. Similarly with our birthdays as well. Up in the top, we used to have this kind of bizarre tradition, which the only thing more bizarre than kind of watching it is experiencing it. But on your birthday, you used to get up, forced to jump up on a table and put on a crown while the whole company would dance around and sing me happy birthday. And it was just kind of a wacky tradition that made people feel really special on their birthday. And I guess another thing of it didn't last forever. At some point we couldn't fit everyone on one floor anymore. And so we started to think about how we scaled that as well and so introduced our birthday wheel here, which now this is done virtually, but when it's your birthday, everyone gets invited to spin the birthday wheel and get something special to celebrate. And I guess this is just a sort of view of even as we've scaled, we've tried to keep those different elements and make it special along the way as well. So, yeah, I'll sort of leave it at that. But I guess just to kind of quickly recap those takeaways, really focusing on building community, prioritizing just in time, learning as you scale and grow, focusing in on a niche before going wide, really envisaging and thinking about the future and making sure you're both planting seeds and harvesting fruit. And finally really thinking about creating those peak moments and the right culture to curate for your company too.

Cool. Zach, that was amazing. I know we have just a couple minutes left, but we did get earlier some really good questions from Twitter and LinkedIn. You hit a few of them, but I thought maybe I can just get to two or three of them before we run out of time. The first one, your funnel. Right. So funnels often work differently than we think. Now that we see more companies going public, you've got 60 million free users. Right. But how do they convert? Do they convert linearly? Do folks that do enterprise and pro quickly fall through the funnel? Do most free never convert? Like, how does this funnel work at Canva?

Yeah, I guess we. We've always thought we're talking about a bottoms up approach at Canva, and I think that has really meant really prioritizing and investing in that free experience, which I. Which I mentioned earlier. So the vast majority of people use Canva for free, and then we see people that are getting a lot of value then upgrade and use us individually as a pro user or with a small team. And so we sort of see that uptake and then up into enterprise as well. And so we definitely see, like, the product being the catchment for that, as people use the product and love it. Like that ultimately sees us sort of trade up that pyramid. And we've seen that with things like Fortune 500 organizations as well, where many of the Fortune 500s will have thousands of individual users or small teams on the platform. And then for the organization, then it's about actually bringing them together and sort of unlocking some of the power of enterprise. So that bottoms up approach has been.

So even today, as you get to a billion, the enterprise piece is organic. You're mining the free or even pro base to find the larger accounts. Is that class, do you have an active sales team? Do they hunt the long tail? Or how do you build these into enterprise accounts?

Yeah, we do have a sales team as well. But the sort of scale of our products, we have 60 million people designing every month. People loving and using the product is definitely where we see the demand coming for many of the enterprise customers that we've got on board, you know, have done so because people in the team use us individually, you know, or have used us in their personal life and sort of bring it in. And so for us with sales too, it's really about just helping those organizations, like, unlock the value that they need to, or you know, solving the problems that they have. So it's really about just making sure we, we, we solve for the customer pain point there. Cool.

And then maybe just one, one or two more because we are out of time. So maybe it's less of a, less interesting than a billionaire, but Canva has pay per use and monthly plans. Is there. What have you learned there? Can these little $1 for an image, can that really move the needle at a billionaire or what? How do you, why do you have both paid for versions?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think a few things. We want to make sure that there's like, there's a variety of choice for people. There might be people that are coming to create that once off graphic in Canva and we want to solve for their use case and they equally might need a stock photo. And so when we launched Canva, the $1 photo license was something that hadn't been done before. And so because you're using it within Canva means we can kind of control the usage. And so it's a dollar per use. So I guess there's that use case and then with our Pro subscription, you actually get access to sort of unlimited content in terms of imagery and things like that. So we continue to offer both. But a lot of people, you know, might, might use the $1 image and then actually decide that they want to subscribe to Pro because, you know, it makes sort of sense if they. Multiple graphics. Yeah.

So originally it was disruptive. Right. But maybe now it's, it's a stepping stone potentially to becoming a subscript, a subscriber afterwards, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Okay, last one there. There's so many good ones. Although we did hit, hit about half of, in your presentation, but just last one and maybe, you know, in the, like in the last 18 months community's become really hot, right? Community startups, Community as a strategy in marketing. VPs of community you touched on in the beginning. What, what as a, as the cmo, what is Community? Is it more than happy users? Like what does it really mean? 60 million users, of course you have, you have happy. I mean, word of mouth is the majority of revenue. What is it? How do you invest in Community and how is it different than happy users and happy customers?

I think for us, Community has really been, as you've seen, it's been absolutely pivotal to our growth. And I think at its core it's actually being close to the people around the world that actually use your product and understanding, you know, their problems and challenges and you know, what they need. And for us it's also been handing over and sort of ceding some of that to them. Like our community create incredible content and you look online, it's just like there's literally hundreds of thousands of tutorials and courses and all that sort of stuff. And I guess more recently we've really focused on how do we actually enable our community to achieve their goals too. And so we've launched our design circle where we give the community early access to new features and we've got community members that we let try out products early and they give us feedback. But that also helps them make content and courses and tutorials which might be revenue streams. I guess there's community. We've also got a community of people around the world that actually contribute templates into Canva now and are earning money and an income through creating for Canva too. And so I guess in the broad sense it's, you know, it's helping people on our platform kind of achieve their goals. And then I think it's really about understanding each of those different communities that we have and sort of engaging with them and sort of helping them as much as we can.

Cool. Well, Zach, thanks. I wish we could get to a few more of these questions, but we'll do it. We'll do it in a follow up session. We'll do what one works for you. But thanks for joining us, Caitlin, anything we need to do to wrap up or are we good for this session right now?

You're good, Zach. Thank you so much. Jason, as always. Thank you. And yeah, excited. We're about to kick off in San Mateo so hope to see some of you there.

Thank you again, Zach, thanks for everything. Congratulations on the big on the latest milestone to celebrate with schnitzels. A billion in ARR and company from one of the very first employees. Pretty cool. Congratulations.

Thank you. Thanks. Jason. Sa.