21 Questions from Aussie Startups: Highs, lows & lessons learned during Canva’s journey so far (Part 1)

Key ideas

Perkins recounts bootstrapping yearbooks, years of investor rejection and a long hunt for a technical co-founder, teaching how to start niche, refine a pitch and test onboarding.

1. 1

   Start with a niche you can reach

   Perkins writes that taking on the biggest companies in design made little sense without relevant experience, so she applied simple online design to school yearbooks, a need she knew through her mother, a teacher. She and her partner Cliff bootstrapped from her mother's living room, tried direct mail and an expo, and found calling schools with a sample yearbook worked best. She says starting niche and then going wide gave them a deep understanding of the customer's problem.

2. 2

   Turn every rejection into a slide

   Perkins says investors turned Canva down over distance, valuation, a pre-launch international seed and not fitting the pattern, and that each rejection hurt. Her response was to rework the deck, moving the toughest objections up front, such as market size, comparisons with other companies and what a big competitor might do. She also began asking investors for advice rather than money, which kept the door open to come back.

3. 3

   Keep trying for a technical co-founder

   Perkins calls a technical co-founder absolutely critical, since Bill Tai's investment hinged on Lars Rasmussen endorsing an engineer. She describes three months of conferences and cold calls in San Francisco, another year without success, then repeated asks of Cameron Adams until he said yes, and says she never found a playbook. She adds that hiring a software development company early is probably underrated, because it let them learn when a co-founder like Adams would not have joined.

4. 4

   Test whether users believe they can

   Before launch, with a waiting list to win over, Perkins says user tests showed people scared to click, wandering around and leaving dejected. She concluded the barrier was partly people's belief that they could not design, and says the team spent months perfecting onboarding, watching users' emotional journey, down to changing the color of a circle. She says positive word of mouth then helped Canva greatly.

5. 5

   Organize teams around crazy big goals

   Perkins writes that Canva structures each team around crazy big goals with less emphasis on titles, and that teams celebrate when they hit them, since she thinks rigid hierarchies do not suit fast-growing startups. She says everyone works either on long-term growth, such as new languages or platforms, or on shorter-term optimizations. Among her growth lessons, she puts solving a real problem for a lot of people first, alongside a generous free tier.

In Melanie’s words

What’s available here

• Original source

  Linked. Opens on the publisher’s site.

• Player on this page

  Not applicable. Written piece; nothing to play.

• Full text or transcript

  Not reviewed. No license to show a text version here.

• Our summary

  Draft. Written by us with AI from the full public text and checked against it; quotes are word for word. Not yet rights-reviewed.

• Ask questions with AI

  Not reviewed. Off until there is licensed text to work from.