Originally founded in 2013, Canva is an Internet-based design and publishing tool with a singular mission: It wants to empower people everywhere to unleash their own creativity, designing whatever they want and publishing it online. Social media graphics, posters, presentations, you name it — Canva offers the templates that help make it possible.
Over the course of the last decade, it has grown from a small startup to an incredibly successful international business with locations in Sydney, Manila, and Beijing, among others. It's estimated to employ approximately 1,500 employees as of February 2021. In September 2021, the company raised approximately $200 million and announced a valuation of a massive $40 billion — spawned in large part by the major emphasis on digital visual communication in recent years.
Of course, the road to get to this point was far from easy — as co-founder Melanie Perkins is not shy about sharing.
When Melanie Perkins was attending college in Australia in 2007, she came up with the idea that would eventually become Canva. During that period, she was supporting herself by way of a part-time job teaching students how to use desktop design software. Part of the issue she experienced was that the tools of the era were quite counterintuitive. They were difficult to learn, even harder to use, and required a significant amount of effort to truly extract value out of. Not only that, but they were also needlessly expensive — creating a barrier for entry that few people were willing to overcome.
At that point, inspiration struck. Perkins realized that someone needed to build a tool that would simplify the process to the point where anyone could create great designs, regardless of what level of experience they were bringing with them. More than that, it wouldn't be an expensive piece of software that you had to license, download, install and maintain. It would be a platform that existed totally on the Internet that was accessible anywhere, at any time.
With that, the journey to Canva began in earnest.
Although the Internet had become prominent in many homes by 2007, Melanie Perkins' idea wasn't an easy sell. Venture capitalists scoffed at the idea of this type of "always accessible" tool. It took a full three years for her to find her first investment — something that she attributes to her own learning curve pertaining to the world she was trying to enter.
To test the validity of her idea, Perkins and her co-founder began an online school yearbook business to work out the kinks in their plan. Dubbed Fusion Books, it was a website that students could use to work together to design their own unique profile pages and articles for yearbooks. That content could then be printed out and sent to students all across Australia. It was a first step, but it was certainly a big one.
From Perkins' perspective, her initial pitch decks simply didn't do a good enough job explaining why Canva was an idea worth investing in. Sure, it was a tool that made excellent designs easy — but why does the average home user actually want that? What does it do that they can't accomplish by using what was already on the market? These were questions that, in hindsight, she wasn't immediately able to answer.
This is why, for Melanie Perkins, it's always important to explain why your idea matters before you explain how it works. During those early days of Canva, she was putting the cart before the horse, so to speak. She was placing too much emphasis on the technical solution that Canva could offer rather than explaining the emotional problem that it could help solve.
That simple flip in perspective made all the difference.
Within just five years of the Canva launch, Perkins made international headlines as being one of the youngest female CEOs in the technology industry at age 30. A few years later, her company — based out of Sydney, Australia — was already valued at $3.2 billion.
All this because a budding entrepreneur identified a problem and, rather than letting it overcome her, set out to solve it for herself.
About Frank Jenkins Jr
Frank Jenkins Jr. CPA is the managing partner of Adams, Jenkins & Cheatham, a CPA practice based in Midlothian, VA. Frank specializes in Consulting services, tax planning, audit & assurances. "I genuinely care about our clients because I have a personal connection with them." He is active in the community and belongs to the AICPA and the VSCPA.
