From a High School Yearbook Idea To A $26 Billion Business.

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This is the story of how Melanie Perkins built a $26 Billion business.

Her journey to build Canva wasn't easy.

She had:

• 100+ investor rejection

• No technical background

• Zero Silicon Valley connections

What she did have were product-market fit and an ambitious vision.

The stoy begins in 2008 when she was teaching design part time. She found design software clunky and difficult to use.

"Students would take a whole semester just learning where the buttons were and how to design something."

Melanie and her co-founder Cliff Obrecht (now husband) didn't start with design software.

They didn't have the tech skills or the capital to tackle that problem immediately. Instead, they focused on a niche product category first - high school yearbooks - with their company Fusion Yearbooks.

Melanie's mom was a teacher. She could see how much time and effort her mom put into each yearbook.

Melanie & Cliff decided to make software that made yearbook creation easier. The software would be free & schools would pay for printed yearbook copies.

Since none of them didn't know to code, they found Greg Mitchell.

Mitchell ran a software dev company called InDepth (now Cirrena). The team used a $50,000 AUD friends & family loan and contracted InDepth to develop the first version of Fusion Books.

In Year 1, 16 schools signed up for Fusion Books, 50 in the 2nd and 100 in the 3rd.

In their 3rd year, they were awarded the 2008 Western Australia Inventor of the Year.

The following year, they came back and they met the investor who would change everything for them: Bill Tai.

They met Bill in a competition at Perth.

1st meeting in San Francisco turned out to be nothing but disastrous at least by her account:

• She didn't use an iPhone or an iPad.

• She overdressed to seem professional.

• She printed her pitch deck instead of running it on a laptop.

A slide from her pitch deck:

But surprisingly her meeting with Bill went well.

He introduced her to Lars Rasmussen, the co-founder of Google Maps & Google Wave. Lars understood the power of real-time collaborative editing and saw Melanie's vision and became Canva's first advisor.

Bill was willing to invest if Melanie could find a technical co-founder approved by Lars.

For another year Melanie and Cliff focused on their yearbooks, and then headed off to the Mai Tai conference.

Here they met the engineer that changed their lives. Cameron was the Google wave team’s designer. After a lot of pitching, Cam agreed and he joined in as a co-founder.

Bill agreed to invest ($25k to start) and help the team raise more capital for Canva's MVP.

The first fundraise was excruciating.

Melanie received 100+ rejections, for reasons like:

• Canva was overpriced.

• HQ in Australia, far from the Bay.

• No Harvard, Stanford or MIT background.

Her pitch deck changed a lot - the co was called Canvas Chef at one point.

Eventually, in 2012, Melanie raised $1.6 million from angels like Bill & Lars, and VC firms like Blackbird, Matrix, and InerWest Partners.

They were also able to get a grant from the Australian government for $1.4 million, bringing their total seed raise to $3 million.

They had the money they needed.

Now they had to build V1 of Canva. The final piece of the puzzle was founding engineer Dave Hearnden.

The team spent so much time developing it that investors started to get concerned. Finally, in Aug 2013, they were ready to launch.

After 7 years of building towards a grand vision, their growth happened fast:

• 1 million users in 2014.

• 6 million users in 2015.

• 2 billion+ designs made in 2020.

Thank you for reading.

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See you next Friday,

Armaan 🤝