How I Built This with Guy Raz - Canva: Melanie Perkins (2019)

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

When she was just 19 years old, Melanie Perkins dreamt of transforming the graphic design and publishing industries. But she started small, launching a site to make yearbook design simpler and more collaborative. Her success with that first venture—and an unexpected meeting with a VC investor—eventually landed her the backing to pursue her original idea, and the chance to take on software industry titans like Adobe and Microsoft. Today, Melanie's online design platform Canva is valued at $6 billion, joining the list of Australia's "unicorn" companies.For more information on the HIBT Fellowship visit: https://npr.org/fellowsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Airbnb.ca.ca. slash host. Okay, so for today's show, we're going to run one of our favorite episodes from the archives. It's a story of Melanie Perkins, the founder of the design platform, Canva. And right at the top of the show, you'll hear me say that the company is valued at a billion dollars? Well, Canva is now valued at $6 billion. Okay, on to the show. Aren't any of the investors saying you don't have a tech team, you don't have a chief technology officer. Like, I don't know if I'm going to put my... That was literally what everyone was saying. What makes sense, right?

Yeah, it makes perfect sense, but how are we going to get this thing rolling? How many people do you think you pitched over that, I guess, two-month period in San Francisco? I don't know. Over 100 people, more. I was going through my rejections the other day. I was looking at some of the emails, and there was quite a dampy. From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how a college student named Melanie Perkins

turned her passion for making better yearbooks into the design platform Canva, now valued at over a billion dollars. So there's a story. that I think a lot of people have. And the details might be different, but it's basically a version of this. There was this one time you had a very clever business idea. Maybe it was an idea for a super useful product

or a service that would make your life way easier. Mine was actually the one-cup coffee maker. I swear, that was my idea. But like most people, I didn't do it. And if you're like me, you didn't have the time to work on it or the money maybe it just seemed too overwhelming to get started. But the way the story always ends is that a couple of months later, maybe a couple of years later,

you're shopping at a store or you're surfing the web, and there it is. I can remember the very day I saw the one-cup coffee maker at Target. Someone took my exact idea and made it happen. Now, does this story sound familiar? Because every business starts out as an idea. But to turn an idea into a reality? You have to get started, even if it means starting out small. You have to plant the seeds for a business to grow before someone else does.

And Melanie Perkins, as you will hear, she did have a big idea. She wanted to transform the entire desktop publishing industry when she was just 19 years old. But instead of feeling overwhelmed by the scale of her idea, Melanie got to work. She started out small by focusing first on one little piece of the idea. that she thought she could make work, which happened to be an online tool to design and publish school yearbooks. Melanie grew up in Perth in Western Australia. Her mom was a teacher and her dad was an engineer. And when Melanie went to university to study communications, this was in the mid-2000s,

she started using graphic design and publishing software programs like Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Publisher. And she was frustrated that the programs were so clunky and so different. to learn. And it seemed completely silly that you'd take so many instruction manuals and so many steps through the most basic of things. Students would take a whole semester just learning where the buttons were, they'll learn how to design something. It seemed very apparent that this whole desktop-based thing would be completely archaic and

outdated in the future. And so I had this very oversized vision for taking on all of these different industries from Microsoft Office and lots and lots of other industries as well. We thought rather than people using things like clip art, they should be able to have access to beautiful templates like designers do. But at that point in time, I was 19 and I had no business experience. And so rather than trying to take on the entire world of design, all these really big companies we decided to take on school yearbooks in Australia.

You keep saying we, when you say we, who are you talking about? My boyfriend turned co-founder Cliff. And you're still together, 12, 11, 12 years later. So you decided to start like a web-based business that would help people design your books. How did you come upon the idea of yearbooks? Well, we had this vision for taking on the entire world of design, but yearbooks seem to be like a really pressing need because school teachers would get thrown in to do this thing

that had no design experience. I'd seen my mom put together school yearbooks for her school. And it's a grind. It's a huge grind. And all of a sudden these people with no design experience were expected to create something to look professional. And so we realized that it would be a really easy thing to do because there's such a strong market need for these people to create yearbooks.

So how do you go from having that idea to actually, like, what was your next step? Because it was you and Cliff, and he was also 19? 20. By the way, what was it called? Fusion books. Fusion books. So were either of you guys like coders or software engineers? Not at all.

We just went and interviewed every software development company in Perth. And most people told us that we were completely mad. But how did you even have the money to pay them? We got a 50 grand alone from friends and family, which was awesome. And we got five grand back from GST, which is like our tax thing. So that was our marketing budget. You went around to friends and family and said, we had this amazing idea. We want to develop a web-based software solution for people designing yearbooks, which is a great idea.

That's exactly right. So you and Cliff have a little bit of cash, and you go around to software developers in Perth. who did you eventually find? There was this amazing company called In-Depth, and I went in with like an 80-page description of exactly what we wanted to build. Like I had wireframes built off, even though I didn't know what that...

Like you sketched out pictures of what the pages would look like? Yeah, to the detail, what every single button was going to do, how it was going to work. Like this project ended up being like five times bigger than they anticipated, but they were very kind and like we'd had a fixed price contract. And what was going to make this? better than anything else available at the time. Well, I think that there was just nothing much available

other than these desktop-based programs. So rather than having to send emails back and forth and collect all those files, I wanted it just to be collaborative and online and really simple. Because at that time, if you wanted to make a yearbook page, you would just go on Microsoft Word or like... Yeah, Microsoft Word or publisher.

And then also, it wasn't just that part. You'd then have to go get your stock photos or stock illustrations to actually make it look really good. And so there would be so many different things that you'd have to piece together to create something really, really hacky. And then you would like email that page to somebody and say, hey, what do you think? And they'd say, oh, no, but you wanted something more like Google Docs

where everybody could kind of jump in and make changes? That's correct. So you go to the software company in Perth, and how long did it take for them to build out the software for you? I think it was about six months before we had a first iteration and then immediately started on our second iteration. And do you remember what year this was? That was 2008.

So you just put it up there. On the one hand, yearbooks seem like a really niche market, right? Because it's, you know, one time a year when someone's using it. But on the other hand, every school does a yearbook, right? So it actually is surprising that there was nothing really out there to make it easy. Yeah, absolutely. And on the plus side as well, because a yearbook actually has to get printed, that was how we're able to monetize. So we're able to give the software away for free and then actually sell the physical yearbooks.

So the idea would be that somebody would go on there, design their yearbook, hit, submit, and then you guys would take that and then print it. And you would make money off of the actual printing costs. Yeah. So what happened? Well, we got 16 schools in our first year, which we were very excited about. And then we ended up getting printing presses in my mom's living room. How did you put it? How did you get printing presses?

So Fuji Xerox had this really cool deal where they said that they'd give us the printer for free if we paid for the ink and cartridges. And they kind of believed that we had like a newspaper article in Perth and they obviously saw that. Oh, there was an article about you guys. Yeah. And they saw it and they thought, oh, we'll help out. And they thought that help out and we'd become a big printing press company one day. Wow. And so they gave us a printer.

We ended up with a couple of them, actually. And so we would have a printing press going for 24 hours. hours for three months a year, and it would just be printing out these yearbooks, and then we'd go to a binding place, and that'd actually do the finishing and the binding. Did any of these schools know that you guys were like 19, 20 years old? I don't imagine so. So within your first year, do you remember, like, what kind of revenue you did? The first year revenue would have been very modest, but it was enough to be able to afford

to do more marketing the next year. So we just reinvest our profits every year into the next year. And very fortunately, I guess we had to become profitable quite quickly because of those we'd have no company immediately. So the first year we had 16 schools, the second year we had 50 schools, the next year we had 100 schools. And then it was like, I think it was 300. So it was growing quite rapidly.

When did you start to think about building this into something bigger? Because by 2010, you're two years in. And I can imagine you can start to see this thing has legs. Yeah, so actually the original idea of taking on the whole world of design and making it easy for everyone was actually planted right from the start. And then we narrowed it down to yearbooks. But we kept looking around and people would be like, oh, can we use this to design our canteen menus and our newsletters and our school flyers?

Are like, surely there must be more technology available now that does that. And there certainly wasn't. But then in 2010, I met. I met Bill Tai, who was a Silicon Valley investor over from here. And he was just talking about all these companies and startups. And like when I first heard him speak, it sounded like a window to a whole new world. You met him in Perth.

What was he doing there? He was speaking at a conference. This is in 2010. Yeah. So even though we'd sort of had a company that we'd been growing. But the only thing that we knew at that point in time was there were a small business that really struggled to get alone from the bank. because we didn't have a credit history.

And there was this whole world of startups that were taking on big industries. So I went up to him after a speech. Someone there kindly introduced me and said, hey, she's got a cool company. And he said, yeah, if I went to San Francisco, he'd be happy to meet. And you said, oh, okay, great.

And you just took his number? Yeah. And email and stuff? That's exactly right. And so as soon as I met him, I realized that that was the next level and that if I could do anything we possibly could to get there. It was this...

So you just emailed him and said, can we talk? Well, yeah, I kind of was like, hey, I'm going to be in Silicon Valley, just going to be in the area when I catch up. Did you really have plans at that point, or you just thought, let's do what he says? I was like, if I just say that I'm going to be there and he says that he'll meet up, well, then I'll go. Right. And so could not have been more over the moon that he actually even responded to my message. Sure, I'll sure, come see me.

Yeah. I was just completely dumbfounded. Wow. So you presumably go and book your ticket to San Francisco. Yeah. And how long were you planning on going out, coming out for? I planned on coming out for two weeks. My brother was living here, and I thought I'd come and visit him,

and I'd go and have this meeting that I was absolutely afraid of as an understatement. And so in between the time that he said that he'd meet with me and coming here, I put together my business plan. The Future of Publishing was what I titled it. And it had a picture of us beating Microsoft Office and Adobe and Google Docs and a whole bunch of other companies. So we met on University Ave in Palo Alto. In Palo Alto at a cafe. And he said we'll go for lunch.

So I brought my, I physically printed my pitch deck, which I also didn't realize was so uncool. You're supposed to put on like a computer. computer, right? Like a Mac, like a sleek Mac. I totally didn't know this at the time. You brought a stack of like stapled. I was sitting there like I had my paper pitch deck and he was like, do you have an iPad? I'm like, no.

And then I was like trying to flip the pages in my deck and explain about the future of publishing and how we're going to take on all these big companies and trying to eat my lunch. And he was there wrapped, like engaged? No, he was on his phone the whole time. It was so awkward. I felt like the biggest flop. But very fortunately, when I went home, I had an email from him and he said, if I could find a tech team, he'd be happy to invest. Wow.

Yeah, so he'd actually been messaging a lot of different people and introducing me to them. Wow, during the meeting? So he was actually on the phone messaging other people. Yeah, so the next meeting I had was with Lars Rusmerson, who co-founded Google Maps. And meeting him completely blew my mind because I really didn't know. It sounds so bizarre, but I... They had no idea that people that made big, world-changing companies were just regular and nice, hard-working, normal people.

And meeting Lars completely changed my perception of what was possible. And did he, when he met you, he said, hey, there's something here. Yeah, we ended up having an incredible conversation for hours. We both had a really similar view of what the future of communication and publishing should be like. What was he saying? So there was a few philosophies. One of them was that overtime industries would converge.

So rather than having the print industry being over here, having to use different software to create a website and different software to create a presentation and different software to create marketing materials and some of those things being online and some of them being desktop-based, that all these industries would come together and be in one page and then be accessible to the world. It seemed crazy that you'd have to use so many different tools and go and learn a different thing for everything you wanted to create. So you meet this guy, Lars, and you say to him, hey, Bill says he's going to back me. If I find a tech team, can you help me? Is that what you said to Lars? Yeah, that's exactly right. And Lars said he'd be happy to be an advisor. But what that ended up entailing was him rejecting everyone for a full year.

Why did Lars have to approve of the tech team? Was that Bill's condition? Yeah, that was Bill's condition. He said, oh, I trust Lars. If Lars gives a thumbs up to your tech team, I'll fund you. That's exactly right. So you are in San Francisco for the next three. months until my visa expired.

Okay. To Visa, right, because three-month visa, tourist visa. And where are you, like, working out of? What do you... So I was sleeping on my brothers, so he had a one-bedroom apartment. I was sleeping in his living room floor. And I was working in, at Nordstrom, the shopping center. Yeah, the Westfield Shopping Center, yeah.

It's an amazing co-working space. I don't know why more people don't take this up. It's free? It's free. There's Wi-Fi? That's exactly right. So the Nordstrom's in the Westfield Shopping Center and San Francisco. okay? And so I would go there and I'd work. And between that, I'd be going to every single

conference that I could. Like, anything, any meeting, anyone would take. Just like chatting with people whoever would listen? Like, literally, even on the bus, I'd be pitching people trying to get them to join my tech team. And are you just naturally kind of gregarious and outgoing? Was it easy for you to just show up? Like, you would just go up to people and say, hi, I'm Melanie. Can I tell you about my company? Is that what you would do? So I'm actually naturally really introverted. But when I have a goal, I do everything I can together. And so, yeah, I would be getting up and, like, if people would let me do a one-minute pitch at a conference, I would get off and I'd be doing that one-minute pitch and probably-heart beating and racing? Absolutely. Completely terrified, but I'd just keep on

pushing myself because I wanted this to happen. Your partner and boyfriend Cliff, he was still at work, right? Presumably for those three months, he was working on Fusion, the yearbook company. Yeah. And how was it doing? It was doing well. It was growing. It had, like, he moved out, from my mom's house to enter our first office. Yeah, it was, it was an interesting time because we knew that there was this big, amazing opportunity over here, but it was really hard to make progress with. And then on the other side was fusion, and that was a sure thing growing every month, every year. It felt like I had been over in Silicon Valley achieving nothing while, like, I'd left him with all the hard work, pretty much summed it up.

So three months, you're here for three months. Was it exciting? Were you encouraged? Did Did you feel like this is moving forward? I think every day I felt like I'd make a little progress. But by the end of the three months, I didn't have a tech team, and I left feeling like the biggest failure. Why? Because I had not landed a tech team, which meant that I hadn't landed investors, which meant that all I'd done in my view at that point in time was like nothing. I'd learned a lot that I hadn't actually achieved anything.

And so when I was going back to Perth on the flight, I wrote a list of the things that I'd achieved and one of them was like staying alive, which is a little grim. But it was a thing. It's a thing. But then, yeah, then moved the company from Perth to Sydney and came back for round too. Coming up in just a moment, why Melanie's next step in her search for investors was learning how to kite surf. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to Howell. I Built This from NPR.

Hey, welcome back to how I built this from NPR. So something you should know before we get back into Melanie's story is that Bill Ty, the VC investor Melanie met with at the Palo Alto coffee shop. He's a huge kite surfing fan. And Bill's taken these two things, venture capitalism and kite surfing, and kind of combine them into a conference he puts on called Mai Tai. And back when Bill met with Melanie, basically told her, hey, if you'll Like kite surfing, I can invite you to this event, and you can talk to some other investors there about your idea.

Because I made it seem like I was really interested in kite surfing, and so he said that if I could kite surf, I could go to this conference, and that was where a lot of ECs and investors would be. So I learned to kite surf and felt like I was going to risk my life quite significantly. It's really frightening. And what is this conference likely? What do you do? They have tech talks, like during the morning, and then everyone kite surfs in the after. And how many people are there? 150 or something. Okay, so it's pretty big. Yeah, relatively.

And it's at a hotel in Maui. In Maui, okay. And kite surfing by day and then mingling at night, you went or both you and Cliffland? We both went. And you guys must be thinking, this is a way for us to get in front of potential funders, investors. That's exactly right. So what did you, were you? So we weren't scheduled to talk or anything.

But one in one of the events, we were. he just said, like, can we talk tomorrow? Can we do a pitch? And this was like at 10 o'clock at night. And eventually he said yes. So we ended up like just staying up until 6am, like preparing our pitch for the pitch of our lives. And eventually got up and was so incredibly nervous in front of everyone. But apparently it didn't do so bad because like this XE of Shutterfly came up and said he would be keen to invest. And a number of other people said that either give us intros or it would be. keen to invest as well. What does that mean? Does that mean, like, I'm ready to write you a check

now, or does that mean I'm interested in further talking more about this? Further talking more about this and waiting to see who else is going to invest before we invest is the general feeling. So, you had to get enough people who were interested to invest before anyone would invest. So you did not leave Maui with like a stack of checks? No, not at all. You left Maui with how many checks? Zero checks. So the next, so from Maui, you went back to San Francisco. still on a tourist visa. Exactly. This is round two.

Now it's U.N. Cliff. And what did you do over the next six or eight weeks? Did you start to pitch potential investors? Is that what you were doing? Yeah. Pitching everyone. We're still pitching for other engineers at this stage because we still didn't have an engineer. We're pitching any venture capitalist or angel investor that would take a meeting.

Weren't any of the investors saying, hey, this is a really cool. idea and, you know, Fusion seems cool, but you don't have a tech team. You don't have a chief technology officer. Like, I don't know if I'm going to put my... That's just, yeah. That was literally what everyone was saying. That... Which makes sense, right? Yeah, it makes perfect sense, but how are we going to get this thing rolling? How many people do you think you pitched over that, I guess, two-month period in San Francisco? Um, three months. It was, I don't know, between the first year and that year period, it would over 100 people more.

I didn't count. I was going through my rejections the other day. I was looking at some of the emails, and there was quite a dampie. So what was it that kept you going, like when you were just getting rejection after rejection? I think you just know the game you're playing. And, you know, we wanted to build the future of publishing,

and we knew that this, well, like in my head, this was just absolutely the future. There's no way that things were going to be desktop-based anymore. Everything was very evidently moving online. There's no way that things were going to be fragmented across all these industries. It was going to be easier for people. And so I really wanted to create that. Even though it was frustrating,

it was also I knew it was a pretty important thing to do to get people to see the same future that I did. Yeah. But I think it was really beneficial because we got so many different questions and comments and people not liking what we're doing, at all. It meant that we really had to know what we were doing and really refine our strategy. So every single day we'd go back and revise our pitch deck. Every time we got a really hard

question, that would go right to the front of the pitch deck. So the hardest questions were answered right at the front. So rather than people sitting and going through the entire pitch and then being like, oh, but you're the same as some random company that actually had nothing to do with us, we then put aside in our pitch deck, which showed the gap in the market and all of the other companies and where we believe the huge gap was, a lot of people would say they know nothing design, they don't know anything about our industry. And so that was a reason to not invest. So we made one of the first pages of our pitch deck explaining the industry and where we believe this huge gap was.

This was in 2012, right? Okay. So let's say I'm one of these investors you're meeting with in the Bay Area, I would say. So yeah, this looks cool, but I have a lot of questions for you, Melanie. First of all, tech team. Where's your tech team? You would say what? So we've already built a company with Fusion Books. We've demonstrated that we can make a profitable company that's been able to grow. We've launched internationally, and we're just going to take it onto the bigger stage. I can totally understand why no one wanted to invest in us. And then I would say, and I would say, but, you know, like, look, Microsoft or Google, the minute they see what you guys do, they'll crush you because they'll just put something else out

way bigger. And, I mean, you're just going to get crushed right away. You sound totally like one of those investors. And what would you say? We'd say, there is this huge gap. in the market because to canvallel, to actually create this huge industry, the future of publishing, you would have to completely cannibalize your industry. And if you look at the areas of publishing over the years, we started off with metal plates, and then we moved into the tight setting and paste-up. So this actually became the second slide in our pitch deck. Then we then moved into the desktop era.

And then we're now moving into this new era, which we believe is going to be online. And what you'll see, dear investor, is that no industry player has actually ever been able to go from one industry to the next and actually still maintain being the market leader. And so every single time there was a new era, a new market leader emerged. And so we believe that market leader can be us. And then I would say, okay, but you know, it looks interesting, but you guys are away in Australia. I mean, like, would you guys consider relocating here, making it, moving your team here? So it depends when you ask this question.

So at a certain point in time, we ended up fighting an amazing co-founder, Cameron Adams, who had been at Google. And so he was going to be based in Australia. And we also met another amazing guy from Google, who Lars said was one of the best people we'd ever worked with Dave Herndon. So Lars actually introduced us to both Cam and Dave. Dave had worked in the US, but he was Australian. He was going to be in Australia.

And so it sort of started to swing the pendulum towards Australia. And then the government in Australia had this matching funding thing where they would match every dollar that we got from investors up to $2 million. They wanted to incentivise you. To stay. To stay in Australia. So Dave Harnan, you just mentioned, he ends up becoming your chief technology officer, right? That's correct.

And I'm just curious. He was a really talented engineer working at Google. I'm sure he was very well paid at the time. How did you convince him to join your tiny startup instead? Well, if you search the term on Google, bizarre pitch deck, I can proudly claim the number one spot. Right. So I went on to, so firstly we'd pitched Dave, and Dave was like interested in what we're doing. So he was a little bit concerned about joining.

So what I did was I went to his Facebook page and I took lots of photos from his Facebook page and I put together a pitch deck and said why it would be such an amazing adventure to come and join and recreate the future of publishing and change the face of the internet using a storyline from the photos that I had taken from his Facebook page. convinced him. I think that that definitely moved it in the right direction. I think that he realized that we had a lot of passion and we're going to do whatever it took to make this thing happen. Okay, so now you've convinced a few high-profile people to join you. You're finally putting together this tech team to actually build this thing. But you're still pitching investors and getting rejections, right? When did that change? We had enough people that were somewhat interested

that hadn't rejected us. So they had a bit of a strategy where rather than asking if people wanted to invest, we'd ask people for their advice. And you can go back and you can say, hey, do you want to give me some advice? I'd love to show you my pitch deck. And then they'd give us some advice. And so that means they didn't say no to us at this point in time. They would just give you feedback. Give us feedback. And they're like, okay, that's great feedback. We'll take that on board. And like, hey, do you want to meet up again in another month? And look, we've done the things that we'd said we were going to do. And once you had done that enough times, they realized that you actually do the things that you say you're going to do. Yeah. We kind of had enough

people at that point were they were kind of interested. We'd kind of been demonstrating that we could do what we said we were going to do. And then at the tide turn, because we were all of a sudden oversubscribed. How much did you want to raise in that first seed round? So we wanted to raise 1.5. I think we left San Francisco and we'd raised 750. But then over the coming months, we ended up filling out that round of about 1.6, I think it got to. were totally oversubscribed.

And then the Australian government gave us one point four. A matching amount? Yeah, exactly. So you've got three million bucks. This is what? Early 2013? Yeah, 2012. So it was a full year of development

between landing investment and actually launching the product. And in that time, I invest is like, well, like, what the hell is she done without money? Like, it's a long time. So, like, the lean startup was a big deal back then. and launch and iterate and do something in a weekend and see if people like it. Yeah.

But the whole point was that we took all these really complex things and made it simple and then great forever unacceptable. And so that took a lot more time than a weekend. Yeah. And so you spent that year developing this thing and then spent a lot of time on user testing, making sure that people actually understood it. People were scared of designing

because people are conditioned for their whole lives thinking they're not creative or can't design things. So we ended up with these things called starter challenges where they'd come and they'd change the color of a circle and put a hat on a monkey and all these little silly challenges that built up people's confidence with their design abilities. So that took a while you were sort of building out this technology, presumably you had to hire people too, right? How many people did you have to hire in that first year before you even launched? I think we had about 15 people. So you had a team. We had a team. Yeah, we had a team. It was incredibly exciting.

And it sounds exciting. But let me just the flip side of this, which is all of a sudden you've got $3 million of other people's money. You've convinced these really talented engineers to join you. You've got other people who've like given up their jobs to come and work for you. That's scary. That's a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. Yeah, definitely. Actually, when I met Lars and started to think about this whole world venture capital and taking people's money,

I realized that I had to make a decision at that point in time that if I was going to pursue this path, I would have to be at least partially okay with the idea of it not working out. And why that was something that was important is I'm really not someone that likes to give up ever on anything. But yeah, certainly it was a lot of pressure. But I also felt incredibly happy for it to have gone from something where everything was extremely, So trying to convince people to join my team to something that was internal. Like I could work really hard to make sure that this was an amazing product. And I like that switch.

That's my preferred place. So you guys launch, I guess, in August of 2013 and you're ready with this online graphic design and like publishing tool and you hang the shingle out and the website goes live. And what happens? Like, do people come to it right away? Well, we're fortunate that because we had. some high-profile investors in that first round. When we landed that first round of investment, we announced it. We got some tech crunch coverage, and we were pretty stoked about that. And we ended up with a waiting list of 50,000 people before we launched. Oh, so it was like buy invitation only

initially. And we said we weren't, we were this stealth startup that wasn't saying what we were doing. And then, yeah, we launched in August 2013. We'd spent a lot of time prior to that engineering, it so people would have an amazing experience and to share it with others. And that certainly happened. And so within the first, every month was the biggest and best ever. Wow. And explain what the business model was and is. Like you, it's free to use, right? Like, you can just go and design anything. So a subscription model, how does it work? So one of our philosophies right from the start was that we wanted design to be accessible to everyone. We wanted to be free. And so Canver is completely free to use. And then you can purchase images for a dollar.

And so it would mean that, like, if you're, you know, putting together your school assignment or you're, you know, just a really small business trying to get your social media off the ground, you could afford to create signings that look great. And then we also have a paid offering. So if you're using it for work, if you would like to save your brand colors and fonts and logos, then you can go on our premium offering. And it's like a subscription, like a monthly amount. And so let's say I want to design like a yearbook page, right? and I can go and design it, but if I want to actually download it, I have to pay for that. No, that's free as well. That's free, okay.

Yeah. We wanted to ensure our free product was a complete value loop. Like you could go in, get your thing completely free. It doesn't say Canva, like, printed on it or anything? Do you guys have ads at all? No ads. So how, so you need a pretty significant percentage of your users to buy images because building this technology is expensive.

Yeah, so the concept was that we'd give away the software for free, but then you could purchase images, you could purchase fonts, you could purchase potentially layouts, but we're currently giving them away for free. But the idea is that you would always be able to have that base product for free for everyone, and we're actually profitable. So actually that business model's been working out of right for us. And you can also print your design, so you can click print,

and in 40 countries you can have it delivered to your door. I mean, one of the things that I'm really surprised about, and I'm a little disappointed about, actually, is that it sounds like you just didn't make any mistakes after I launched it. It just sounds like you put this great product out there and there were no bugs and everybody was happy with it. Is that? Is it true? I mean, I'm like waiting for the disaster story where, you know, you launched it and then like it crashed for four days or something. Oh, I'll give you a tidbit. So it's, I certainly hasn't been smooth sailing, but I guess I'm always just focused on the next mountain. mountain to climb. So, for example, when we launched, so we had, I've just told you the entire backstory of all the effort that had gone into getting it to launch. So I was back in San

Francisco, sleeping in my brother's apartment, and he was actually away. So I'm just there by myself before, so I'm about to go to sleep and someone broke the embargo. And break the embargo that you're about to launch? About to launch, yeah. An article came out, and their article said that we had a not very good product and that we had cheesy photography and that it wasn't very easy to use. And I felt at that point in time like the last, I don't know, six years of my life was crushed. Very fortunately, that was a bit of a, fortunately a false start. Everyone else seemed to like it and get what we're doing. So as you scale and grow and hire more people,

you are the CEO, you're the boss of the company, you're self-described introvert, you're sitting here, you seem like just a kind and really delightful person. And sometimes you have to be tough as a CEO. Like you have to make tough decisions. You have to fire people. You have to review people.

You have to have difficult conversations with people. Have you had to learn how to do that or does that come naturally to you, or do you just avoid doing that? I think everything, every single day, right from the start has been a learning curve. You know, there's been people that haven't worked out over the years. We try to just have the nicest conversation, try to actually help them to understand that why it wasn't working out, try to coach them to actually make them better.

I don't know, there's just every single stage there's been things to learn. And I don't think that, you know, some things never get easier. But you just have to figure out, like, what is the best thing that you possibly can do and learn as you go. I think that that's one thing that I'm pretty good at is just in time learning. And over the years, there's certainly been a lot of things to learn. You know, given that you are like one of the first Australian unicorns, right? I don't know, does that increase the pressure on you?

Or does it, are you just super proud of it and, you know, just carry on? I mean, do you feel any of that weight? I think the ironic thing is, like, since I was doing my assignments in year two, I've always put a lot of pressure on myself. And so that same pressure just applies today. Like, of course, it's a different magnitude. But I think I've just always put a lot of pressure on myself. I've always wanted to do the best I possibly can.

And now, yes, I feel a lot of responsibility for the livelihoods of a lot of our team members. But I think that, you know, that same pressure of just, like, trying to do my absolute best every single day. Just that's kind of being continuous. I'm just curious. like at the hundreds of thousands of designs that have been created, you know, up until this point with this tool that you brought into the world, like, do you have any favorites? To me, the stories that really touch me are like, so we've got 20,000 non-profits using Canva and this is everything from people trying to end poverty to cure cancer. Like seeing the stories, they're pretty damn cool. Like we had a lady who found her birth mother, who she created a poster on Canver.

posted on Facebook, founded birth mother, that was pretty cool. We've seen so many people who post the resume that landed them a job. There's just so many stories every single day. I look through Twitter and I see so many touching stories of, you know, that one philosophy of that design should be accessible to everyone is actually being put into practice and having real world implications. How much of all of this, this amazing story do you attribute to your skills, your intelligence, your hard work, and how much to luck?

I think it's a really interesting question because I think that if you zoom out of luck and you say, where were you born, who were your parents, what was the education that you got, you know, having good health. There's so many layers of luck. So if you look at all of those things, I couldn't be luckier.

But then on the other side of it, I feel like we've planted enough seeds that eventually one of those grows. And so that's kind of another version of luck is like we planted maybe a thousand seeds and one of those seeds grew. And so you could kind of attribute that either luck or hard work for planning a thousand seeds. So I'd say a little column A, a little column A, little column A. How old are you now? 31.

So 31. And amazingly, I mean, you're so young, but you're a veteran. I mean, you've been in the startup world since you were 19. Like you started your first real company. So you have a lot of experience. I mean, you've got 12 years of experience. experience doing this, raising money, starting a business, creating a brand, marketing. What do you know now that you wish you knew when you were 23, 24, 25?

I think one of the wonderful things about this whole experience is that I didn't know a lot going into it. And I think that learning every single day as you go has actually been one of the most critical parts because I think if I knew all of the lessons that I've had to learn over the last 12 years, I would have been incredibly intimidated and potentially not even wanted to start. Had I listened to statistics, for example, and thought that that was something that I should be afraid or frightened of, that probably would have dissuaded me. Because every single day you're getting thrown in the deep end. But at the same time, like, I love challenges and taking on what seems to the impossible from the outside. I don't know, when you don't know

what you don't know, then you can't really be afraid of it. That's Melanie Perkins, co-founder of Canva. The company says its publishing tool is now used by 30 million people a month. Oh, and by the way, when it comes to kite surfing, Melanie told me she actually got into it for a while, but she doesn't really do it anymore. I did it for five years, and I can now officially kite surf. Great. But I felt for five years like I was kind of risking my life. I take risks in things that are kind of calculated, and so my risk loss,

Ratio was a little out with that. I felt like I could just die at any moment. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also write to us at hibt and npr.org. And if you want to follow us on Twitter, it's at how I built this or at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, it's at guy.org.com. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramtin Arablui. Thanks also to Liz Metzker, Farah Safari, Dareth Gales, J.C. Howard, Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Janet Ujung Lee. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. This is NPR.