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NPR is launching a How I Built This fellowship program to support entrepreneurs. 10 fellows will receive mentorship, attend virtual workshops, and have the opportunity to pitch their business ideas. One winner will receive a $50,000 grant. The podcast features an episode about Melanie Perkins, founder of Canva, a design platform now valued at $6 billion. Perkins started small by focusing on creating an online tool for designing yearbooks. She secured funding and partnered with a software development company. The program gained traction and they began printing yearbooks. Hey, it's Guy here with some really exciting news. We are launching a brand new How I Built This fellowship. Now, we've done this in the past few years to help support the next generation of entrepreneurs working to build a better world. And this year, we're taking it to the next level. We're going to pick 10 fellows. Each fellow will get matched to an amazing mentor, attend virtual workshops with some of the entrepreneurs who've been on the show, and even have a chance to be interviewed by me. And each fellow will then have an opportunity to pitch their business idea to a panel of amazing judges, including some of our favorite How I Built This founders. And guess what? One winner will be selected to receive a $50,000 no-strings-attached grant. $50,000! Amazing, right? If you are an early-stage entrepreneur looking to make the world a little bit better and want to find out how to apply to become an HIBT fellow, visit npr.org slash fellows for more details. And remember, the deadline is March 31st. The How I Built This Fellows program, including an NPR grant to one select fellow, is supported by GoDaddy. Rules apply. ♪♪ Okay, so for today's show, we're going to run one of our favorite episodes from the archives. It's the story of Melanie Perkins, the founder of the design platform Canva. And right at the top of the show, you'll hear me say that the company is valued at a billion dollars. Well, Canva is now valued at $6 billion. Okay, on to the show. ♪♪ What are any of the investors saying? You don't have a tech team. You don't have a chief technology officer. Like, I don't know if I'm the planner. Yeah. That was what everyone was saying. That's it. Right. Yeah, it makes perfect sense, but how are we going to get this thing rolling? How many people do you think you pitched over that, I guess, two-month period, a couple years ago? I don't know. Over 100 people, more. I was going through my rejections the other day. I was looking at some of the e-mails, and there was quite a... quite a damn few. ♪♪ From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movement they built. ♪♪ I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how a college student named Melanie Perkins turned her passion for making better yearbooks into the design platform Canva, now valued at over a billion dollars. ♪♪ So, there's a story that I think a lot of people have, and the details might be different, but it's basically a version of this. There was this one time you had a very clever business idea. Maybe it was an idea for a super useful product or a service that would make your life way easier. Mine was actually the one-cup coffee maker. I swear, that was my idea, but like most people, they didn't do it. And if you're like me, you didn't have the time to work on it or the money, or maybe it just seemed too overwhelming to get started. But the way the story always ends is that a couple of months later, maybe a couple of years later, you're shopping at a store or you're surfing the web, and there it is. I can remember the very day I saw the one-cup coffee maker at Target. Someone took my exact idea and made it happen. Now, does this story sound familiar? Because every business starts out as an idea, but to turn an idea into a reality, you have to get started, even if it means starting out small. You have to plant the seeds for a business to grow before someone else does. And Melody Perkins, as you will hear, she did have a big idea. She wanted to transform the entire desktop publishing industry when she was just 19 years old. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the scale of her idea, Melody got to work. She started out small by focusing first on one little piece of the idea that she thought she could make work, which happened to be an online tool to design and publish school yearbooks. Melody grew up in Perth, Western Australia. Her mom was a teacher and her dad was an engineer. And when Melody went to university to study communications, this was in the mid-2000s, she started using graphic design for publishing software programs like Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Publisher, and she was frustrated that the programs were so quirky and so difficult to learn. And it seemed completely silly that you'd take so many instruction manuals and so many steps through the most basic of things. Students would take a whole semester just learning where the buttons were and learn how to design something. It seemed very apparent that this whole desktop-based thing would be completely archaic and outdated in the future. And so I had this very oversized vision for taking on all of these different industries from Microsoft Office and lots and lots of other industries as well. I thought rather than people using things like clip art, they should be able to have access to beautiful templates like designers do. But at that point in time, I was 19 and I had no business experience. And so rather than trying to take on the entire world of design, all these really big companies who decided to take on school yearbooks in Australia. You keep saying we. When you say we, who are you talking about? My boyfriend turned co-founder, Cliff. And you're still together 12, 11, 12 years later. So you decided to start a web-based business that would help people design yearbooks. How did you come upon the idea of yearbooks? We had this vision for taking on the entire world of design. But yearbooks seemed to be a really pressing need because school teachers would get thrown into this thing. They had no design experience. I'd see my mom put together school yearbooks for her school teachers. And it's a grind. It's a huge grind. And all of a sudden, these people with no design experience were expected to create something to look professional. And so we realized that it would be a really easy thing to do because there's such a strong market need for these people to create yearbooks. So how do you go from having that idea to actually, like, what was your next step? Because it was you and Cliff and he was also 19. I was 20. 20. By the way, what was it called? Fusion Books. Fusion Books. So were either of you guys like coders or software engineers? I mean, you were. Not at all. We just went and interviewed every software development company in Perth. And most people told us that we were completely mad. But how did you even have the money to pay them? We got a $60,000 loan from Friends and Family, which was awesome. And then we got $5,000 back from GST, which is like our tax thing. So that was our marketing budget. You went around to Friends and Family and said, we have this amazing idea. We want to develop a web-based software solution for people designing yearbooks, which is a great idea. That's exactly right. So you and Cliff have a little bit of cash and you go around to software developers in Perth. Who did you eventually find? There was this amazing company called InDepth. And I went in with like an 80-page description of exactly what we wanted to do. Like, I had wireframes built up, even though I didn't know what that was. Like, you sketched out pictures of what the pages would look like? Yeah, to the detail, what every single button was going to do, how it's going to work. Like, these projects ended up being like five times bigger than I anticipated, but they were very kind and just like we had a fixed price contract. And what was going to make this better than anything else available at the time? Well, I think that there was just nothing much available other than these desktop-based programs. So rather than everyone having to send emails back and forth and collect all those files, we wanted it just to be collaborative and online and really simple. Because at that time, if you wanted to make a yearbook page, you would just go on Microsoft Word or like... Yeah, Microsoft Word or Publisher. And then also, it wasn't just that part. You'd then have to go get your stock photos or stock illustrations to actually make it look really good. And so there'd be so many different things that you're having to piece together to create something really, really hacky. And then you would like email that page to somebody and say, hey, what do you think? And they'd say, oh, yeah. But you wanted something more like Google Docs where everybody could kind of jump in and make changes. That's correct. So you go to the software company in Perth. And how long did it take for them to build out the software for you? I think it was about six months before we had our first iteration. And then immediately started our second iteration. And do you remember what year this was? That was 2008. 2008. So you just put it up there. On the one hand, yearbooks seem like a really niche market, right? Because it's, you know, one time a year when someone's using it. But on the other hand, every school does the yearbook, right? So it actually... It's surprising that there was nothing really out there to make it easy. Yeah, absolutely. And on the plus side as well, because the yearbook actually has to get printed, that was how we were able to monetize. So we were able to give the software away for free and then actually sell the typical yearbooks. So the idea would be that somebody would go on there, design their yearbook, hit submit, and then you guys would take that and then print it. And you would make money off of the actual printing costs. Yeah. So what happened? Well, we got 16 schools in our first year, which we were very excited about. And then we ended up getting printing presses in my mom's living room. How did you... How did you put... How did you get printing presses? So Fuji Xerox had this really cool deal where they said that they'd give us the printer for free if we paid for the ink and cartridges. And they kind of believed that... We had like a newspaper article in Perth and they obviously saw that. Oh, there was an article about you guys? Yeah. And they saw it and they thought, oh, we'll help out. And they thought they'd help out and we'd become a big printing press company one day. Wow. And so they gave us a printer. We ended up with a couple of them actually. And so we would have a printing press going for 24 hours for three months a year. And it would just be printing out these yearbooks. And then we'd go to a binding place and that'd actually do the finishing and the binding. Did any of your schools know that you guys were like 19, 20 years old? I don't imagine so. So within your first year, do you remember what kind of revenue you did? The first year revenue would have been very modest, but it was enough to be able to afford to do more marketing the next year. So we just reinvested our profits every year into the next year. And very fortunately, I guess, we had to become profitable quite quickly because otherwise we'd have no company immediately. So the first year we had 16 schools. The second year we had 50 schools. The next year we had 100 schools. And then it was like, I think it was 300. So it was growing quite rapidly. When did you start to think about building this into something bigger? Because by 2010, you know, you're two years in and I can imagine you can start to see this thing has legs. Yeah, so actually the original idea of taking on a whole world of design and making it easy for everyone was actually planted right from the start. And then we narrowed it down to yearbooks. But we kept looking around and people would be like, oh, can we use this to design our canteen venues and our newsletters and our school flyers? Like surely there must be more technology available now that does that. And there certainly wasn't. But then in 2010, I met Bill Tai, who is a Silicon Valley investor over from here. And he was just talking about all these companies and startups. And like when I first heard him speak, it sounded like a window to a whole new world. You met him in Perth. What was he doing there? He was speaking at a conference. This was in 2010. Yeah, so like even though like we sort of had a company that we'd been growing, but the only thing that we knew at that point in time was that we were a small business that really struggled to get away from the banks. We didn't have a credit history. And there was this whole world of startups that were taking on big industries. So I went up to him after a speech and someone there kind of introduced me and said, hey, she's got a cool new company. And he said, yeah, if I went to San Francisco, he'd be happy to meet. And you said, oh, okay, great. And you took his number? Yeah. And email and stuff? That's exactly right. And so as soon as I met him, I realized that that was the next level. And that if I could do anything we possibly could to get there, it was just... So you just emailed him and said, can we talk? Well, yeah, I kind of was like, hey, I'm going to be in Silicon Valley. I'm just going to be in the area. I want to catch up. Did you really have plans at that point or you just thought, let's see what he said? I was like, if I just say that I'm going to be there and he says that he'll meet up, well, then I'll go. Right. And so it could not have been more over the moon that he actually even responded to my message. He said, sure, I'll sure come see me. Yeah. I was just completely dumbfounded. Wow. So you presumably did go and book your ticket to San Francisco? Yeah. How long were you planning on coming out for? I planned on coming out for two weeks. My brother was living here and I thought I'd come and visit him and I'd go and have this meeting that I was absolutely afraid of as an understatement. And so in between the time that he said that he'd meet with me and coming here, I put together my business plan. The future of publishing was what I titled it. And it had a picture of us beating Microsoft Office and Adobe and Google Docs and a whole bunch of other companies. So we met on University Ave. In Palo Alto. In Palo Alto, at a cafe. And he said we'd go for lunch. So I brought my, I physically printed my pitch deck, which I also didn't realize was quite on call. But you're supposed to put it on like a computer, right? That's correct. Probably a Mac, like a sleek Mac. I totally didn't know this at the time. You brought a stack of like stapled... I was sitting there, like I had my paper pitch deck and he was like, do you have an iPad? And I'm like, no. And then I was like trying to flip the pages in my deck and explain about the future of publishing and how we're going to take on all these big companies and try to eat my lunch. And he was there wrapped, like engaged? No, he was on his phone the whole time. It was so awkward. I felt like the biggest flop. But very fortunately, when I went home, I had an email from him and he said if I could find a tech team, he'd be happy to invest. Wow. Yeah, so he'd actually been messaging a lot of different people and introducing me to them. Wow, during the meeting? So he was actually on the phone messaging other people. Yeah, so the next meeting I had was with Lars Rasmussen, who co-founded Google Maps. And meeting him completely blew my mind because I really didn't know. It sounds so bizarre, but I had no idea that people that made big, world-changing companies were just regular and nice and hard-working, normal people. And meeting Lars completely changed my perception of what was possible. And did he, when he met you, he said, hey, there's something here. Yeah, we ended up having an incredible conversation for hours. We both had a really similar view of what the feature of communication and publishing should be like. What was he saying? So there was a few philosophies. One of them was that over time, industries would converge. So rather than having the printing industry being over here, having to use different software to create a website and different software to create a presentation and different software to create marketing materials, and some of those things being online and some of them being desktop-based, that all these industries would come together and be in one page and then be accessible to the world. It seemed crazy that you'd have to use so many different tools and go and learn a different thing for everything you wanted to create. So you meet this guy, Lars, and you say to him, hey, Bill says he's going to back me if I find a tech team. Can you help me? Is that what you said to Lars? Yeah, that's exactly right. And Lars said he'd be happy to be an advisor. But what that ended up entailing was him rejecting everyone for a full year. Why did Lars have to approve of the tech team? Was that Bill's condition? Yeah, that was Bill's condition. He said, oh, I trust Lars. If Lars gives a thumbs-up, your tech team, I'll fund you. That's exactly right. So you are in San Francisco for the next three months. Until my visa expires. Okay. Visa Craig. Three-month visa. Tourist visa. And where are you working at? I was sleeping on my brother's... He had a one-bedroom apartment. I was sleeping in his living room floor. And I was working at Nordstrom, the shopping center. Yeah, the Westfield shopping center. It's an amazing co-working space. I don't know why more people don't take this job. It's free. There's Wi-Fi. That's exactly right. So the Nordstrom, the Westfield shopping center and San Francisco, okay. So I would go in there and I would work. And between that, I would be going to every single conference that I could. Like, anything, any meeting, anyone would... You mean like chatting with people who ever would listen? Like literally, even on the bus, I'd be teaching people, trying to get them to join my tech team. And are you just naturally kind of gregarious and outgoing? Was it easy for you to just show up? Like, you would just go up to people and say, hi, I'm Melanie. Can I tell you about my company? Is that what you would do? So I'm actually naturally really introverted. But when I have a goal, I do everything I can together. And so, yeah, I'd be getting off and like, if people would let me do a one-minute pitch at a conference, I would get off and I'd be doing that one-minute pitch and probably... Heart beating and racing? Absolutely. Completely terrified. But I'd just keep on pushing myself because I wanted this to happen. Your partner and boyfriend, Cliff, he was still at work, right? Because presumably for those three months, he was working on Fusion, your book company. Yeah. And how was it doing? It was doing well. It was growing. Like, he moved out from my mom's house into our first office. Yeah, it was an interesting time because we knew that there was this big, amazing opportunity over here. But it was really hard to make progress with. And then on the other side with Fusion, and that was a sure thing growing every month, every year, it felt like I had been over in Silicon Valley achieving nothing while, like, I'd left him with all the hard work. Pretty much summed it up. So three months, you were here for three months. Was it exciting? Were you encouraged? Did you feel like this is moving forward? I think every day I felt like I'd make a little progress. But by the end of the three months, I didn't have a tech team, and I left feeling like the biggest failure. Why? Because I had not landed a tech team, which meant that I hadn't landed investors, which meant that all I'd done, in my view at that point in time, was, like, nothing. I'd learned a lot, but I hadn't actually achieved anything. So when I was going back to Perth on the flight, I wrote a list of the things that I'd achieved, and one of them was, like, staying alive, which is a little grim. But it was a thing. It was a thing. But then, yeah, then moved the company from Perth to Sydney and came back around, too. Coming up in just a moment, why Melanie's next step in her search for investors was learning how to kitesurf. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. How I Built This Hey, everyone. Just a quick thanks to our sponsor, ZipRecruiter. Finding great candidates to hire can be like finding a needle in a haystack, and working remotely can make finding qualified candidates even more challenging. That's why you should try ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post a job on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. How? Their technology actively invites the right people to apply for your job. Take charge of hiring for your business with ZipRecruiter. Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash built, B-U-I-L-T. Thanks also to Squarespace, the easy-to-use website builder designed by world-class designers. Squarespace's all-in-one platform is dedicated to making it easy to establish an online presence with domains, marketing tools, analytics, and more. Go to squarespace.com slash NPR for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code NPR to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Thanks also to TD Ameritrade. TD Ameritrade's learning experience is curated from their vast library of exclusive content and customizes to fit your investing goals and interests. It started at tdameritrade.com slash education. The news is about more than what just happened. You need to know why it happened, who made it happen, how it felt in the communities you care about. NPR's daily news podcast, Consider This, gives you all of that with context, backstory, and analysis on a single topic every weekday. It's not just information. It's what the news means. Consider This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. So, something you should know before we get back into Melanie's story is that Bill Tai, the VC investor Melanie met with at the Palo Alto coffee shop, he's a huge kitesurfing fan. And Bill's taken these two things, venture capitalism and kitesurfing, and kind of combined them into a conference he puts on called My Tai. And back when Bill met with Melanie, basically he told her, hey, if you like kitesurfing, I can invite you to this event, and you can talk to some other investors there about your idea. Because I made it seem like I was really interested in kitesurfing, and so he said that if I could kitesurf, I could go to this conference, and that was where a lot of VCs and investors would be. So I went to kitesurf and felt like I was going to risk my life. And that's basically, it's really frightening. And what's this conference like? What do you do? They have tech talks, like during the morning, and then everyone kitesurfs in the afternoon. And how many people are there? A hundred and fifty. Okay, so it's pretty big. Yeah, it was. And it's at a hotel in... Maui. In Maui, okay. And kitesurfing by day, and then mingling at night, mingling at night. You went, or both of you went? We both went. And you guys must be thinking, this is a way for us to get in front of potential funders, investors. Yeah, that's exactly right. So what did you... So we weren't scheduled to talk or anything, but in one of the events, we just said, like, can we talk tomorrow? Can we do a pitch? And this was like at 10 o'clock at night, and eventually he said yes. So we ended up staying up until 6 a.m., preparing our pitch for the pitch of our lives, and eventually got up and was so incredibly nervous in front of everyone, but apparently it didn't do so bad, because this exe of Shutterfly came up and said he would be keen to invest, and a number of other people said that he would give us intros, or would be keen to invest as well. What does that mean? Does that mean, like, I'm ready to write you a check now, or does that mean I'm interested in further talking more about this? Further talking more about this, and waiting to see who else is going to invest before we invest, is the general feeling. So you had to get enough people who were interested to invest before anyone would invest. So you could not leave Maui with, like, a stack of checks? No, not at all. You left Maui with how many checks? Zero checks. Zero, okay. So the next... So from Maui, you went back to San Francisco. Still on tourist visa. Exactly. This is round two. Now it's you and Cliff. And what did you do over the next six or eight weeks? Like, did you... Was it... Did you start to pitch potential investors? Is that what you were doing? Yeah, pitching everyone, including... We're still pitching for other engineers at this stage, so we still didn't have an engineer. We're pitching any venture capitalist or angel investor that would take a meeting. Weren't any of the investors saying, hey, this is a really cool idea, and, you know, fusion seems cool, but you don't have a tech team. You don't have a chief technology officer. Like, I don't know if I'm going to put my... That was literally what everyone was saying. That makes sense, right? Yeah, it makes perfect sense, but how are we going to get these things rolling? How many people do you think you pitched over that, I guess, two-month period in San Francisco? Three months. It was, I don't know, between the first year and, I don't know, that year period, it would... Over 100 people, more. I didn't count, but I was going through my rejections the other day. I was looking at some of the emails, and there was quite a band for you. So what was it that kept you going? When you were just getting rejection after rejection? I think you just know the game you're playing, and, you know, we wanted to build the future of publishing, and we knew that this... Like, in my head, this was just absolutely the future. There's no way that things are going to be desktop-based anymore. Everything was very evidently moving online. There's no way that things are going to be fragmented across all these industries. It was going to be easier for people, and so I really wanted to create that. Even though it was frustrating, it was also... I knew it was a pretty important thing to do to get people to see the same feature that I did. Yeah. But I think it was really beneficial because we got so many different questions and comments and people not liking what we were doing at all, and then we really had to know what we were doing and really refine our strategy so every single day we'd go back and revise our pitch deck. Every time we got a really hard question, that would go right to the front of the pitch deck, so the hardest questions were answered right at the front. So rather than people sitting and going through the entire pitch and then being like, oh, but you're the same as some random company that actually had nothing to do with us, we then put a slide in our pitch deck which showed the gap in the market and all of the other companies and where we believed the huge gap was. A lot of people would say they know nothing about design, they don't know anything about our industry, and so that was a reason to not invest. So we made one of the first pages of that pitch deck explaining the industry and where we believed this huge gap was. This was in 2012. Right. Okay, so let's say I'm one of these investors you're meeting with in the Bay Area, I would say. So yeah, this looks cool, but I have a lot of questions for you, Melanie. First of all, tech team. Where's your tech team? You would say what? So we've already built a company with Fusion Books. We've demonstrated that we can make a profitable company that's been able to grow. We've launched internationally, and we're just going to take it on to the bigger stage. I can totally understand why no one wants to invest in us. And then I would say, you know, like why? Look, Microsoft or Google, the minute they see what you guys do, they'll crush you because they'll just put something else out way bigger. And, I mean, you're just going to get crushed right away. You sound totally like one of those investors. And what would you say? We'd say there is a huge gap in the market because to actually create this huge industry, the future of publishing, you would have to completely cannibalise your industry. And if you look at the areas of publishing over the years, we started off with metal plates, and then we moved into the type setting and paste up. So this actually became the second fly in that page deck. And we then moved into the desktop era, and then we're now moving into this new era, which we believe is going to be online. And what you'll see, dear investor, is that no industry player has actually ever been able to go from one industry to the next and actually still maintain being the market leader. And so every single time there was a new era, a new market leader emerged. And so we believe that market leader can be us. And then I would say, okay, you know, it looks interesting, but you guys are way in Australia. Would you guys consider locating here, moving your team here? So it depends when you ask this question. But at a certain point in time, we ended up finding an amazing co-founder, Cameron Adams, who had been at Google. And so he was going to be based in Australia. And we also met another amazing guy from Google, who Lars said was one of the best people we'd ever worked with, Dave Handen. So Lars actually introduced us to both Cam and Dave. Dave had worked in the US, but he was Australian. He was going to be in Australia. And so it sort of started to swing the pendulum towards Australia. And then the government in Australia had this matching funding thing where they would match every dollar that we got from investors. They wanted to incentivize you to stay in Australia. So Dave Handen, you just mentioned, he ends up becoming your chief technology officer, right? That's correct. And I'm just curious. He was a really talented engineer working at Google. I'm sure he was very well paid at the time. How did you convince him to join your tiny startup instead? Well, he searched the term on Google, bizarre pitch deck. I can proudly claim the number one spot. Right. So I went on to, so basically we pitched Dave, and Dave was interested in what we were doing. So he was a little bit concerned about joining. So what I did was I went to his Facebook page, and I took lots of photos from his Facebook page, and I put together a pitch deck and said why it would be such an amazing adventure to come and join and recreate the future of publishing and change the face of the internet using a storyline from the photos that I'd taken from his Facebook page. And that convinced him? I think that that definitely moved it in the right direction. I think that he realized that we had a lot of passion and we were going to do whatever it took to make this thing happen. Okay, so now you've convinced a few high profile people to join you. You're finally putting together this tech team to actually build this thing. But you're still pitching investors and getting rejections, right? When did that change? We had enough people that were somewhat interested that hadn't rejected us. They had a bit of a strategy where rather than asking if people wanted to invest, we asked people for their advice. And you can go back and you can say, hey, do you want to give me some advice? I'd love to show you my pitch deck. And then they'd give us some advice. And so that means they didn't say no to us at this point in time. They would just give you feedback? Give us feedback. And they're like, okay, that's great feedback. We'll take that on board. They're like, hey, do you want to meet up again another month? And look, we've done the things that we said we were going to do. And once you had done that enough times, they realized that you actually do the things that you say you're going to do. Yeah. We kind of had enough people at that point that were kind of interested, that we'd kind of been demonstrating that we could do what we said we were going to do. Yeah. And then the tide turned because we were all of a sudden oversubscribed. How much did you want to raise in that first seed round? So we wanted to raise 1.5. I think we left San Francisco and we raised 750. But then over the coming months, we ended up filling out that round of about 1.6, I think it got to. We were totally oversubscribed. And then the Australian government gave us 1.4. A matching amount. Yeah, exactly. So you got 3 million bucks. Mm-hmm. This is what, early 2013? Yeah, 2012. So it was a full year of development between landing investment and actually launching the product. And in that time, I guess it's like, what do they call it? What the hell is he talking about? It's a long time. So the lean startup was a big deal back then. And launch and iterate and do something in a weekend and see if people like it. Yeah. But the whole point was that we took all these really complex things and made it simple and then great for everyone and accessible. And so that took a lot more time than a weekend. Yeah. And so you spend that year developing this thing and then spend a lot of time on user testing, making sure that people actually understood it. People were scared of designing because people are conditioned for their whole lives thinking they're not creative or can't design things. So we ended up with these things called starter challenges where they'd come and they'd change the color of a circle and put a hat on a monkey and all these little silly challenges that built up people's confidence with their design abilities. So that took a while. And why you were sort of building out this technology, presumably you had to hire people too, right? How many people did you have to hire in that first year before you even launched? I think we had about 15 people. So you had a team. We had a team. Yeah, we had a team. It was really exciting. It sounds exciting. But let me, just the flip side of this, which is all of a sudden you've got $3 million of other people's money. You've convinced these really talented engineers to join you. You've got other people who've given up their jobs to come and work for you. That's scary. That's a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. Yeah, definitely. Actually, when I met Lars and started to think about this whole world of venture capital and taking people's money, I realized that I had to make a decision at that point in time that if I was going to pursue this path, I would have to be at least partially okay with the idea of it not working out. And why that was something that was important is I'm really not someone that likes to give up ever on anything. But, yeah, it certainly was a lot of pressure. But I also felt incredibly happy for it to have gone from something where everything was external, so trying to convince people to join my team, to something that was internal, like actually can work really hard to make sure that this is an amazing product. And I like that switch. That's my preferred place. So you guys launch, I guess, in August of 2013, and you're ready with this online graphic design and publishing tool, and you're getting the shingle out, and the website goes live. And what happens? Do people come to it right away? Well, we're fortunate that because we had some high-profile investors in that first round, when we landed that first round of investment, we announced it. We got some TechCrunch coverage, and we were pretty stoked about that. And we ended up with a waiting list of 50,000 people before we launched. Oh, so it was like by invitation only initially. And we said we weren't really a stealth startup that wasn't saying what we were doing. And then, yeah, we launched in August 2013. We'd spent a lot of time prior to that engineering it so people would have an amazing experience and to share it with others. And that certainly happened. And so within the first, you know, every month was the biggest and best ever. Wow. And explain what the business model was and is. Like, it's free to use, right? Like, you can just go and design anything. So a subscription model, how does it work? So one of our philosophies right from the start was that we wanted design to be accessible to everyone. We wanted it to be free. And so Canva is completely free to use, and then you can purchase images for a dollar. And so it would mean that, like, if you're putting together your school assignment or you're, you know, just a really small business trying to get your social media off the ground you could afford to create something that would look great. And then we also have paid offerings. So if you're using it for work, if you would like to save your brand colors and fonts and logos, then you can go on our premium offering. And it's like a subscription, like a monthly thing. That's correct. And so let's say I want to design, like, a yearbook. Huge, right? And I can go and design it, but if I want to actually download it, I have to pay for that. No, that's free as well. That's free, okay. Yeah, we wanted to ensure that our free products was a complete value, like you could go in, get your thing, completely free. It doesn't say Canva, like, print it out or anything? No. Do you guys have ads at all? No ads. No ads. So you need a pretty significant percentage of your users to buy images because building this technology is expensive. Yeah, so the concept was that we'd give away the software for free, but then you could purchase images, you could purchase fonts, you could purchase potentially layouts, but we're currently giving them away for free. But the idea is that you would always be able to have that base product for free for everyone and we're actually profitable. So actually, that business model is working out all right for us. And you can also print your design. So you can quick print, and in 40 countries you can have it delivered to your door. I mean, one of the things that I'm really surprised about, and I'm a little disappointed about, actually, is that it sounds like you just didn't make any mistakes after you launched it. It just sounds like you put this great product out there and there were no bugs and everybody was happy with it. Is that true? I mean, I'm waiting for the disaster story where you launched it and then it crashed for four days or something. I'll give you a tidbit. It certainly hasn't been smooth sailing, but I guess I'm always just focused on the next mountain to climb. So, for example, when we launched, I've just told you the entire backstory of all of the effort that's gone into getting it to launch. So I was back in San Francisco, sleeping in my brother's apartment and he was actually away. So I'm just there by myself. I'm about to go to sleep and someone breaks the embargo. Breaks the embargo that you're about to launch. About to launch, yeah. An article came out and their article said that we had a not very good product and that we had cheesy photography and that it wasn't very easy to use. And I felt at that point in time like the last, I don't know, six years of my life was crushed. Yeah. Very fortunately, that was a bit of a, fortunately, a false start. Everyone else seemed to like it and get what we're doing. So as you scale and grow and hire more people, you are the CEO, you're the boss of the company. You're a self-described introvert. You're sitting here, you seem like just a kind and really delightful person. And sometimes you have to be tough as a CEO. You have to make tough decisions. You have to fire people. You have to review people. You have to have difficult conversations with people. Have you had to learn how to do that or does that come naturally to you or do you just avoid doing that? I think everything, every single day, right from the start has been a learning curve. There's been people that haven't worked out over the years. We try to just have the nicest conversation, try to actually help them to understand why it wasn't working out, try to coach them to actually make them better. I don't know. At every single stage, there's been things to learn and I don't think that some things never get easier. You just have to figure out what is the best thing that you possibly can do and learn as you go. I think that that's one thing that I'm pretty good at is just-in-time learning. And over the years, there's certainly been a lot of things to learn. Given that you are one of the first Australian unicorns, right, I don't know, does that increase the pressure on you or are you just super proud of it and just carry on? I mean, do you feel any of that weight? I think the ironic thing is since I was doing my assignments in year two, I've always put a lot of pressure on myself and so that same pressure just applies today. Of course, it's a different magnitude, but I think I've just always put a lot of pressure on myself. I've always wanted to do the best I possibly can and now, yes, I feel a lot of responsibility for the livelihoods of a lot of our team members, but I think that that same pressure of just trying to do my absolute best every single day, that's kind of been continuous. I'm just curious, of the hundreds of thousands of designs that have been created up until this point with this tool that you brought into the world, do you have any favorites? To me, the stories that really touch me are like, so we've got 20,000 non-profits using Canva and this is everything from people trying to end poverty to cure cancer. Seeing the stories, they're pretty damn cool. We had a lady who found her birth mother who she created a poster on Canva, posted it on Facebook, found her birth mother. That was pretty cool. We've seen so many people post their resume that landed them a job. There's just so many stories. Every single day, I look through Twitter and I see so many touching stories. That one philosophy of design should be accessible to everyone is actually being put into practice and having real-world implications. How much of all of this, this amazing story, do you attribute to your skill, your intelligence, your hard work, and how much to luck? I think it's a really interesting question because I think that if you zoom out of luck and you say, where were you born, who were your parents, what was the education that you got, having good health, there's so many layers of luck. If you look at all of those things, I couldn't be luckier. But then on the other side of it, I feel like we've planted enough seeds that eventually one of those grows. That's another version of luck. It's like we've planted maybe 1,000 seeds and one of those seeds grew. You could attribute that to either luck or hard work for planting 1,000 seeds. I'd say a little column A, a little column B. How old are you now? 31. 31. Amazingly, you're so young, but you're a veteran. You've been in the startup world since you were 19. You started your first real company. You have a lot of experience. You've got 12 years of experience doing this, raising money, starting a business, creating a brand, marketing. What do you know now that you wish you knew when you were 23, 24, 25? I think one of the wonderful things about this whole experience is that I didn't know a lot going into it. I think that learning every single day as you go has actually been one of the most critical parts because I think if I knew all of the lessons that I've had to learn over the last 12 years, I would have been incredibly intimidated and potentially not even wanted to start. Had I listened to statistics, for example, and thought that that was something that I should be afraid of or frightened of, that probably would have deflated me because every single day you're getting thrown in the deep end, but at the same time, I love challenges and taking on what seems to be impossible from the outside. I don't know. When you don't know what you don't know, then you can't really be afraid of it. That's Melanie Perkins, co-founder of Canva. The company says its publishing tool is now used by 30 million people a month. Oh, and by the way, when it comes to typesurfing, Melanie told me she actually got into it for a while, but she doesn't really do it anymore. I did it for five years, and I can now officially typesurf, but I felt for five years like I was kind of risking my life. I take risks in things that are kind of calculated, and so my risk-loss ratio is a little out with that. I feel like I could just die any minute. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also write to us at hivtnpr.org, and if you want to follow us on Twitter, it's at How I Built This or at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, it's at Guy.Raz. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramkin Arului. Thanks also to Liz Metzger, Sarah Safari, Daris Gayle, JC Howard, Julia Carney, Neal Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Janet Wu-Jung Lee. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. This is NPR. When the survivors of a mass shooting at the newspaper went back to work, everything was different, even email. What if someone's sending us more death threats, or what if somebody sends me a death threat and I don't see it, and then somebody comes and kills all my friends, and it's my fault because I didn't read the email? That's this week on the Capital Gazette series. That's this week on the Capital Gazette series from NPR's Embedded.
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