Disclosure
A lead investor attempted to halve Canva's valuation on signing day
“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…”
Insight
Cameron Adams says coach-mark onboarding fails because users forget every step
“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…”
Insight
Adams: Grassroots growth creates chaotic enterprise networks requiring centralized control
“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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Canva's founders committed after two hours in person and two Skype calls
“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.”
Assertion Supported
Canva has grown to 230 million monthly active users
“Going from zero to two hundred and thirty million people that now use Canva every single month.”
Disclosure
Canva rejected early investor pressure to launch an unpolished initial product
“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.”
Opinion
Adams: Serving a broad user base drove Canva's long-term success
“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.”
Assertion Supported
Canva intentionally never built an in-platform community forum for its users
“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.”
Assertion Supported
Adams: Canva's top five markets are US, Brazil, Indonesia, India, Philippines
“Our top five markets now are the US, Brazil, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines.”
Insight
Canva CPO: Today's products must launch mobile-first, not desktop-first
“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”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Subscription revenue eclipsed Canva's two-million-dollar micro-transaction business within three months
“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.”
Disclosure
Canva has vowed never to do a massive codebase rewrite again
“So we've kind of vowed never to do a huge rewrite like that ever again.”
Assertion Partly supported
Canva has maintained profitability for eight consecutive years without external funding
“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…”
Disclosure
Early user testing revealed social media marketers as Canva's initial beachhead market
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Adams: Only a minority of Canva's traffic comes from paid channels
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Canva reached 20,000 user signups within its first month of public launch
“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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Adams: Startups using presentations drove Canva's growth in years 3 and 4
“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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Canva saw SEO returns within three months, driving massive ongoing traffic
“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.”
Assertion Partly supported
Canva expanded from 8 to 100 languages in consecutive years
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Canva grew monthly revenue 30 percent using one-dollar micro-transactions
“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.”
Assertion Supported
Adams: Canva for Work had 200,000 people on launch waitlist
“We had 200,000 people on the waiting list, which was awesome.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Five thousand employees in large enterprises used Canva organically before enterprise tiers
“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.”
Assertion Supported
Canva spent two years rewriting its entire codebase while shipping almost nothing
“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…”
Disclosure
Adams: Email startup Fluent failed to raise VC funding on Sand Hill Road
“We spent about two months traipsing up and down Sand Hill Road and all over the Bay Area. Didn't manage to land funding, but got a lot of aqua hire offers through that process and came back to Australia”
Cameron Adams