Power Of Not Giving Up- Canva Story
Canva is a leading graphic design platform, a tool that makes it easier for anyone to become a designer. With over 100 templates already available, you can easily design a presentation, posters, posts, logos, flyers, and a lot more, without having any prior design experience. Unlink other tools where you have to buy, install, learn and create. With Canva’s online platform you can easily log in and start to create, without having to buy or install anything. With Canva’s purchase of stock images, they have also made it easy for users to search an image within the platform and include it in their design.
So how it all got started? Canva CEO & Co-Founder Melanie Perkins has had business roots from the young age of 14. When she was 14, she started a company that made scarves and sold them to shops around Perth and she recalls her venture, very helpful because she learned the power of cold calling. She was good at picking up a phone and getting scarves in the hands of consumers.
At 19, she was studying at University in Perth and teaching design to students in her spare time. It was then when she realized that the programs she was teaching were really complicated, she thought that designing should not be as complicated as it is and with no tech business experience, she decided to start, a school yearbook business in Australia.
Her mom’s living room became the printing press, physically printing yearbooks made her “an amazing print operator”. The yearbooks were designed and delivered to doors, the business was growing quickly but people kept on asking her if the designs could be used elsewhere. With her interest in solving problems from a young age, she decided to build a platform and that was the idea of Canva.
She went on to various meetups pitching her idea to investors, after meeting 100 plus investors with no results, she ran into Bill Tai. One thing leads to another and she found a co-founder, Cameron Adams to which Melanie says “I’m really truly grateful”, as he did have experience with a tech company. Some of you may be familiar with it, Google.
Finding an investor was not easy; she spends nights on her brother's apartment floor. It took her three years to get the funds and then a year to build a team. Finally, in 2013, the company was launched. That launch was not taken kindly by one of the publishers. A negative article was written on Canva, but in some way it also helped Canva with their marketing, things picked up and started to grow rapidly, other press reports came out with much more positive comments about the platform.
The culture at Canva cannot be overlooked, with her times of eating lunch by herself she wanted to make sure that at Canva people had someone to eat lunch with, the lunch is provided. There are clubs for board games, indoor soccer, video games, rock climbing, an onsite gym, and employees are encouraged to bring in their kids and pets to work.
Five years after launching, in 2018 it was valued at $1 billion, in 2019 it was valued at $3.2 billion, with more than 15 million monthly active users in 190 countries, in six years, Canva has helped create close to 2 billion designs.
She credits her success on not give up and persisting. Melanie Perkins says that “the reason we struggle with insecurities because we compare our behind-the-scenes footage with everyone else’s highlight reel”.
If we could get one message from this story, it is to never give up. And keep working hard in the dark. It's hard to say what Canva will be in the coming years, but Melanie Perkins says that the company is only getting started.
