Have you ever heard about the Canva? It’s the dream of a young girl who decided to make it real. As the world sees, it is one of the most significant graphic designing tool websites which was established in the year 2012. It allows the user to use drag and drop feature to get access to various graphics, fonts, and photos. Not only this tool is used by the professionals, but non-designers also use it for designing print and web media graphics. Melanie Perkins founded this company and today, more than two hundred people are working for this company.  Its headquarters are located in Manila and Sydney along with an office which is located in San Francisco.

The Story of Canva startup

The idea of Canva came up into the mind of a girl who was just 22 years old. She was a University dropout who went to Palo Alto (Australia) to meet with Bill Tai, who is a famous investor. In a book, she had read that if you want to impress someone, then it can be done by mimicking the body language of that person. As per she tells now, ‘It was pretty funny. He was sitting there with his arm behind his chair. So, I’m here with an arm behind my chair, trying to eat my lunch, while flipping the pages of my pitch to sell him on the future of publishing.’

She wanted to introduce this idea of Canva to him, which can allow any person to design posters, greeting cards, and almost everything online. She was trying to mimic her during that time, but he didn’t notice her. He wasn’t also much interested in her idea. She said, “I didn’t think he liked my pitch at all because he was on his phone the whole time.” Whatever she thought at that time was opposite as Mr. Tai was impressed with her. He introduced her to the developers, engineers and investors of the Silicon Valley. He also invested money in Canva and at present, her business has the value of one billion. There are more than ten million users around the country who are using this website in 179 countries. Every second, there are ten designs created on this website, which isn’t bad at all.

In the year 2016, Canva earned more than $23.5 million amount, but all the money has been used for the rapid expansion of it.  So, ultimately, there is a loss of $3.3 million this year. Melanie is the CEO of the company while her boyfriend, Cliff is the chief operating officer. Both of them are also the owner of Fusion Books, but there are some managers who are working for them.  It is crucial to have the right kind of people in your company as it becomes easier to make decisions, and the burden and responsibility on the owner reduce.

How did the idea of Canva come to Melanie’s mind?

In the year 2006, there was a nineteen years old girl who was at commerce & communications’ university in Australia. She was frustrated about the way she had to learn the use of design software. She told me that they had to waste the entire semester to learn just the basics of it. She thought that when someone wants to export high quality of PDF file, then it takes many clicks. It gave her the idea of launching a website for online designing, which is easy to use for the people today. 

She planned to test her idea on a smaller scale, and that was the time when she founded Fusion books with her boyfriend, Cliff Obrecht. On this website, high schools are allowed to design yearbooks at the online site.  They had to borrow money from their relatives to make the payment for software designers who were there to build this platform. Within some years, Fusion got the honor of largest yearbook publisher. This business became successful, and that was the time when Melanie decided to leave the university and focus on her work.

She says, ‘In Australia, people talk down their accomplishments. In Silicon Valley, where you are trying to raise funds or get an engineering team, you have to be able to speak about your accomplishments.” She continues, ‘It was three years between first pitching to an investor and landing an investment. This is an incredibly long period, and we had hundreds of rejections along the way.’ So, it wasn’t an easy task to begin Canva, but Melanie did the best she could and now she’s one of the inspirations for all the ladies who want to achieve something at a younger age.