Canva

“Building community is all about getting individual users to love it and talk about it to other people. And that kind of growth doesn't quite work in an enterprise setting because you end up with a very disorganized and chaotic network graph inside an organizat…”

“I think within three months, so our one dollar image revenue at that stage is, I think, about two million dollars. Within three months, our subscription tier had already eclipsed that and was growing far more rapidly.”

“And we started seeing returns on that within Three months and it's scaled up over the next couple of years to become a massive driving engine for us. And it still is a massive source of traffic for us.”

“We had 200,000 people on the waiting list, which was awesome.”

“So we've never built like a community, like a forum. We don't have this spot on Canva where people come to talk about design. We've fostered community where it arises.”

“There was this one period where we decided to rewrite our entire editor code base, which was particularly trying. The reason was it took us like close to two years to do that. And in that time, we essentially launched nothing. We didn't put out any new functio…”

“And that's when I got an introduction to my Canva co-founders, Melon Cliff, and it was actually through my old boss at Google called Lars Rasmussen. He had bumped into Melanie at a startup event over in Perth in Australia. And they got in talking, he was reall…”

“An amazing amount of organic traffic comes to Canva. You know, it's only a minority that comes through marketing or other paid channels. It's really about Canva users bringing new Canva users into the fold that continues to drive the success of Canva.”

“Our top five markets now are the US, Brazil, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines.”

“Inside some companies, like, 50,000 employee companies, we already had like 5000 people using Canva. They just didn't do it in a structured way.”

“We went from about five under that first day. I think by the end of the week, we had about 5000 people who'd signed up. End of the month, we had about 20,000. I think by the end of the year, we'd had The number of designs that had been created was something li…”

“So we've kind of vowed never to do a huge rewrite like that ever again.”

“And in today's world, you have to be mobile first. So, you know, if we're making the product today, it would definitely be a mobile first product with probably desktop as the secondary”

“We launched eight languages in that year, and then the following year we launched Canva in a hundred languages, and this totally opened up new markets to us.”

“Startups became a really vital part of Canva's growth through year three and four. And that's when we really started opening up Canva as a real work tool, not just something that created some pretty graphics, but a tool that helped you rally people together, e…”

“I think it's been one of the secrets to canvas success is that we have such a broad user base and our vision just encompasses. So many possible things you can do and people that can use it in different ways.”

“I think we officially spent two hours in person, two separate Skype chats, and that was it. A few emails. We didn't have any working sessions.”

“We also had a waiting list of about 15,000 people who had signed up already, not even knowing what Canva was about.”

“Few investors asked us to ship a bit earlier than we would have. And we always said, no, we know what the product is. We know what we want to put out there as the first version.”

“I think at the time, and still you get a lot of onboarding that is coach marks. It like points over here and says, Hey, you might want to do this thing. And you click through the steps at the end of it. You've totally forgotten every single step. And you're ju…”

“So since then, we've put a premium on being a profitable company, making sure that we don't need funding, that we can run the company without having to go to someone else and put our hand out. And that has informed the next eight years of profitability that we…”

“It was all rosy until the final day when they had to sign the long docs, everyone else had signed, everyone else had put in money. And this investor came back to us and said, you know what? We think we overvalued you. We think we can get better deal. How about…”

“Going from zero to two hundred and thirty million people that now use Canva every single month.”

“Through some of those early user testing sessions, both the in-person ones and then the ones that we did online, we started to see that there was this rich vein of social media marketers who just got really excited about Canva.”

“We operated on that business model for the first two years of Canva. And it was going pretty well. We had like, 30% month on month gross on revenue.”