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Ten years after its founding, Canva is moving toward bigger goals.

The recent tech industry is best described as "devastated." Slowing earnings, halving share prices and massive layoffs are coming. Is the dotcom bubble about to burst, and are companies still expanding?

Lately, many people have been searching this winter for tech companies that are still making steady progress. Canva, valued at $40 billion and ranked fifth on the global unicorn list, is one of the brightest.

Founded in 2012, Canva is an online design platform from Australia. According to CB Insights, Canva is currently the fifth largest unicorn in the world after ByteDance, SpaceX, Shein and Stripe. Just last month, Canva announced that the platform officially broke the 100 million monthly users mark, and also began to enter the office software field to launch an impact on Google and Microsoft.

It is worth noting that Canva is one of the few large companies founded by female entrepreneurs in the technology field. Among the top 10 technology unicorns in the world, Canva is also the only company headed by a female CEO. Canva took less than 10 years to reach a valuation of 40 billion, and now has users in more than 190 countries, still running all the way through the current winter.

So how did Canva get started, and what drove Canva's continued explosion?

Simply put, Canva is an online design platform whose business model, like most Sass companies, comes from subscription services. However, Canva's biggest feature is that it is aimed at a very large user group, whether it is a student party, a professional person, a variety of teams, large and medium-sized enterprises, as long as you have design needs, you can use Canva to complete.

Note that the "design requirements" here do not only refer to professional design work engaged in artistic creation and typesetting, but include P a picture, design your own business card or greeting card, make a course presentation PPT or personal resume, edit a video and almost all design scenarios you may encounter in life.

Various categories of design scenarios listed on Canva website

Canva's founding philosophy was to be a "design platform for everyone." It provides users with a large number of copyright images, original illustrations and various high-quality design templates. Users do not need to have any art foundation. They only need to select their favorite templates and simply modify them in a few minutes to create personalized design works that look "tall."

In addition, unlike many similar platforms, Canva supports one-click saving of works on mobile phones, computers or sharing with friends. For all kinds of design needs, Canva is also equipped with Youtube tutorial videos to teach "Xiaobai" to complete the design.

Currently, Canva has three subscription models: Free, Pro and Teams, which are aimed at individual users and enterprise users respectively. For the average user, the templates in the free version are sufficient. Therefore, although Canva did not carry out large-scale publicity in the early stage of release, it quickly accumulated the first batch of users for the platform through word of mouth of free users.

Since then, Canva has created a product-driven flywheel effect by increasing the number of templates and image libraries while expanding the boundaries of its business to visual areas such as images and Media Processing Service. Over the past decade, Canva has built a complete design ecosystem that has allowed the platform to grow rapidly. Canva opened its beta in January 2014 with only 150,000 users, reaching 75 million by early 2022 and exceeding 100 million monthly active users as of last month.

Today, big tech companies such as TikTok, Google and Amazon are Canva customers, with more than 80% of the world's top 500 companies reaching customers, with an average of more than 150 designs generated on Canva every second.

Canva's user growth, pictures from Canva's official website not only to revolutionize Adobe's life, but also to challenge Microsoft and Google to look back at Canva's growth curve will find that its explosive growth actually occurred mainly during the epidemic. In the two years from 2019 to 2021 alone, Canva's users grew tenfold, five rounds of funding were completed, and its valuation grew from $6 billion at the end of 2019 to $40 billion.

At the moment, Canva has left its direct competitor Adobe far behind if measured by 100 million monthly live people. Adobe Creative Cloud currently has about 25 million subscribers, a quarter of Canva's. Especially after Canva launched Visual Worksuite in September this year, its usage scenarios have been greatly expanded again, directly driving the number of Canva users to increase by 15 million in October.

If Canva has achieved its goal of "a design platform for everyone" in the past 10 years, Canva has begun to move into a larger field-visual office.

The Worksuite suite launched by Canva includes design documents, whiteboards, presentations, video editing, web page creation and other plate functions. The word Worksuite also makes many people directly associate with Google Workspace and Microsoft Office Suite, while Canva is trying to integrate visual design and online office compared to Google and Microsoft's relatively single product features.

Taking online document editing as an example, Google doc currently only provides users with an online Word function, but Canva doc combines its powerful design library with document editing, and users can add pictures, videos, tables, etc. to documents by simply dragging and dropping, greatly enriching the functions of documents and beautifying the presentation of documents.

Canva not only has the same functions as Google Workspace that allow multi-person teams to display, edit and share works remotely, but its products also provide more powerful functions and deeper analysis tools such as multi-platform homework, one-click export, traffic analysis, questionnaire survey, etc. In addition, Canva offers more detailed tools than Google and Microsoft's traditional office suite tools, including whiteboards, presentations, video production, and more.

Previously, Canva itself has been loved by users with design needs, and the launch of the Worksuite series is undoubtedly adding another fire to Canva's general market.

Canva's high-profile foray into office space has apparently caught Microsoft's attention, too. Just after Canva announced last month that it had surpassed 100 million monthly active users, Microsoft rushed to launch a graphic design software called Desinger. Overall, the software directly targets Canva, which also allows users to use templates to quickly design, generate posters, logos, banners, etc. It also offers free and high-end versions, which are included in Microsoft's Office Family Bucket.

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What many people don't think is that behind Canva's ten years from zero to 40 billion US dollars, which makes Microsoft afraid, it is actually a young woman standing.

Melanie Perkins, 35, is not only one of Australia's richest female entrepreneurs, but also the most influential female entrepreneur in global technology start-ups. She was only 19 when she came up with the idea for Canva.

Melanie Perkins is not a technical student herself. She studied at the University of Western Australia, majoring in communication, psychology and business. During her part-time job as a tutor teaching graphic design to students during college, she found that Adobe, which was in a "monopoly" position, had high barriers to use and was expensive for student parties. So the idea of a design platform that didn't require technical experience and could be used by anyone began to emerge in her mind.

Image from Canva official and unlike many people, Melanie isn't just thinking about it. After forming a complete plan, she decided to drop out of school at the age of 19 to start a company called Fusion Books with her then-classmate and future husband Cliff Obrecht. They first targeted the school yearbook market, offering a library of design templates that allowed students to personalize their own school yearbooks using simple drag-and-drop tools.

Fusion Books became the largest yearbook design company in Australia, expanding into France and new Zealand. But Melanie soon realized that the yearbook market was too small and she wanted to be a design platform that empowered a broader visual design landscape.

But who cared about a girl in her early 20s who dropped out of school to start a business?

Melanie later recalled that she visited more than 100 investors and institutions in Australia, but was greeted by one after another, and for three years, no one wanted to invest in Canva. It wasn't until 2011 that she finally waited for Bill Tai, a prominent Silicon Valley investor who had invested in Twitter and Zoom in the early days of Canva's business development.

Bill Tai attended an award ceremony for a startup competition in Perth, and Melanie seized the opportunity to explain her Canva idea to Bill Tai during a dinner party. Although Melanie didn't get any investment from this conversation at the time, Bill Tai was impressed by her entrepreneurial enthusiasm, and Bill Tai invited her and her team to Silicon Valley for an investor gathering, where she met Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen and got his first intentional investment.

But Lars Rasmussen believed neither Melanie nor Cliff Obrecht had a technical background, hoping they could find a technical head and introduce them to Cameron Adams, a former Google employee who was starting his own business at the time. Adams initially showed little interest in this Australia girl's project, Melanie learned about it and wrote Adams a long letter detailing her experience, determination and plans for Canva, which finally impressed Adams with sincerity and ability.

Adams added to Canva's technical deficiencies, and Lars Rasmussen's investment allowed Canva to finally enter the sights of investment institutions. Since then, large institutions including Sequoia Capital and Disney have invested in Canva successively. At present, Canva has raised more than 500 million US dollars.

Since 2022, many technology-based growth companies that have grown rapidly in the epidemic, like Canva, have been broken, some with broken valuations and some with heavy layoffs. But Canva's user base is still growing at a rapid pace, and revenue is expected to continue to top $1 billion this year.

Although many companies have frozen hiring during the winter, Canva's website is still open to more than 250 jobs worldwide. In addition, as a company founded by female entrepreneurs, Canva has always been willing to provide employment opportunities for more female job seekers. Canva currently has nearly 41% female employees, well above the industry average of 28%.

If you're looking for new companies and opportunities, why not check out Canva?

This article comes from Weixin Official Accounts: Guixingren (ID: guixingren123), author: Juny Wen, editor: VickyXiao

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