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- Unheard Roots of Canva (PT.1) 💻
Canva has revolutionized design in recent years.
They’ve become one of my personal go-to tools whenever I need to design anything.
It’s well-built design tool isn’t the only thing that makes Canva special, it’s also led my an impressive woman called Melanie Perkins!
With all that said, we present to you the unheard roots of Canva!
The Realization ✨
The very first version of Canva was conceived when Melanie Perkins was a student in The University of Western Australia (towards 2011~2012).
Melanie up till that point hadn’t realized how arduous and difficult the process of designing was .
It would take between 30~40 hours just to learn the basics of Adobe Photoshop and other similar design tools.
Even after spending hours learning how to use the tool, you would have to spend a lot more time getting good.
Plus you would also need to spend money buying fonts, stock photos, and emailing back and fourth with others to get things right.
Not to mention the license to use most of these design tools would cost between $1000~$1500.
Thinking about a solution 💻
Melanie believed there had to be a better version; a version that was online, collaborative, and affordable.
In 2013, when Melanie was 19 years old, she launched the very first version of Canva.
A service that helped improve the process of designing yearbooks.
"Finally we launch in 2013 and a journalist broke the embargo and said that Canva wasn't the best. They wrote a quite critical article and we were like oh no."
Luckily the publication that wrote the critical article is now out of business and Canva is a $40 billion company.
Although Canva ended up achieving mega success, It wasn’t obvious that things would work out at the time.
"And I felt like my whole world had just crashed down and I was like quite sad in that point in time."
Trying to raise money 💰
While building Canva, Melanie decided to attend conference about entrepreneurship in Perth, Australia.
One of the speakers in the conference was the legendary investor Bill Tai, an investor with companies like Zoom under his belt.
Melanie knew establishing a connection with a person like Bill would open her up to the funding opportunities Canva needed.
In order to make the intro, Melanie went up to Bill Tai in the hallway of the conference and immediately struck up a conversation.
Although the conversation lasted 5 minutes, Bill gave Melanie his email and agreed to meet if she ever visited San Fransisco.
Rookie Mistakes 📉
Right after meeting Bill Tai, Melanie started sending Bill emails asking him to sign an NDA so she could pitch Canva.
At the time Melanie didn’t realize how much of a rookie mistake this was.
After being ignored multiple times, Melanie sent one last email telling Bill she would be in town and would love to meet for coffee.
Surprisingly, Bill replied to the last email and agreed to meet.
The problem? Melanie in desperation had lied about being in town. She was actually in Australia when she sent the email.
To make the meeting a reality, Melanie immediately bought a ticket and flied to Silicon Valley.
I wasn’t expecting this issue to be this long.
I don’t want you to spend an hour reading it so I’m breaking the Unheard Roots of Canva into two different parts.
Stay tuned to hear how Melanie raises millions of dollars in funding and builds a 40 billion dollar design empire.
📈📈