Canva: The Story of the Design Product that is User Friendly

It’s one thing to launch a business. Starting a company that competes with tech behemoths like Microsoft and Adobe is quite another. However, it is just what Australian businesswoman Melanie Perkins did when she created a design product to compete with the tech behemoths.

500 million individuals use LinkedIn, 1 billion use Instagram, and 2 billion use Facebook. On all of these sites, they utilize photographs to connect and communicate, but they are not photographers. To create their online presence and interact with their fans, businesses hire social media managers. Even though they are not graphic designers, their employers insist that they have experience with image design.

In order to test their concept, Melanie and Cliff Obrecht, her co-founder and future husband, first established an online school yearbook design company called “Fusion Books.” Fusion books assisted students in working together to create their profiles and articles. The yearbooks would then be printed and sent to Australian students. Her aim of building a fully integrated platform for designers was realized when the company quickly became a smashing success.

Canva quickly garnered investors’ interest as a result of her networking and persuading abilities. Melanie felt it was time to start Phase 2 of her dream project, which involved assembling a team to make it a reality, as funding began to trickle in.

Melanie was able to recruit Dave Hearnden as a tech developer and Cameron Adams as a tech co-founder thanks to their shared contacts. The tech duo collaborated with Melanie to construct the Canva platform and assemble a team that could assist users in creating a variety of designs without charge.

So how did Canva enter the design software market and amass 10 million customers in its first five years of business?

Create a platform that makes it simple for those who aren’t designers to produce visual content.

Most of Canva’s features are shared with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. It goes without saying that Adobe makes some of the top products in the world. Since the late 1980s, Photoshop and Illustrator have been around, and they are still the most popular tools used by graphic designers in the industry today. Even those who don’t design are familiar with Adobe’s offerings.

Canva’s success as a business tool has mainly been attributed to its bottom-up design philosophy: If you can get people excited about using simple templates at home, they’ll eventually bring them to the office. It has largely been successful. According to Canva, 800,000 teams now pay for their memberships, and 12% of its users have team accounts, a number that has approximately doubled since last year. (These teams may be paying anything from $13 per month for a five-person Pro subscription and $30 per person for an Enterprise one because Canva won’t disclose subscription revenue.)

The presentation made by Canva more than ten years ago is very comparable to what it is today. People can easily create business cards, birthday invites, social media ads, sales presentations, coffee mugs, and yearbooks using its user-friendly templated design platform. On a phone, tablet, or laptop, it performs flawlessly. Canva is a word processor for today’s visual culture that lets you tap and change any element you see, including text, images, backgrounds, and animations.

As Canva enters new markets in China, Dubai, and the Philippines, the team has now surpassed 2000 members and is still expanding.