How Canva leveraged unconventional growth levers to grow to $42B | Cameron Adams (Co-founder & CPO)

Cameron:

This investor came back to us and said, you know what? We think we overvalued you. How about we put in the same amount of money for half the value? They've realized that it was a mistake and certainly a costly one for them.

Brett:

For today's episode, I'm thrilled to be joined by Cameron Adams, the co-founder of Canva. Before Canva, Cameron had started his own design agency, joined Google, and then founded an email startup with a few other Google alums.

Cameron:

There's this whole chain of events that led to Canva actually becoming Canva. But I also think that you put yourself in a position of luck. If you just sit in your room at home and never talk to anyone, nothing is gonna happen.

Brett:

As the last startup was floundering, a chance meeting with Canva founder, Mel Perkins, would set a whole new trajectory in motion. Cameron would end up spending remarkably little time with Mel and Cliff before deciding to join them in building Canva.

Cameron:

Two hours in person, two separate Skype chats, and that was it.

Brett:

But he had a gut feeling that would prove to be quite spot on.

Cameron:

We had like 30% month on month growth on revenue. But we also started to notice there were a particular cohort of Canva users that wanted a bit more out of the product.

Brett: Let's dive in. Thank you so much for joining.

Cameron: It is an absolute pleasure, Brett. Great to be here.

Brett: What were you up to a year before you got involved with Canva?

Cameron: Well, a year before Canva was founded, I had just left Google. We had just had a baby. My wife had also started her own business. So there was a lot going on. I started a startup called Fluent, which was focused on email, with a couple of my ex-Google colleagues. So we were just starting out building that and creating the product. We went through this whole journey of building the product, it being in stealth, it got leaked, it got a lot of press. We were originally going to bootstrap, but we thought since people were knocking down our door to give us cash that we might go talk to them. So we decided to go to Silicon Valley from Sydney, Australia. Thought we would quickly come back with a novelty-sized check of $2 million to help us run the rest of the startup. Didn't pan out that way. We spent about two months traipsing up and down Sand Hill Road and all over the Bay Area. Didn't manage to land funding, but got a lot of acqui-hire offers through that process. And came back to Australia and started thinking, well, what do we want to do now? And that's when I got an introduction to my Canva co-founders, Mel and Cliff, and it was actually through my old boss at Google called Lars Rasmussen. He had bumped into Melanie at a startup event over in Perth in Australia. And they'd gotten talking, he was really impressed with her, and they were looking for someone to help them actually build out the vision and get the product going. So through an early introduction, it was a bit of a delicate dance because I was still in startup mode, trying to get Fluent going, but the vision for Canva was just too compelling and it kept coming back into my mind, and I eventually reached back out to Mel and Cliff and said, "What are you up to?" And we decided to partner together.

Brett: And what was the original thing that they explained that they were up to?

Cameron: They had been working on a school yearbook business. They'd been running that for about three or four years. It was built in Adobe Flash, if anyone remembers what that was. And they had built out a decent business. I think it did 2 or $3 million in revenue. They'd really started to corner the yearbook business in Australia. But they had this bigger vision. It wasn't just yearbooks. They wanted to bring design to everyone. And it really fascinated me because I'm a graphic designer by background. I also have a computer science degree. That's how I ended up building digital products. And I'd always been really interested in creative tools, helping people unlock their innate creativity, which a lot of us don't realize we have. And I'd built a lot of tools over the previous 15 years that did that. Canva was a really pointed expression of that. Being able to bring visual design to people who had never even thought about tackling it before was really compelling, and that's what Mel wanted to do. So we started exploring what that meant and burrowing into some of the vision decks she'd put together, thinking about what product we wanted to create. And that's really where Canva started to flourish.

Brett: What did you see in the two of them that made you want to start a company together?

Cameron: To be honest, we didn't have a huge number of meetings before we decided to go all in together. But when I first met them, we just really clicked. And I think I was at this moment where I'd been at Google for four years. Prior to that, I ran my own design agency. After I left Google, I started Fluent and worked together with a couple of engineers. And then throughout my career, I'd always had side hustles and startups that I'd wanted to get off the ground. And through that, I really learned a lot about myself, what skills I had, what skills I didn't have, what I liked doing, what I didn't like doing, and what a great team looked like that I could fit into, what my teammates needed to have, what skills they needed to have, what passions they needed to have. And when I first met Mel and Cliff, it just felt like a glove. We just fit together really well. Our skills were complementary but also separate, which meant we could focus on specific areas but also come together really well to collaborate. One of the key things that I'd identified through Fluent was that I had no business skills whatsoever. Hopefully I've developed more of those in the last 15 years. But through Fluent, people constantly asked us about business models, creating the company, stuff outside the product, and we were very product-focused thinkers. So when I met Mel and Cliff and saw that they had built this amazing yearbook business. Cliff was an amazing operator. He thought about hiring and revenue models and margins. Mel was thinking about huge vision and how to bring teams together and rally the world behind this idea. We just fit together so well. And I think all of us felt it and we quickly wanted to get into building Canva together, both the product, the company, the team, the community, everything. And I think it's been fortunate that over the last 13 years, that has played out really well and we're still a really great triad together.

Brett: How much time did you spend together before you committed to starting the company?

Cameron: I think we officially spent two hours in person, two separate Skype chats, and that was it. A few emails. We didn't have any working sessions. We had lots of discussions about philosophy of the product that we wanted to build. Mel did a deep dive into the product that I was building, the email product, and really loved it. So she reassured herself that I could make great products through that. But as I said, it was a very rapid courting session, and I think it was that instinct and that gut that we felt, that resonance when we first met, that we really leaned into. Plus we also had great advisors. So Lars introduced me to them. I think that played a role in reassuring them that they knew Lars and through that chain they could respect his opinion on me being a great partner.

Brett: Do you think you all just got lucky or do you think there's something else to be learned from it? And the reason I'm curious about it is I think so much of the conventional wisdom is don't rush into starting a company with someone. Ideally, you start it with somebody that you went to college with that you've known for eight years or a colleague that you've worked together for six years. And what you did is in many ways the opposite of that, in terms of at least the amount of time that you spent.

Cameron: I mean, I don't have all the data on what makes a successful company. I just have what I've experienced and perceived. And as you said, it's kind of worked out for us. I do think that luck is a huge element of it. Like had Mel and Cliff and I ever met, had Lars... Had I applied for Google... Well, actually I didn't apply for Google. Had someone recommended me to Google and I'd gone into the office, had Lars not liked me. There's this whole chain of events that led to Canva actually becoming Canva. And when you think about all those moments of chance, the sliding doors in there, it's immense. It's a huge chain of probability and luck. But I also think that you put yourself in a position of luck. So many of those moments were me reaching out to someone, me doing a piece of work, working late nights on an idea and pushing it out there so that other people could see it and respond to it. So you do make your own luck in that you need to present yourself with the most number of opportunities. If you just sit in your room at home and never talk to anyone and never push anything out, nothing is going to happen. So my philosophy is that the more you push out there in terms of what you are creating and who you are connecting with, the more chances you have to strike that bit of luck, to find the right people, to find the right idea, to connect with the world in the right way. So I think in that respect, you do make your own luck, but it is also a large part of the world bringing something good to you.

Brett: When you all committed to building this company, did you think there was a real chance of building one of the most valuable software businesses of the last 20 years? Or was it more like you think there's an opportunity for this, there's nobody that's built this, we're going to go build it and sort of see what happens?

Cameron: You might get a different answer between me and Mel and Cliff on that. I'm sure Mel will say that she wholeheartedly believed that this is one of the biggest opportunities in the world. And I honestly believed that as well. But I also had a risk factor baked in. It's like it's a great bet to take to put this product out into the world, but I don't know how people are going to receive it. So I definitely put it out into the world with huge hope and promise, and it's been amazing to see the world respond to that and really gravitate towards what we enable for them through the product, and has enabled Canva to grow incredibly over the last 13 years, 12 since we launched, going from zero to 230 million people that now use Canva every single month. It's a bit of a crazy, wild ride. One that I don't think I signed up for in the first days. It was just like, "Create something great and cross your fingers." But the growth that we've experienced since then I think is a testament to our belief in the vision. So putting something great out there, we knew that it had promise and that it had the potential for pretty much everyone in the world to use, but you can't know it's going to succeed from day one. So putting it out there and responding to people's enthusiasm for it and growing the product, increasing the features and expanding the surface area that Canva covers has really been our journey for the past decade.

Brett: Once you committed to working together on it, where did you start? What was the early version of the product? How did you think about breaking the long-term product vision into where you would start, what you would build first?

Cameron: We started pretty wide. Thinking back on it, it was kind of like a Double Diamond process where you go wide, you come back in, and you go out wide again as you get user response, and then zero in on your final product. In the very early days, it was me and Mel sitting in this big cavernous, empty office that we'd hired together and jamming on ideas, sketching both physically and on the screen, and then quickly getting those ideas into code, into prototypes that we could actually interact with. And it was really important for us to feel the product and for us to know that it was the right product. So being able to... I've got a skill in design, I've got a skill in coding, and when you merge those together, it creates a really rapid iteration loop. So we could turn a sketch into something that we could actually use on our computer within a few hours. And that loop really helped us iterate the product and figure out the kind of paradigms that we wanted to use to bring design to the masses. We tried out a whole bunch of different things, including an entirely search-driven interface that filled your screen with all these design elements and you picked them, different layouts, different ways of manipulating text and images. We were also experimenting with the technology as well and pushing the capabilities of what possible inside a browser. That was one of the interesting pieces to me because I'd been working in deep browser tech for like a decade, helping to shape what JavaScript was and HTML and CSS. And pushing the boundaries of that with a super visual product that had a heap of interaction patterns in it and really asked a lot of what was possible in a browser at the time was also one of the interesting aspects of the project. So we were testing that as well, making sure that we could have hundreds of images on screen, that you could drag them around, that you could change all the fonts and resize everything, and that you could possibly make it collaborative over the internet. Testing those technological boundaries was also part of prototyping and making sure that we ended up with the right experience. So we spent probably about three months doing that and just really nailing the experience of what we wanted to deliver before we started to bring in a full engineering team behind it and properly start building out the product with an aim to shipping it.

Brett: Were you thinking about a very specific end user or an end user trying to create a specific thing, or it was built in a more vague, "I want anyone to be able to design something good," sort of much more of an abstract concept of the end user?

Cameron: I would say we leant more into the abstract concept of a user. You tend to gravitate mentally towards a particular person using it, but we really wanted to bring design literally to the entire world. And when you're trying to do that, you can't pigeonhole yourself. So we wanted to create a design platform that enabled you to create so many different things, and we worked on the experience for that from day one. It wasn't really until we started getting to the pointy end of launching that we actually started applying more of a persona lens to what we were creating, and that was basically to get traction. If you push out a product and say, "This is for everyone," it's really hard to message about that product and to get people interested in it. So we actually started gravitating towards a particular user set about two or three months before we started launching.

Brett: In the three months before you really started to build the product, is there anything else you can share about how you were prototyping or what it looked like day to day?

Cameron: We had a team of two engineers plus me and Mel for about six months. So we had a front-end engineer and a back-end engineer. Mel and I spent that three months prototyping the product and figuring out the experience. We then brought on the engineering team. They started laying down the architecture for it, thinking about the data we'd need to store, how we'd store heaps of images on the front end, how we'd do all the manipulation and keep it stable, and it took us another six months to get to the launch. So it was about a year all up from when we started thinking about concepts for Canva through to actually pushing it out the door. For the first six months, we mostly just used ourselves as the barometer for what the product should be and how it feels and what the quality was. From six months on, we started doing a few... I'd call them focus groups. So we started by getting a group of people into our boardroom, which is two-by-one table with a couple of chairs around it, and putting them in front of the product and just observing them. Telling them a little bit about it, then seeing how they interacted with it, what they wanted to do, whether they got stuck on certain points. And that's when we entered real user testing mode. We happened to stumble across a service at the time, which still exists, called UserTesting.com, and it was a bit of a revelation because previously you would have to physically go out, find someone, either go to their house or bring them into your office, and get them to use the product. With UserTesting.com, you could reach anyone at any time, anywhere in the world, and quickly get feedback on the product. So it was an amazingly fast iteration cycle. And we started doing fairly regular user testing sessions. So probably once every three or four days we would push out a version of it. We'd get about 10, 20 responses from people. We'd watch the videos, see what they were doing, what barriers they came up to, any bugs they hit. And then we'd roll that back into what we needed to work on for the product. One of the key things we really identified through those sessions was that people were a bit afraid to start designing. They approached this tool, they landed in a design tool, and they just didn't identify with it. They were like, "I'm not a designer. I'm really scared of screwing everything up." So getting them across that barrier of just putting something on the page, was really important for landing our first users in the product. So we started really iterating on that onboarding process. We knew that we had the features and the experience. Once you'd started creating a design, you could drag stuff on the page, you can manipulate the text, you could do whatever you want with the images, but just getting them to put that first thing on the page was really important. So we did quite a few reversions of the onboarding experience, and we landed on this model where we very quickly set people's expectations. So I think you need to give them an idea of what the product is and give them a reference point. So we actually created a 23-second whole product video where they were in the Canva editor and it was moving stuff around for them and quickly showing them what they could actually create, and then right after that video, after we'd kind of primed them for how they were meant to interact in Canva, we actually got them to put something on the page themselves, which was really critical. I think at the time, and still, you get a lot of onboarding that is coach marks. It points over here and says, "Hey, you might want to do this thing." And you click through the steps. At the end of it, you've totally forgotten every single step and you're just left with a blank page again. So we created this onboarding that literally got them to drag out a monkey and put a hat on the monkey and then change the color of the hat and perform a search for a slice of pizza. So they were directly using the product and overcoming that barrier of putting something on the page. And it had an amazing response. We immediately started getting people getting really excited about the fact that they could be a designer, that they could create something amazingly visual, and then quickly riffing on how they would apply that to their job or their industry. So it was exciting to see that change as we iterated on the onboarding and it was one of the critical pieces of the product success when we launched.

Brett: Were there other things like that that you figured out in watching and talking to those early customers that were trying out the product that were a big part of the early success?

Cameron: Definitely. We started seeing who really got into the products. I mean, we couldn't launch the all-singing, all-dancing version of Canva on day one. You need to pace yourself. You've got limited resources, you've got limited time, so you need to put out a product that's polished enough that people feel like they can use it and trust it. You also need to get it out quick enough so that you're getting feedback and responding to it and helping you find your direction. Through some of those early user testing sessions, both the in-person ones and then the ones that we did online, we started to see that there was this rich vein of social media marketers who just got really excited about Canva. So this was 2013. Pinterest had come out like a year or two earlier. Instagram was just becoming popular. Twitter was a thing, but it wasn't particularly visual. More and more people were now adding images into their Twitter posts. And it was just the right moment where people were starting to having to scale their visual content needs. And there was this type of user who was helping people with their social media, helping businesses figure out their strategy, produce content that engaged people. So these social media managers needed to create a lot of content. They couldn't afford to go and get someone to do it. And most of them were actually individuals. So they were running their own business, thinking about text and visuals and strategy, and liaising with clients. So extremely time poor. And Canva was just the perfect tool for them to be able to scale themselves, to help their clients create content, to do it quickly, and then to get on with the rest of doing their business. So we quickly identified them as a key user group that the first product needed to be suited for in terms of all the features that they needed, and B, to then start building a community around it. And it was an amazing community to get involved with in the early days because they loved being on social media, telling people about the tools they were using, introducing Canva to them, giving tips and tricks, and of course creating a whole lot of content and using the products through that process. So it was a really great first customer to land on.

Brett: How would you describe the feeling that you all had as you were working on this?

Cameron: I think we knew we were onto something great. We knew the idea was really solid and we were excited to get that out. It was slightly frantic because as a founder, you're not just focusing on the product, you're also thinking about the company, you're thinking about the team, you're thinking about PR and press before you get to the launch, you're thinking about how you pay people, you're thinking about the business model. We had to get a whole lot of content to put into Canva, so all the stock photographs, all the templates that exist in there. So you have to think about the content team and a whole host of things. So you're very frantic, trying to juggle all those things, while still placing a premium on the product and making sure that we're delivering an amazing experience. But incredibly exciting. We felt a little bit of time pressure. We were always worried that someone would launch exactly Canva before we did. Luckily they didn't, and no one has for a long time afterwards. So I think we struck really the right balance of waiting for enough polish to be put into the product versus just getting it out the door. At the time, the Lean Startup book had just come out, so everyone was Lean Startup, like just launch the first HTML page you can think of and iterate upon it. And we were kind of counter to that. We knew what product we wanted to deliver. We had gotten a huge amount of user feedback already. And we knew we needed to deliver a polished visual design product that really delivered amazing content for people. So we bided our time. Few investors asked us to ship a bit earlier than we would have, and we always said, "No, we know what the product is. We know what we want to put out there as the first version." So we really sweated the details on that and made sure it was something that we were proud in, but we still knew it had a few bugs and flaws in it. So I think we struck the right balance there.

Brett: Did you find that as you got closer to launch, you were building with other end users in mind other than the social media manager that you outlined, or that was kind of like the early North Star end customer for the product?

Cameron: We focused quite heavily on that user in the last couple of months. We knew where the product was going to go after that as we expanded. We knew what features we wanted to put in to make presentations, for example. But that last couple of months, we definitely focused very heavily on that social media graphic case and just made sure it was really robust and attractive for those users.

Brett: And it was always clear that you could start with them as the tiny beachhead and eventually expand to millions and millions of people, is the way that you thought about it. You weren't trying to build a product for social media managers long-term, right?

Cameron: No. And I think it's been one of the secrets to Canva success is that we have such a broad user base, and our vision just encompasses so many possible things you can do and people that can use it in different ways. And for me, that's driven me for the last 13 years. It's like there's so much opportunity there, so many really unique and interesting problems that we still have to tackle for different types of users, and that enables us to constantly be innovating, creating new big products, releasing and launching them, and I don't think I could do that if we were just focusing on the one small user group for the last 13 years.

Brett: Up until launch days, as you were catching up with former colleagues and talking to friends, as you were explaining what you're doing, did everybody say, "Oh, that sounds awesome. Makes total sense to me." Like there was a lot of support and it all made sense to people, or there were lots of people that were saying, "Listen, it's been so long since anybody's built a design tool that has ever worked. Adobe really owns that," or whatever it might be. Like there was a lot of people that just didn't get it, that there was a mixture of sort of reaction in that pre-launch phase?

Cameron: I think there's a lot of people that say no all along the journey. We had so many investors say no. So many pitches that ended up going nowhere. I'm sure they're kicking themselves now. But I think you just have to get used to the fact that you see a different view of the world from other people, and when you're launching a product, you just need to firstly have confidence in your vision, like you know where you're going. Then B, recognize that some people aren't early adopters. Some people don't have the vision or need to think outside what they're doing, and you just need to go and find those people who do share your vision, who do get excited about what you're building and drill into them. You can win the rest of the world over time. You've got plenty of time to shape the product to be more broad, to encompass more use cases, to really meet all the different personas that you could possibly build it for. You've got plenty of time for that. In the early days, just focus on the kind of positive, optimistic users who really will lean in and don't worry about converting the naysayers.

Brett: So what was launch day like?

Cameron: Launch day was pretty electric, but also anticlimactic. We also had a waiting list of about 15,000 people who had signed up already, not even knowing what Canva was about, so we're going to send out an email to them.

Brett: How did you get those 15,000 people?

Cameron: Just over time. So we'd had a waiting list up for literally the year that Canva was going. I think Mel also had a bit of a landing page going even before that, as she was pitching various people around the world. So we'd built it up over time, friends and family, just general connections. I think it's... I don't know, getting a 15,000 person waiting list to me doesn't seem that onerous, particularly when you've got that much time to do it. And then activating that waiting list is a totally different question that we can dive into. But we had all those parts ready for launch. One hiccup was that two days before launch, I actually got in a accident on my bike. I got hit by a car and got knocked unconscious, had to go to hospital, get a few stitches on my face. Was back in the next day coding to make sure that we hit the milestone. And the rest of the team were there alongside me. And we hit the go live button. We had a big Google Analytics dashboard up on the wall. If you're familiar with the live view, it kind of lets you see users dropping into your site and which pages they're going to. And we were expecting a massive flood of thousands, tens of thousands of people coming to the site. Everything went live. The articles went live. And we watched the Google dashboard. After about 30 seconds, we saw one little drop come in of one person visiting the site. Two minutes later, we saw another drop coming in. Five minutes later we saw three drops. And then it just kind of went quiet. It was actually very anticlimactic. We went to the pub at about 11:00 PM at night for drinks as we kind of realized that there wasn't going to be this flood of users. And you just come back the next day and just continue building the product, think about how you're going to grow it, engaging with the community. And it's one of the big lessons I've learnt is that launches are important to get across that finishing line and to have that accomplishment under your belt, to have the right platform to build upon, but the launch itself is not the success of your company or your product. It is in all the days after that of how you turn up, how you engage your users, how you respond to their feedback, how you get them to talk about the product to their audience. It's in all the steps after that that enable you to grow. The launch is probably the least important thing when you're looking at a journey of 10, 20 years.

Brett: Why do you think on day one it just didn't start to take off?

Cameron: I think it's probably pretty much the same with a lot of products. It's actually a rarity I think that you get 10 million people descend on your product on day one, and most of the stories that you hear about that, they're actually untrue. It's like this thing was actually built two years ago and you just happened to hear about it the day that 10 million people decided to turn up. So I think that's kind of the hidden story in a lot of these startup success narratives is that there is a lot of hard graft and a lot of people not turning up and just a lot of very small iteration. When you look at an exponential chart, it always starts at zero. It doesn't immediately go to 10 million. So if you're starting at zero and adding a couple of users every day and then a thousand a week and then 50,000 a month, it stacks up. And that's one of the things we realized is what an exponential chart looks like and what that growth looks like in the early days, and you just need to turn up every day and plug away, make the product, engage with your customers, be firm on the vision that you want to create, and just keep heading towards that. As we progressed over the next couple of years, we started to unlock some true parts of our growth engine, which have really stood the test of time over the last decade. But for probably the first year, we just really focused on continuing to build out the product and get more features in there, make it a more solid platform, and make sure that the customers who were turning up had a great experience, that they would then talk to their colleagues and their customers about. Word of mouth in that early couple of years was like gold for us. Still is. An amazing amount of organic traffic comes to Canva. It's only a minority that comes through marketing or other paid channels. It's really about Canva users bringing new Canva users into the fold that continues to drive the success of Canva.

Brett: So when you think about those first few hundred signups, did they instantly love the product and were using it on a daily basis? Like a majority of them, a minority of them? I get one piece is the total universe of signups, clear that that was very low in the first week, whatever. What about how the actual product resonated when someone created an account and got in there? Was it instantly valuable for them or did you have to do a lot of work to start to get that deeply satisfying product experience?

Cameron: It was instantly valuable, and that's what we worked on in that year and through all those user testing iterations and working on the onboarding, making sure they actually got value out of the product pretty much straight away. Yeah, that was critical. I can't remember retention rates and churn rates from the early days, but retention was pretty high. The number of people who bothered to turn up to your site because they were interested in the concept of it, then signed up and then actually used the product, I would be guessing, but I feel like half of them turned into pretty ravenous users.

Brett: So I guess that was the thing that really fueled your enthusiasm. Even if the end number of users was not very high, you had a very retentive, loved product very early on.

Cameron: Yeah. The people that turned up loved it. When you're first putting out a product, even 500 people using it and liking it is really addictive. So being able to feed into that was good. And then we also saw that growth loop where one passionate user on Canva sent out multiple tweets about it. From those tweets, other people got interested and brought them in, and we could really tangibly see that loop happening. That also fueled us in the early days, just following along with the community and making sure that they were conversing about Canva. And that definitely helped us grow. We went from about 500 that first day. I think by the end of the week, we had about 5,000 people who'd signed up. End of the month, we had about 20,000. I think by the end of the year, we'd had... The number of designs that had been created was something like 500,000 designs had been created on the platform in that first year. So it was all scaling up and starting to be on that hockey stick graph.

Brett: Did you just email users to get feedback? Did you get on Skype with them? Did you just respond on Twitter? How did you tangibly start to pull the road map out of early customers?

Cameron: We didn't have much face-to-face with customers as part of our product process. We had like a community team. It was one person. But she was doing a lot of reaching out to bloggers, social media managers, people that were really engaged and talking to them, getting feedback from them. She did a lot of that. As a product team, we didn't actually. We were still leaning heavily into user testing. Twitter was great because it's high volume, it's easy for you to check in, you can do it anytime. So we got a lot of feedback through there. We also had a support email, which we interacted with people over email with. So from all those signals, we kind of gathered the product feedback that we needed to continue the road map. But we've made sure, ever since we've launched, ever since Canva's been going, that we balance responsiveness to users through feedback channels like that and creating features that they love with the vision that we know where we want to take Canva with. So there's still a ton of things that we're building because we truly believe that's where Canva should go, and we kind of blend that with user feedback to make sure that we're also looking after the community and delivering the things they're clearly asking for.

Brett: Did you start to think about other specific end users like social media managers and then you had another persona and another persona, or you quickly kind of move to just anybody that could get value out of a product like this?

Cameron: We had quite a few consumers coming in. Social media managers was quite a good business use case for Canva. We also had lots of content geared towards a lot more personal use cases, so like a Halloween poster or helping with your P&C event at the local school. There were lots of people coming in through those channels. They didn't obviously monetize as well, so we kind of kept them as two separate streams. For probably the first year or two, we built out for those kind of two rough buckets, people creating professional content for social and then a lot more of this personal content. It wasn't until I think we launched presentations that we really started to think more clearly about other personas that we would start building for. And with presentations you start moving into work use cases a lot more. With presentations, early adopters for us were basically startup founders, people starting their business. They needed to really quickly get something together that communicated their ideas, whether it's going out to their investors or rallying their team around what they're building this month. So startups became a really vital part of Canva's growth through year three and four. And that's when we really started opening up Canva as a real work tool. Not just something that created some pretty graphics, but a tool that helped you rally people together, express your ideas and get things done.

Brett: When you reflect on the first two years, so that's up until, call it, the 800,000 users you had, all the way back to the first line of code that you wrote, what are the most important things that you think you intentionally or unintentionally did correctly that are able to be more broadly exported to other people that are getting going?

Cameron: I can think of a whole range of things from a micro to a macro spectrum. On the macro, having a huge vision for what we wanted Canva to be, like truly a world-changing tool that wasn't just something that we were building for one person. We're literally building it for billions of people and we can see how Canva can be used by billions of people around the world. It will take us many more years to get to billions of people. We're at roughly a quarter of a billion right now. So we're still on that journey of getting there. But having that from day one is incredibly inspiring and also makes you think about the scale. You're not just building a product for this one particular use case. We're not building a to-do list app for nurses who want to order a coffee on Tuesday mornings. It is a truly expansive platform that can do so many different things. We just so happen to, in the early days, zero in on a particular user that was really passionate about it. So I think having that balance of huge vision plus product that you're building that's useful to someone today is really important. Then in our day-to-day product processes, I think we really tapped into quick iteration and prototyping in those early days. It was something that we could easily do with the skills that we had on our team, and I find it very easy to think about a design idea, sketch it, and then get it into code, which I think is a really important step when you're building a product, because it isn't until you put something interactive in someone's hands that you actually know how it's going to behave. Or even for yourself, you don't even know how it's going to behave until you've tried it out and clicked on buttons and dragged things around. So I think that product iteration loop that we had was really important because it was fast and it was a really strong signal of quality and finding the right thing to build. I think that's changed drastically in today's age. Your ability to do that is now even faster. So with AI, you can really quickly get a prototype up. You can even skip the sketching step. You can just go straight from idea to interactive prototype. And that's really turning the product process on its head and making it even more rapid to get to that confidence stage. I think in terms of growth, really focusing on that early community and being responsive to them, building them up as your advocates and your evangelists, making them feel like they're part of the team so that they're really willing to talk about your product and take it to other people is incredibly important. And then other growth strategies can kick in after that. But having the community that loves your product and loves it because it's a quality product is for us one of the key ways that we build.

Brett: When you use the term community in the context of what you all have built and engaging and supporting, maybe you could talk a little bit more about that. I feel like community is one of those words that everyone throws around.

Cameron: Yeah, so we've never built a community like a forum. We don't have this spot on Canva where people come to talk about design. We've fostered community where it arises. So there's a ton of Facebook groups. We've had groups that we have driven ourselves. They tend to be really high maintenance, and we've kind of let those go now because people are more than willing to create their own groups like designing on Canva groups for entrepreneurs, and they'll bring people in and they'll have really great conversations. So we help foster those with people. We'll drop in, we'll give them tips about what's coming up on the roadmap, we'll respond to their requests, make sure that their bugs are filed, et cetera. So that's how we think about community. It's more of the broader ecosystem rather than building specific tools that bring community together on the Canva platform. But you can also think about community as those people who file bug reports, those people who come into your support processes. Being able to convert someone who is very frustrated with your product because it's not letting them do what they want to do, and respond to them, have a great customer service interaction and turn them into a Canva fan is equally being part of your community. Because that creates another person who's willing to talk about Canva and will sit down at a bus stop one day next to someone and tell them about the product, show them their favorite design and win you another Canva user. So we think about community as all those different touch points that you have with a Canva user or a possible Canva user and making sure that they get good quality out of it, they have a positive interaction, and that we're constantly building the brand of Canva as an empowering, design-centered, goal-oriented tool for anyone that wants to achieve things. And you can do that through so many different channels.

Brett: In those first couple of years after you launched, you figured out some of the most important growth levers of the business. Could you tell the story about those?

Cameron: We had very vague ideas about SEO before we launched. We eventually figured out we knew nothing about SEO. But we fortunately came across an amazing growth leader here in Australia who really properly set up Canva for search engine optimization. So thinking about the whole flow of someone typing in a search, then ending up on a Canva landing page, then getting them into the product, making that a really great experience. So basically putting as much thought into that experience as we had put into the core of the product. And he created this really great engine where we mapped out hundreds of terms that people might search for that were related to Canva. We created landing pages that really spoke to people's jobs to be done when they landed on that page. We gave them an easy entry point into the editor. And then we made it clear once they were in the Canva editor how they would achieve the job that they had signed Canva up for in the first place. So that was really critical and it scaled really well. So you can think of hundreds, thousands of different terms that people might search for when they want to design something, and we could create inroads for each of those. It was a very thoughtful, strategic, and well-operated operation to get all of that happening. And we started seeing returns on that within three months, and it scaled up over the next couple of years to become a massive driving engine for us, and it still is a massive source of traffic for us. So that was one of the key growth drivers. The other key growth driver for us was internationalization. So I think one of the advantages we have as an Australian-founded company is that we couldn't just focus on Australia. If you're in the US, you can sometimes be tempted just to service the US market. But here in Australia, we've only got 25 million people. You're never going to create a scaled online company just thinking about that market. So we're always thinking about other users, other countries, other people and languages being able to use Canva itself. It was in about year... It was three years after we launched when we first started executing upon our international strategy, which involved firstly getting Canva into different languages. We launched eight languages in that year. And then the following year, we launched Canva in a hundred languages. And this totally opened up new markets to us, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, India, massive markets, a lot of non-English speakers, and it has totally reshaped what the product of Canva is, how we surface content to people, how we give them a great experience wherever they are in the world. Our top five markets now are US, Brazil, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines. So extremely international user base, and it was all fueled from those early days of internationalization, which has now proceeded into really intense localization. So making sure that it's not just in their language, but it has all the right content, it speaks to their cultural norms, it's relevant to their society and the interactions they have with other people in their country. There's a whole deep vein of localized experience that you can offer that really help your product grow in different markets.

Brett: When you think about those first few years after you launched, is there anything that in retrospect you did that you wish you did sooner?

Cameron: We were slightly late in terms of mobile. So Canva was launched as a website. We thought of it very much as a desktop experience, though. We use like a 1,200 by 800 pixel canvas to think about the product. Mobile hadn't quite taken off when we launched, so it wasn't imperative that we had a mobile product when we launched, but I definitely think we could have done it earlier. We proceeded from our desktop product to actually creating a tablet product. So we launched an iPad version of Canva in 2015, and then it took us another year beyond that to launch our first proper mobile product. So I think we definitely could have truncated that. And in today's world, you have to be mobile first. So if we're making the product today, it would definitely be a mobile-first product with probably desktop as the secondary. But back when we started, desktop worked and it still allowed us to grow.

Brett: Why do you think you have become the dominant player in this use case? You're kind of the standalone that has really won so many of these categories. Obviously it's different as you get into more traditional enterprise use cases, but in the non-enterprise, to this day, all these years later, you've built the category-winning product. Why do you think that is?

Cameron: I think of a few different reasons. We were definitely first mover in this category. I mean, we essentially created this category of democratized visual design, and a lot of people didn't pick up on that for many years. So we managed to build up this beachhead and build up really brand equity. Canva is still the foremost design platform that anyone can access anywhere in the world. And then people know that, so it's an incredible foundation to have built upon. The attention to detail that we put into our products, making sure that every pixel that appears on-screen is well-crafted and thought about, that we constantly have a simple but powerful experience, one that's easy for people to approach, but they can, over time, still develop experience and knowledge that helps them get more and more value out of the product. I think having a very community-oriented brand is also really important. A lot of people trust Canva. They love Canva. They literally love it, and they tell us they do. And building that brand equity and love for the product of Canva, the brand of Canva, and our philosophies and ways of viewing the world is also really powerful. That helps other people want to spread the word of Canva because they love talking about a great company that they feel very values aligned with, and it just all turns into this really powerful growth engine of great product, great users, and great community, just bringing more and more people in and constantly getting more and more value out. We've also focused a lot on internationalization and localization where people haven't. We've focused a lot on content, which is kind of the other side of Canva, which people often don't appreciate. Both the product experience, but it's also having the right content for people, having the right templates, illustrations, photos, videos, and music when they want to create. So there's quite a few different levers in there, but we managed to pull it together into a seamless experience that's accessible to everyone in the world and enables them to achieve things that they couldn't achieve before.

Brett: How did you think about layering on monetization?

Cameron: In our early pitch decks, we always had $1 for elements. That was a critical innovation that we had. Because part of designing is getting access to the ingredients for a design, whether that's a photograph or a font or a video. And it was extremely expensive to do that. So graphic designers would normally go look through a stock photo library, they'd find a watermarked image that they liked, and then they would have to pay $500 to unlock that image and eventually use it in the design. It was extremely expensive, but also prevented experimentation because it was hard to get that image into a design, play around with it, see whether it was the one you liked, and then decide to make that purchasing decision. So we enabled you to design and grab the content in the same tool and do so extremely easily and extremely cheaply. So that was our original pitch to investors and they really loved it. And we built up a massive stock library that enabled us to execute upon that. We operated on that business model for the first two years of Canva, and it was going pretty well. We had like 30% month-on-month growth on revenue. It was constantly scaling up. But we also started to notice that there were a particular cohort of Canva users that wanted a bit more out of the product, and it had always been our idea to have this premium tier for the product where we could start to build a deeper product and get people to pay for it. But it really crystallized towards the end of year two. So we started thinking about what this premium tier for the product would look like. We went out, looked at all the feedback, looked at what people were asking for, and we crafted this package that we called at the time Canva for Work, which is now Canva Pro. And it was about four different features that crossed brand and running your business inside Canva that really resonated with SMBs. We put that product out there. We actually had a really great marketing campaign behind it. We had 200,000 people on the waiting list, which was awesome. People were really excited for it to launch. And when it launched, it did pretty well, counter to my previous spiel about launches not being that important. That was a pretty good launch. We got quite a few subscribers straight out of the gate with that one. And it quickly started eclipsing our $1 image revenue, I think within three months. So our $1 image revenue at that stage was I think about $2 million. Within three months, our subscription tier had already eclipsed that and was growing far more rapidly. So that quickly became the dominant business model, which we're operating on and has put us in good stead over the decade that followed. It's still an amazing revenue driver for us. We're thinking about adding different pricing packages on top and different add-ons that you can possibly add into Canva now. But that subscription package has been an incredible revenue success for us.

Brett: When you thought about going much more intentionally into enterprise and going after enterprise customers and use cases, did it feel like re-founding and re-getting into product market fit, or was it just a natural extension of the way the product was already being used and it didn't feel like that?

Cameron: Thought it would be a natural extension, and we tried that actually for a couple of years. So from about 2020, we started to think about enterprise as a distinct market that we wanted to go after. We'd seen huge amount of penetration of Canva into enterprises, but through individuals and small teams. They had just picked up Canva and started using it. So inside some companies, like 50,000 employee companies, we already had like 5,000 people using Canva. They just didn't do it in a structured way. So we saw it as a big opportunity to wrap them all up and create an enterprise package. And we basically tried to do that by putting in an enterprise package, giving some vague promises around it'll be better for large teams and brand consistency and stuff like that. Got a little bit of traction, but we realized it wasn't very successful. And we've spent the last three years, as you said, kind of going back and learning a lot more about the enterprise space, about decision makers in there, what truly scaled teams need from their visual content, how they want to control their brand, how they want to interact with teams across the organization. We did a lot of learning and properly built the enterprise product that now exists today. So we launched that about 18 months ago now. And the reception to that has been far more successful than our very early iterative attempts on an enterprise product. So now we have companies like FedEx, New York Stock Exchange, Amazon using the enterprise product and getting a huge amount of value out of it. But it did require us to not go all the way back to the drawing board, but definitely more heavily rethink about what we're offering to them.

Brett: Why do you think that is?

Cameron: I think because the roots of Canva is very much about democratization and being really grassroots. We leant into that organic angle very early on. Building community is all about getting individual users to love it and talk about it to other people. And that kind of growth doesn't quite work in an enterprise setting because you end up with a very disorganized and chaotic network graph inside an organization. And pulling that together, finding this one decision-maker who wants to champion it, and make sure that they get on the one contract and that they admin their teams, they have all the templates and the brand in place, it's a very different play to what we were used to as grassroots adoption. So it required us to kind of re-approach it and learn a bit more and build up that enterprise muscle internally so that we were approaching it from the right angle.

Brett: At what point in the journey did you feel like it was highly likely that you would build this enormous important company? It sounds like maybe some of your co-founders from the moment they sat down and started thinking about it were highly convicted, but was there a moment that everything kind of clicked for you personally, when you started to see the product being pulled into the market in a certain way?

Cameron: It built up day by day, but there was this one specific email that we got from an early customer. It was probably like, I don't know, nine months or a year after launch. And it was from an orphanage in South America. And they just wrote us a really nice letter saying, "Thank you for creating this product. It has helped us create amazing newsletters that we send out about the kids in our care, which help us ultimately find forever homes for them." It was extremely heart moving, and it was the first moment I can remember getting feedback from the product from someone I knew nothing about in a country I knew nothing about from a totally alien environment but who was still managing to get amazing value out of Canva. And that's when it really clicked for me that the capability for Canva to go all around the world, span language barriers, span personas and use cases, and just be this amazing general tool that enables people to have an impact in their lives was just made tangible in that moment. So I really often link it back to that time.

Brett: What about maybe the inverse of that? Were there a few moments that were particularly difficult or hard, other than the normal trials and tribulations of making a startup work?

Cameron: In terms of the product, it's mostly been smooth sailing. You iterate, you put stuff out, you see what works, you see what doesn't. You're kind of used to that. There was this one period where we decided to rewrite our entire editor code base, which was particularly trying. The reason was it took us close to two years to do that, and in that time we essentially launched nothing. We didn't put out any new functionality. We couldn't respond to customers with like, "Here's an improvement based on what you've said." It was really, really trying for us as a team, as a product. So that was really hard. So we've kind of vowed and never to do a huge rewrite like that ever again.

Brett: In retrospect, was that a mistake?

Cameron: I don't know if it was a mistake. I can't think of how we might've done it otherwise. Maybe parallelized it, but maybe that would've just pushed the timeline out even longer and then caused this moment at the end where you had to bring everything together. So I think it was a hard call. It was one that was really hard to get through. But it was ultimately the right call because it set us up for real-time collaboration, truly scaled teams, like hundreds of people using designs together, velocity of products, better tech stack that enables us to scale to hundreds of millions of people. It was the right call for so many reasons. And it finished just prior to COVID, which enabled us to then pick up on a huge number of tailwinds throughout that period as well. So it was the right call in the end, but it was a struggle to get through. The other critical one that I can think of that wasn't product related was probably about our third round of funding. We had a lead funder come in. They were extremely bullish on the product. They were like, "Yep, let us handle everything. We want to put in tens of millions, and we're going to value you at a hundred million." It was all rosy until the final day when they had to sign the long docs. Everyone else had signed. Everyone else had put in money. And this investor came back to us and said, "You know what? We think we overvalued you. We think we can get a better deal. How about we put in same amount of money for half the value?" It was like an incredibly dick move, and it threw us into all sorts of chaos. We kind of scrambled, put together a totally different round that excluded that investor. We actually ended up with kind of better terms anyway. But from that moment we said that we don't want to be beholden to any investor. We don't want to be in that position again where we critically need funds and someone else can determine the trajectory of our business. So since then, we've put a premium on being a profitable company, making sure that we don't need funding, that we can run the company without having to go to someone else and put our hand out. And that has informed the next eight years of profitability that we've had at Canva.

Brett: It must be a fascinating position for that investor to be in right now.

Cameron: We've had interesting conversations with them since, and they've realized that it was a mistake and certainly a costly one for them.

Brett: Want to wrap up where we always do, which is just basically the question, who's somebody that's had a disproportionate impact on the way that you think about these topics of building startups or products or scaling businesses? Is there somebody who's imparted something on you or been involved in a way that's had a big impact on the way that you think about these things? And what's the thing that they imparted on you?

Cameron: I think I've got a couple of homegrown heroes as well as one from Google. So Lars has been hugely influential in my history and the history of Canva. So introducing us as co-founders, but also learning a huge amount from him at Google about how he thought about products and vision and bringing a team together and creating something truly innovative and exciting. And also I think really leading with heart. He was always his true self in front of the team, with the way that he led the team at Google. So I learned a huge amount off him. There's also a couple of other builders here in Australia. One of them was Campaign Monitor, which is an email delivery software, which started in Sydney. Knew their two founders quite well. Particularly spoke to Dave Greiner a lot in the early days and learned, again, a huge amount off him of how to scale a business. But also, again, leading with heart and being your true self and creating a proper organization. It's not about bringing some technology to market. It's about creating a place where other people want to come and join you in this mission and are excited about it. And about the impact you have in all of your customer's lives. I think that's really important when you're building an organization of true value and longevity. Then we're also quite close with the Atlassian guys. Well, Scott's now kind of retired and Mike is solely at the helm now. But from both of those guys, we've learned a tremendous amount about building a company in Australia, scaling it around the world. They've obviously IPO'd a long time ago. Thinking about customer growth, team growth, leaders that you need along the way. That's been hugely valuable.

Brett: Awesome place to end. Thank you so much for spending the time with us.

Cameron: It's a real pleasure. Thanks, Brett.ANSCRIPT HERE