Unheard Roots of Canva (PT.2) 🧑‍💻

This is part 2 of the story of Canva, the $40,000,000,000 design empire built by a genius called Melanie Perkins.

For some context, first read Part 1.

Pitching the very first investor 💸

As soon as Melanie Perkins received the email with Bill Tai agreeing to meet her in Silicon Valley, she immediately booked a plane ticket and flew to California.

Bill Tai was Melanies only contact in Silicon Valley and would be the portal that opened Canva up to a world of funding opportunities.

Melanie did everything to impress Bill Tai during the meeting, including reading about body language and creating a pitch deck with an ambitious vision prior to the meeting.

In fact, the very first page of Canvas first pitch deck read “The future of publishing.”

Unfortunately, Melanie was crushed when Bill Tai ended up looking at his phone during the entire meeting.

The Pleasant Surprise 😲

After the meeting, Melanie learned Bill Tai wasn’t on his phone because he wasn’t interested.

Turns out, Bill was on his phone messaging people in his network about Melanie and her vision.

One of the people Bill reached out to was Lars Rasmussen, the co-founder of Google Maps.

Right after the meeting, as Melanie was thinking she messed everything up, Bill sent her a message saying he would be happy to invest as long as she could build a solid technical team.

Plus, to help Melanie build a talented tech team, Bill scheduled a meeting between Melanie Perkins and Lars Rasmussen.

Building a team 🚀

Luckily, the meeting with Lars went exceptionally well for Melanie and they had a lot of common views on the future of design.

Lars also agreed to helping Melanie hire engineers, which essentially entailed Melanie finding engineers and Lars rejecting them until she found the right one.

For an entire year Melanie met with every single engineer she could find.

She met people on the bus, reached out to engineers on Linkedin, went to events, etc.

Every single time Melanie thought she had found the right engineer, Lars would reject them.

Lars knew Melanie had a complicated technical vision and Canva needed a very specific kind of engineer that could handle the technical obstacles.

Finding THE one 🥂

Melanie eventually met Cameron Adams, the current technical co-founder of Canva.

Cameron Adams was the only engineer Lars approved during the entire year.

After finally finding a talented technical founder, Melanie was able to get to work on her vision towards 2013~.

Very first funding round 💰

As promised, Bill Tai led the very first funding round of Canva.

Melanie Perkins was able to raise 1.6 million dollars from private equity firms & investors via Bill Tai’s network and 1.4 million dollars from the Australian Government.

As Canva started getting traction, it was able to secure more funding and scale to become the 40 billion dollar company it is today.

Lessons from the story of Canva 📚

• Find the right problem

There are a couple of things that make a problem worth solving.

1. The number of people who experience it

2. Number of people growing

3. Amount of money being spent trying to solve the problem

4. Pain of the problem being felt critically

Canva was able to find an idea that checked off every single on of these boxes.

1. There was a large number of people who were trying to learn and use design tools

2. There was a growing number of people using the internet for design

3. There were lots of people paying companies like Adobe $1500 for a license

4. Users had to spend 40+ hours just to learn the basics of Adobe tools and more time and money to actually use it.

• Put yourself out there - build strategic connections

Canva was able to raise $3,000,000 in it’s pre-seed round because Melanie struck up a conversation with Bill Tai at a conference.

One conversation led to millions of dollars.

That right there is the power of networking and building strategic relationships.

• Always overdeliver and exceed expectations - Give your customers a better experience than they could imagine

Canvas premium plan is only $12.99 monthly.

And it includes more features than almost every single design tool in the market right now.

Plus it’s unbelievably simple to learn yet anyone can produce breathtaking visuals within minutes.

Canvas ability to overdeliver and exceed expectations has been a paramount part of its 40 billion dollar valuation and remarkable retention rates.