After listening to the
Canva: Melanie Perkins episode of the NPR podcast How I Built This with Guy Raz, I was inspired by the founder Melanie Perkins and her drive and ability to pitch her business. This is her story of how she built the free, accessible and easy-to-use online design platform we know today as
Canva.
The Journey
Melanie wanted to revolutionize the publishing industry and bring it into the future of online platforms, and unlike most people she acted on that dream. She wanted to start Canva because she found the existing publishing programs like InDesign and Microsoft Publisher to be clunky and hard to use. She reduced the scale of her idea to be realistic and started out with just yearbook design in Australia before she moved on to her goal of taking over the entire design industry. Melanie co-founded Canva at 19 years of age with her then boyfriend Cliff who she is still with to this day. She thought that yearbooks were the best place to start because often non-designers are thrown into the huge task of designing a yearbook. Melanie and Cliff went around and interviewed every software development company in Perth strapped with a $50,000 loan from friends and family to get the business running. The first software development company that they worked with was called In Depth. One of her biggest selling points of the business was the entirely online aspect of it, she thought that desktop platforms were of the past and desired to emulate the structure of the Google Suite, making it so you never have to leave the platform, or the internet, for the entire process. Starting with the yearbook market was one of the smartest business moves from the beginning. While it may seem like a niche market, every school puts out a yearbook. And it wasn't just that, the fact that yearbooks needed to be printed was easily monetized and allowed Melanie and Cliff to give the software away for free. They were even lucky enough to be noticed by a printer supply company that gifted their first printing press if they paid for the ink costs. The entire game changed once she met a venture capital investor and had lunch with him in California where he committed to investing in her and her company.
The Tipping Point
While her success with her yearbook company Fusion Books was still growing, she know faced not being able to find a tech team, which caused investors to be wary. Melanie was pitching her business to anyone and everyone just hoping someone would perk up. However, the constant feedback allowed them to develop and refine their pitch and business model in true lean start-up fashion. While Canva now seems like a no-brainer company, she had an incredible amount of doubt from investors for quite a long time. Until, she received a $1.4 million from investors and the Australian government matched that, giving her $3 million to build what we know today as Canva.
Reflection
I'm not sure what I expected to hear in this podcast, but I was pleasantly surprised at Melanie's humble attitude and commitment to her dream. One of the most inspiring parts of her testimony was her statement about being terrified but just kept pushing herself through. She mentions being a naturally introverted person, but very driven when she has a goal. I personally love Canva and recommend it to anyone who is looking to design for the first time. They have beautiful templates that I often get inspiration from as a graphic designer myself. My biggest takeaway from this podcast is even when everything seems against you, when you have a good idea keep pushing. Listen to everything that people say in response to your idea, take in that feedback and show people that you are improving. A truly inspiring story and I cannot wait to see what Melanie and Canva do next.
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