The Exchanges

Q And what was the original thing that they explained that they were up to?

A So they had been working on a school yearbook business. They'd been running that for about three or four years. It was built in Adobe Flash, if anyone remembers what that was. And they had built out a decent business. I think it did two or three million dollars in revenue. They'd really started to corner the yearbook business in Australia. But they had this bigger vision. It wasn't just yearbooks. They wanted to bring design to everyone. And it really fascinated me because I'm a graphic designer by background. I also have a computer science degree. That's how I ended up building digital products. And I'd always been really interested in creative tools, helping people unlock their innate creativity, which a lot of us don't realize we have. And I'd built a lot of tools over the previous 15 years that did that. Campbell was a really pointed expression of that. Being able to bring visual design to people who had never even thought about tackling it before was really compelling. And that's what Mel wanted to do. So we started exploring what that meant and Burrowing into some of the vision decks you'd put together, thinking about what product we wanted to create, and that's really where Canvas started to flourish.

AI assessment note: “It wasn't just yearbooks. They wanted to bring design to everyone.”

Q Were there other things like that that you figured out in watching and talking to those early customers that were trying out the product that were a big part of the, the early success?

A Definitely. We started seeing who Really got into the products. I mean, we couldn't launch the all singing, all, all dancing version of Canva on day one. You need to, you know, pace yourself. You got limited resources. You got limited time. So you need to put out a product that's polished enough that people feel like they can use it and trust it. You also need to get it out quick enough so that you're getting feedback and responding to it and helping you find your direction. Through some of those early user testing sessions, both the in-person ones and, 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. So this was 2013. Pinterest had come out like a year or two earlier. Instagram was just becoming popular. Twitter was a thing, but it wasn't particularly visual. More and more people were now adding images into their Twitter posts. And it was just the right moment where people were starting to having to scale their visual content needs. And there was this type of user who was helping people with their social media, helping businesses figure out their strategy, produce content that engage people. So these social media managers needed to create a lot of content. They couldn't afford to go and get someone to do it. And most of them were actually individuals. So they were running th…

AI assessment note: “we started to see that there was this rich vein of social media marketers”

Q What about maybe the inverse of that? Like, were there a few moments that were Particularly difficult or hard other than the normal trials and tribulations of, of making a startup work?

A In terms of the product, it's mostly been smooth sailing, like you iterate, you put stuff out, you see what works, you see what doesn't, you're kind of used to that. 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 functionality. We couldn't respond to customers with like, here's a improvement based on what you've said. It was really, really trying for us as a, as a team, as a product. So that was really hard. So we've kind of vowed never to do a huge rewrite like that ever again.

AI assessment note: “There was this one period where we decided to rewrite our entire editor code base”

Q When you all committed to building this company, did you think there was a real chance of building one of the most valuable software businesses of the last 20 years? Or was it more like you think there's an opportunity for this? There's nobody that's built this. We're going to go build it and sort of see what happens.

A You might get a different answer between me and Mel and Cliff on that. Uh, I'm sure Mel will say that she wholeheartedly believes that this is one of the biggest opportunities in the world. And I've honestly believed that as well, but I also had like a risk factor baked in. It's like, it's a great bet to take to put this product out into the world, but I don't know how people are going to receive it. So I definitely put it out into the world with huge hope and promise, and it's been amazing to see the world respond to that and really gravitate towards what we enable for them through the product and has enabled camera to grow incredibly over the last 13 years, 12 since we launched, going from zero to two hundred and thirty million people that now use Canva every single month. It's a bit of a crazy wild ride, one that I don't think I signed up for in the first days. It was just like, create something great and cross your fingers, but the growth that we've experienced since then, I think is a testament to our belief in the vision. So like, Putting something great out there. We knew that it had promise and that it had the potential for pretty much everyone in the world to use, but you can't know it's going to succeed from day one. So like putting it out there and responding to people's enthusiasm for it and growing the product, increasing the features and expanding the surface area…

AI assessment note: “I've honestly believed that as well, but I also had like a risk factor baked in”

Q Why do you think you have become the dominant player in this use case? You're kind of the standalone that has really won so many of these categories. Obviously it's different as you get into more traditional enterprise use cases, but in the non-enterprise to this day, all these years later, you've built the category winning product. Why do you think that is?

A I think for a few different reasons. We're definitely first mover in this category. I mean, we essentially created this category of democratized visual design and a lot of people didn't pick up on that for, for many years. So we managed to build up this beachhead and build up really brand equity. Like Canva is still the foremost design platform that anyone can access anywhere in the world. So, and, and people know that. So it's, it's an incredible foundation to, to have built upon. The attention to detail that we put into our products, making sure that every pixel that appears on screen is well crafted and thought about, that we constantly have a simple but powerful experience, one that's easy for people to approach, but they can, over time, still develop experience and knowledge that helps them get more and more value out of the product. I think having a very community-oriented brand is also really important. A lot of people trust Canva. They, they love Canva. They literally love it, and they tell us they do. And building that brand equity and love for the product of Canva, the brand of Canva, and our philosophies and ways of viewing the world is also really powerful. That helps other people want to spread the word of Canva because they love talking about a great company that they feel very values aligned with, and it just all turns into this really powerful growth engine of g…

AI assessment note: “I think for a few different reasons. We're definitely first mover in this category.”

Q Did you just email users to get feedback? Did you get on Skype with them? Did you just respond on Twitter? Like, how did you tangibly start to pull the roadmap out of early customers?

A We didn't have much face to face with, with customers as part of our product process. We had like a community team. It was one person, but she was doing a lot of reaching out to bloggers, social media managers, people that were really engaged and talking to them, getting feedback from them. Um, so I, she did a lot of that as a product team. We didn't actually, we were still leaning heavily into user testing. Uh, Twitter was great because it's high volume. It's easy for you to check in. You can do it any time. So we got a lot of feedback through there. We also had a support email, which, you know, we interacted with people over email with. So from all those signals, we kind of gathered the product feedback that we needed to, to continue the roadmap. But like, we've, we've made sure ever since we've launched, ever since Canva's been going, that we balance responsiveness to users through feedback channels like that and creating features that they love with the vision that we know where we want to take Canva with. So there's still a ton of things that we're building because We truly believe that's where Canva should go, and we kind of blend that with user feedback to make sure that we're also looking after the community and delivering the things they're clearly asking for.

AI assessment note: “So from all those signals, we kind of gathered the product feedback”