The story of why Canva worked: Zach Kitschke shares his lessons from early hire to current CMO

 All right. Well, Zach, thank you so much for joining us.

So I thought one of the ways that we could kind of, um, divide up the time is, is try to go back in time and kind of go chapter by chapter through the company's life and pick apart some of the different insights and things that you figured out along the way. And, I thought maybe the place to start we could go all the way back to kind of days, zero through 12 or 18 months of the company's life.

And the product was developed for, for quite a period of time. It wasn't something that it was, you know, four weeks and then ship a product, um, kind of startup journey. And so I'm, I'm curious what that early time looked like. And. Maybe when you go back and dissect it, what do you think you got right. That enabled such a special company to be created.

 I first started at Canva. In a contract role, uh, to come in and help with our very first, uh, funding announcement. And so, uh, you know, that was, it goes March of 2013 when I first met Mellon cliff and started contracting at that point.

 And I remember, um, just the, the outsized ambition, uh, you know, from, from Mellon cliff, uh, and, and cam at that point, I think we were planning to launch, uh, the products within, you know, the, the next sort of month or two, um, lo and behold, uh, it ended up being, uh, August of that year. So. You know, months and months later.

And I think the thing that we did really well, uh, then, which has been something that has continued, you know, the whole way along was, uh, that obsession with, uh, uh, making sure that the product was actually perfect. And I think it went against the wisdom of the time. This was when, you know, books like the lean startup, where we're really in Vogue, uh, and you know, Mel in particular really, uh, persevered and didn't want to launch the product until it was, uh, perfect.

And, you know, I remember for the first few. Uh, everyone was so excited about this product that we were building, you know, this idea that we were going to transform design, uh, but it was actually months before I, um, I even saw the very first version of the product itself. the engineering team were working really hard on actually building it.

And from a marketing point of view where we're planning, uh, to, to launch it. And I, I remember. That, uh, the first experience one day, we, um, we all got, uh, access to, you know, the, the alpha version. I was really, really excited and went down. I was actually going to say some friends, uh, in my hometown where I grew up, uh, and, you know, sat down to give them a demo of the product.

And I started designing, I, um, you know, an invitation to a party as, as a bit of an example. And of course the product crashed, um, and it was pretty buggy at that point. Uh, and so, you know, it was this period of really sticking out at, um, making sure that it was, was actually perfect. And we did a lot of early user testing and, and sort of spend a lot of time, um, seeing, uh, people experience the products, uh, and, uh, you know, ultimately didn't launch it until we had something that we really felt comfortable with.

 how did you know that you were, you know, that it was time to ship it or that it was in a state that would resonate with customers?

 we had spent such a long time building this product. And, uh, the core idea for Canva was you take this incredibly complex. Fragmented process of creating a design, which, you know, in the past, you'd have to go and purchase expensive, uh, design software. You'd have to spend months, if not years learning how to use it.

Uh, you actually get into, uh, you know, programs like Photoshop or InDesign. Uh, and then the actual process of designing means you have to go to a stock photography website, stock layout, website, stock, font websites, uh, do all of the design process, uh, to actually kind of collaborate or share it with anyone would involve, you know, emails back and forth and PDF versions that you lose track of.

And so, you know, we launched Canva, um, with this view of bringing that all into one place and making the experience, uh, simple. And so I remember we'd spent all of this time building. The product, uh, and we were really, really excited to actually get it into the hands of some of our, uh, community. we actually set up some design workshops in, uh, in Surry Hills and, uh, you know, where, uh, we're still based, uh, today and, and had some real, uh, people come in and we also used a tool called usertesting.com, which, um, which really helped us out along the way.

And, uh, you know, we were also excited to see what people thought of the product. And, uh, the first response was really, uh, disappointing and underwhelming, you know, for this product that we'd all spent months and months. Um, you know, in the case of, uh, of melancholy include for years working on and people got into the product and they just could not understand how to use it.

 Of course that showed us that we weren't ready to launch. And so we then went into this process, uh, of iterating and iterating and iterating, basically running different, uh, tests of our onboarding experience. And, you know, the insights that we gained from that actually helped, uh, perfect the UI, uh, to make sure that people intuitively understood.

 Uh, How to use the product. And it was simple things like we, um, we built out a set of, um, we call them the five Stata challenges, uh, and it guides you step by step through creating a design. So, you know, on the first page it would say change the color of the circle to the color red. And, uh, we'd sort of test that out.

And so people couldn't figure out our color picker. And so, you know, small things in the UI, like changing the color picker to a circle that was the blue, the same color as the circle on the page. And so people then figured out that they needed to click that, to change the color to red.

I would find things like explaining how to, uh, to search within Canva. So we had a photo of a monkey on the page and said, search for a hat to put on the monkey. Um, and people would do that. And so, you know, through iteration, after iteration, uh, we were able to get to the point where, uh, everyone that we tested on really deeply understood the product and had a real, a lot of fun using it.

 How did you think about your ideal customer in the early days? And one of the reasons I'm so curious about that is that I would assume that figuring out who this new design tool is for was really important in the sense that if you went out of the gate and you targeted, you know, high-end photographers that were doing photo retouching in New York, on multimillion dollar shoots, and they picked up this tool, they wouldn't be satisfied with it relative to what they were doing in photos.

Um, and so my guess is that you picked a specific type of customer and then over a very long period of time, kind of expanded that aperture as a functionality and feature set grew. And so I'm interested. What did those early customers look like? Or how did you figure out who it was right for today versus tomorrow versus the next.

 that's exactly right. Uh, and in those early days, we didn't spend a lot of time with. Uh, folks getting them into the product and, you know, talking to a lot of people. Uh, I mentioned that we, uh, started to run design workshops and we'd invite different groups of people that we could kind of rustle together, uh, into our office in Surry Hills.

We'd actually get down to the local library and then sort of advertise these design workshops and would get a mix of people in, uh, and would teach them, you know, some fundamentals of design. But at the same time, it was literally the best possible way to understand, uh, you know, the, the experience that they would have with the platform.

And in those early days, we really, uh, I started to identify this group of people that had a really frequent use case for visual. And, uh, that was social media, marketers and content creators. And so, uh, we really started to zero in, on that community, uh, in those early days. we really made sure that, uh, it was a great experience to actually create social media posts, uh, in, in the product things like, um, uh, you know, graphics for Twitter, Pinterest Facebook, um, at that point in time, uh, created a whole lot of templates that were perfect there. started blogging, um, writing about social media topics and trends, uh, you know, going to conferences and events in that space. Um, and we really had this groundswell there 

 what area I'd love to spend a little bit more time. And you touched on this as you know, obviously you've had a whole variety of roles Over the course of the incredible growth of the company. Um, but most of it has touched kind of different parts of distribution, PR comms, marketing, et cetera.

And he talked a little bit about this when you were talking about workshops, but I'm, I'm really interested in what are the things you did to go from one user to 10, 10 to a hundred, a hundred to a thousand, a thousand to maybe 10,000 kind of the little tactics or things that you did in the early days that that really drove that early growth.

 I'll talk about, uh, payoff, firstly, uh, you know, that was ultimately what I, I was hired firstly, to do. Uh, I, I guess, you know, prior to joining Canberra, I was riding for a, uh, a small publication covering startups in Sydney and around Australia. And, uh, you know, that was actually sort of, uh, funded by one of the local incubators here.

And so that would have become a really fantastic way for me to meet a whole lot of, you know, founders and local investors and, and folks like that. Um, you know, like a lot of startups, uh, that, uh, I ended up filing, I'm sorry. I was out of a role, uh, I'm looking for, for work. And so, uh, you know, reached out to a few people and fortunately, um, Nikki shuck, one of the, uh, the investors from Blackbird, a local fund here, uh, introduced me to Mellon cliff and sort of said, you know, we've just invested.

Uh, and I think they're looking for anyone right now, but you should, uh, you should connect, um, and have a chat. And so I met up with Mellon cliff and, uh, it sounded really exciting what they were, uh, they were building. I was really, really keen to, to get involved, but I, uh, I could tell after that first, uh, you know, coffee at the cafe around from, uh, the, the small, uh, early office, uh, Uh, I hadn't done a very good job, of selling myself.

So I went home that night and, uh, put together a big, long list of ideas that I thought I could come in and help them out with, um, one of those being, helping with, uh, their first funding announcement and ultimately the launch. And so, uh, you know, PR in the early days became a really great way for us to get the word out, particularly out here in Australia.

Um, as well as in the U S as well. Um, we had a really interesting story at that point in time, uh, for a few reasons. Uh, the first reason being. Yeah, we had just closed a $3 million seed round, which was the largest seed round ever raised by an Australian company at that point in time. 

 Um, and, uh, you know, there were some other interesting parts of this story too.

Melon cliff, uh, had spent, uh, months and months and months back and forth, uh, between Sydney and San Francisco. You know, Mel had slept on, uh, her brother's floor for months pitched hundreds of investors. Uh, but ultimately that first round came together, uh, from a whole bunch of folk associated with the, my Tai, um, network, which is, you know, basically this, this kite surfing kind of un-conference.

And so, you know, there was a few really interesting elements, uh, of the story that, that just made it, uh, You know, it's sort of intriguing a startup at that point in time. And so the way that we ended up approaching it was we knew there was going to be a little bit of time between, you know, the funding and actually launching, and so decided to take a bit of a stealth approach.

And so we announced the funding ground. Uh, we talked about the fact that we have this vision to change the world of design, uh, and you know, we're able to talk about the interesting community of investors that had come together to invest in this, you know, startup from the other side of the world. And so, uh, was able to drum up some early coverage of our funding round, uh, and something else that we did, uh, really well at that point, I think in hindsight, was, uh, we use that as an opportunity to drive people to a waiting list that we created.

And so, by the time we actually launched, we've gathered, uh, 50,000 people's emails that we're excited to get on Canva and between the funding, uh, and actually rolling out the products. You know, we did a second announcement, which, um, we actually, uh, unveiled what the product was and what it would do.

And so, uh, you know, did a whole range of interviews and provided, uh, you know, uh, UI of the platform and demoed it to journalists at that point. Um, and so by the time we launched, we actually had, uh, you know, this, this sort of hype and excitement from a community of people that were ready to get in involved.

And, um, we're really excited to get on the. 

 What type of publications did you pitch back then?

 Uh, literally, uh, everyone, I, I, uh, tried pitching, uh, every single report that I could find at that point. Uh, you know, I had some, uh, connections here in Australia, uh, you know, folks that are. You know, I, I sort of worked with, or come into contact with, and so pitch them, you know, in the Australian press, uh, tech crunch, Panda daily at the time, um, did some really great coverage of the funding round story.

 and, uh, you know, there was a lot more reporters that didn't respond to me. Um, but, uh, ultimately there were some that, that did 

 do you think that strategies still can work today? I just feel like it's so much harder to get anyone to write about in early stage technology companies.

 I think at that point in time, that was also the feeling as well. Uh, and I think that ultimately. Yeah, payoff comes down to the story that you're able to tell. Uh, and I think it's uncovering, you know, what is interesting or unique about what you're doing that, uh, sets you apart? maybe you can talk about what is the story that you crafted that you think captured some of the interest or attention of reporters in those early days?

 sure. a good story. Is something different or unexpected or unique. And so for us, that was identifying the elements of the canvas story that, uh, set us apart, I guess, from, you know, other companies maybe in Silicon valley or, um, you know, even in Australia and the prevailing wisdom at that point in time was that you had to be in Silicon valley, you had to be in San Francisco.

And that was something that Mel and cliff had heard time after time from various investors, the other, I think was the really interesting, uh, story of how 

Male had pitched hundreds of investors in order to pull the round together. You know, this story of determination and persistence, uh, uh, you know, battling through, uh, everything that went with actually getting the round, um, together, uh, there as well. And I guess the other element was just how long have the idea for Canva had been brewing Mel and cliff started their first company fusion books back in I think it was 2007. 

And so actually built this really successful school yearbook business, uh, which, you know, became this the largest, uh, school yearbook platform in Australia, uh, France and New Zealand. Uh, they demonstrated that I could build a business that bootstrapped that the whole way along. So, you know, ultimately there was these four really interesting, um, elements of the story, which set them apart, uh, and, and made it an interesting story to, to unpack for, for journalists at that time.

 how did you then approach the evolution of that story kind of between years one and two and three, because I assume what happened is you kind of found. These unique angles to kind of repackage the narrative of the company. And then you kind of tell that story and then you have to go find another story to get people interested again, as the company evolves.

 It felt like? we told the same story, uh, over and over and over again. Uh, and people were really interested in the journey. Uh, however, I think what we did to try and evolve the narrative over time was, uh, looking for milestones of growth, uh, along the way, um, that gave us a reason to reach back out to reporters.

And so, you know, following the launch, uh, there was, you know, the, the next sort of big announcement I can remember was when we, uh, You know, I brought guy Kawasaki on as our chief evangelist. we had, I think it was yeah, a couple hundred thousand users at that point.

Um, you know, it was a very, very small, uh, company compared to what we are today. And so, you know, people were asking like, why has guy joined this company from, from Australia? and then of course, uh, there was you know, at the next funding round, um, and something that I think we did really well, uh, at that point was, uh, We started to learn that reporters don't cover product and less your, Hey, a major tech company.

Uh, and so the thing that, uh, at that point, you know, everyone was interested in was funding rounds. And so whenever we announced a funding round, we would actually tie it or hold it off, uh, until we had a product, uh, announcement to go out as well. And so when we launched our. Uh, what's now Canva pro at the time it was canvas for work, our premium, uh, pro subscription.

We actually announced that we, the funding round at that point in time. Uh, and so reporters wanted to cover the funding. But when we were asked, you know, why have you raised this round? We were able to talk about the product and what we were setting out to do with Canva for work at that point in time.

 what was the story behind guy Kawasaki becoming the chief evangelist, where did sort of that idea come from and. What was that role in the early days? I don't think it's something that a lot of startups think about these days.

 It was really, uh, opportunistic. I think we, you know, we're in now our first, uh, office space, uh, you know, sitting, sitting there, building the product and, and trying to figure out how to spread the word and, and just, um, you know, one afternoon I remember, uh, someone else on the table. I said, I think guy Kawasaki has been using us for his graphics and we actually jumped on and there was this post, uh, which was a graphic that, that he posted and someone had replied to him and said, are you using Canva?

I love it. Uh, and so we were like, oh my gosh, we need to chat to chat to human. So cliff actually reached out, uh, we ended up jumping on a call with guy and found out that it was actually pig he's social media manager. Who'd been a huge fan of kava and had been using it for a lot of his graphics. And so, I mean, a couple of weeks later, um, sort of coincidentally, we were going to be in the U S and so actually went up and met with guy and, uh, you know, talk through the vision, uh, for kava and, and the product.

 he loved, uh, And totally saw, you know, where, where we were going. and I guess, um, you know, we were keen to bring him on. He obviously had this large community that followed him online, uh, had done a lot of, uh, speaking, uh, you know, prolific in the social media space.

 And so there was a lot of, uh, great alignment there. Um, we talked about it and he ultimately decided to come on board and, you know, we were thinking about, um, the story and, and also, um, you know, how do we, how do we frame that up? And, uh, he had been chief evangelist at apple, which he was, you know, really uh well-known uh, for, and so, uh, you know, he ultimately agreed to become chief evangelist for, for kava, which is, you know, only the second time that he'd had that title. and so, um, you know, we were able to, uh, generate, uh, some awareness of that and, uh, people were really interested to find out why he uh, he joined.

 and he originally came on in a full-time role.

 Uh, it wasn't full time. At that point guy was traveling the world, doing, you know, talks, uh, keynotes almost every week and, uh, doing a lot of content online. but it was actually because he was doing, you know, those things, uh, that, uh, he was able to help spread the word about kava. You know, he'd, he'd sort of drop us into every presentation that he was doing, or if he was running a workshop or, you know, opportunities, um, to, to share the word he would, um, he would be doing that. 

 that's so clever. So we talked about kind of leveraging guys and evangelism. We talked about some of the, the early press strategies and just kind of basically pitching and we're begging any reporter anywhere to write a story. Um, and I actually think probably the long tail of that as a little bit under appreciated, um, in that I think everybody's like, oh, I want a story in New York times or whatever, but the compounding benefit of having lots and lots of long tail publishers linking back to your product, writing about your product can be super powerful.

Um, but I'm curious, what are the other things that you did in those early days to go from like a hundred to a thousand, a thousand to 10,000, 10,000 to a hundred thousand?

 I tell you the focus for us. Always started with the product. And I think that's been ultimately the key to our success. I think that obsessiveness with the early experience, seeing people, you know, in user testing or in workshops, uh, and not being satisfied until they had a seamless experience and the product lived up to our hope for them, um, we've always invested in a real.

Incredibly generous free product. And so, you know, these days we have more than 70 million people using kava, literally every country around the world in a hundred different languages to create content every month. And, you know, the vast majority of those people, um, still use Canva for free. And that's intentional.

We want to make sure that no matter who you are, wherever you are in the world, your, um, financial position where you live, um, you know, shouldn't, uh, prevent you from accessing a tool like Canva. the secondary benefit to that has been that, you know, all of these people that, that use and love.

Uh, ultimately are advocates for the products, uh, as well. And we'll tell, um, tell other people about their experience. And so, you know, to these dials word of mouth, um, continues to be one of our largest drivers of growth. 

 how did the freemium model fit into the early growth strategy and how did you kind of figure out what to charge for, or to, how to charge for it, and maybe how that might've changed over time?

 sure. Uh, we. I have been, uh, out there as a product from, you know, the tail end of 2013, uh, and had really focused on that core experience, you know, for that, that first period of time?

uh, we set out to build out. Uh, paid offering and you know, we're looking at at different features And functionality that we could offer.

The idea was always that we would offer, you know, things that, uh, real power users would need or would, would be additive I've run above, uh, you know, the, the free experience there. Uh, it was actually really interesting, I think how, uh, we partnered with our community to help, uh, build that product in the same way that we invited people in early on for those design workshops.

Uh, we actually worked with, uh, a number of larger organizations as we were building the product for work. I remember, you know, I was still, um, uh, running our customer support at that point in time.

And we had an email come through from a graphic designer at Huffington post and they said, you know, can we chat to someone were big fans of Canva, but we've got some real challenges. Uh, in the newsroom that we'd love to see if we could help solve. And so ended up connecting and, uh, you know, actually got over to New York and spent some time within the newsroom ad there.

And what became really, really clear was that had. This problem, you know, they had hundreds of, uh, journalists creating content, you know, social media editors, et cetera, uh, creating content to, to get, uh, their articles and work out there. Uh, and you know, the, the pace meant that people were creating, you know, a huge number of graphics every day.

Uh, but that were finding that people were posting stuff on their, their social profiles that had the wrong colors or outdated font. So you we're totally off brand. And so we spent some time with them understanding that problem. Uh, and at that point we had, you know, templates in, in Canada. That we created that anyone could use.

Uh, and it was really, really clear what they needed was actually branded templates for Huffington post. And so I sat down and in the space of, you know, probably a dial to, we actually, uh, figured out how to hack something together for them. And so what we did was we created some designs, you know, based on what they want for their social posts, uh, and turn them into, uh, uh, you know, uh, templates.

And we actually put, uh, those graphics with the links into Canva on a very hacky WordPress page at that point. And they ended up sharing that within the end user room. And so that, uh, that hacky WordPress page ended up becoming effectively the part I taught for our team templates in Canva. Um, so that, and, uh, you know, it's, uh, it was amazing having Huffington post, uh, able to kind of respond and give us real feedback.

I mean, those early days, and I'm very proud to say they're still, uh, still using canvas today.

 And is that how you approached sort of the early days of product building, you would kind of go deep with a specific type of customer, maybe figure out what they needed or, or maybe most importantly, what they would pay for prototype and then scale

 Yeah, it was definitely a matter of understanding. people really struggled with, or, or what would help them be more effective or efficient. Uh, and now the fate of that, uh, we came up with, uh, as part of that early Canva for work product was a cold magic resize. And, you know, similarly we saw this challenge.

Uh, anyone that's creating content is generally not just creating, you know, a post for social media, but they're also creating a blog graphic and an email head-on, you know, there's, there's a variety of formats for every social platform. And so one of the really time-consuming processes for folks at that point was to actually manually re create, you know, every, uh, graphic that they needed in all the different dimensions with different layouts.

And so, uh, that became the seed of an idea. Um, we thought, wouldn't it be cool if. size, you design to all of the formats that you need with one button. And that was how magic resize was born. 

 That's so cool. So I want to talk a little bit about going from a super small team, your first few hundred users scaling into your first few thousand and, um, what the organization looked like at the time, and maybe some of the ideas that you all implemented as you started to grow, whether it be how you approached hiring your first handful of folks, how you approached organizing the team or things that, that really enabled you to continue to grow the business.

 At every stage, along the way, uh, you're constantly needing to rethink and evaluate the best way to operate as a team to get things done. Uh, and there was some really pivotal shifts that we saw, you know, over time that come with a team that's growing in the early days. Uh, we literally, you know, would all fit around, uh, one, uh, desk in the first office.

 And I remember getting to the. You know, everywhere, uh, we no longer fit and we, we had to split into two tables and, um, there was debates over which table should be code table number one, and which type, which should be called table number two. Um, and so we ended up with table one and table, I, um, to, to keep everyone happy.

Uh, but there was some other shifts that we saw, And so we ended up going through a few phases. We ended up, uh, having, it was only a few of us that were in engineering.

So, you know, we had engineering and we divided engineering into front end and backend. Uh, and we soon learned that that wasn't great cause you need frontend and backend collaborating around problems. And so. Then we formed into, uh, small teams, uh, and we organize teams around, you know, very clear goal or mission, uh, and, uh, you know, we ended up growing with that approach and that became a really effective way to manage, uh, for the startup as it was, as it was scaling.

Then at some point we ended up with, you know, a hundred different teams and, and of course that became unwieldy and impossible to, to sort of manage. And so, um, we started to form into groups, uh, and so, you know, the, the groups have really been the sort of basis for which we've continued to scale, 

 So I remember when we first formed the groups, at that point in time, some of the groups?

that we, uh, we brought together with things like our app store, uh, and now have still a group is responsible for all of the different integrations.

You know, we've got apps that plug into Canva, you know, to bring your content in from different places or allow you to publish to, you know, platforms like Dropbox or, uh, you know, uh, uh, Facebook or others. And so we kicked off the app store, um, group. We had a group dedicated to our, um, iPhone and Android, uh, app experience.

digging in a little bit to some of these ideas around scaling and people. I thought would be fun to explore is, is, um, some of the stuff you've done around learning and development and coaching, and you have this idea of, of Canva university. And maybe we could talk a little bit about that.

 sure. following my involvement with the product space. Uh, the next sort of chapter for me was, uh, stepping in to build our people group. And so at that point in time, um, you know, we had a recruitment team and we had, uh, you know, one or two people in HR, but there was no formal, uh, people group.

And so, uh, you know, Mel melon cliff asked me to take that on and to start thinking about building out our people group. And so I spent a lot of time, I guess we, uh, you know, a couple of us went over to Dreamforce and. Arranging a bunch of different meetings with different companies and companies that.

we thought did people in culture really well and, you know, learned a lot, read a lot, listen to a lot of podcasts.

And so then started to build out the team. Uh, and one of the first things that we did was to launch, uh, Canada university. And I guess the idea for that really came about for a few reasons, the first being that, uh, you know, as a company that that's. Uh, you know, doubling year on year, the thing that just stood out to me was that, uh, that first period of someone coming into the company is actually pivotal to them getting up to speed, feeling confident, getting a context that they need, um, to, to Do their job well, and also to manage, you know, pre load, some of the challenges that come with scale.

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Zach Kitschke was an early Canva hire, and since 2013 he’s done everything from comms, support tickets and cooking team lunch, to starting the people function. Now as CMO, he shares his own career lessons and digs into why the company worked.

Zach Kitschke on why Canva worked and his journey from early hire to CMO

Zach Kitschke has tackled everything from comms and support tickets, to starting the people function. Now as CMO, he shares lessons on why Canva worked.