https://mastersofscale.com/melanie-perkins/
Masters of Scale is a business and finance podcast hosted by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn. The show is created and owned by WaitWhat. In each episode, Hoffman introduces a theory on how successful businesses scale and tests their validity by interviewing founders about their path to scale.
Melanie Perkins is the co-founder and CEO of Canva, an online graphic design publishing tool. Canva has 40 million monthly active users with more than 3 billion designs created. In the summer of 2020, Canva was valued at USD 6 billion.
How Canva came about?
Melanie had been a self-starter since the time her mother had encouraged her to start small businesses to help her understand the vagaries of business. She carried this to her University where she tutored peers in learning design software tools.
She realized then the incumbent tools were expensive, had a steep learning curve, and were not user friendly. With the rise of easy to use applications like Facebook, Melanie thought about if the same guiding principles could be applied for a user-friendly design application.
Melanie decided to start lean and focused on a small, niche market of school yearbooks - the idea was to provide a seamless, online collaboration tool with drag & drop functionality. This was a proof of concept and provided the team with useful insights around functionality usage. The customer calls not only made their product better but also the customers started getting comfortable with the product itself leading to stickiness.
Learnings from Fundraising
To reach the next level, they needed capital. They finalized Canva as a befitting name as they were offering a blank canvas on which creators could build their dream solutions. Melanie reckons it is always better to start off with an idea you’ve conviction for rather than waiting for the perfect conditions. You learn as you go.
Melanie and Canva team worked for more than a year not only bettering the product but also improving their credentials in front of all the potential investors. Melanie was upfront about what she did not know - Venture Capital and Fundraising. She was insecure and naive while pitching to the initial investors often trying to mimic their body language and focus on natural mirroring rather than pulling her weight behind the pitch itself. While this did help, it did not bring about investments. It was a learning curve for her.
This led her to realize that just like customers need to be onboarded to a platform, the investors also needed to be “onboarded” in the correct fashion. It led her to identify the important facets that provide conviction to Venture Capitalists - knowing the “why” of the business along with the “what”. A stable team with tech and product expertise also placates. The pitch deck, the walk-through everything needs to be incrementally made better. One could not just get millions of dollars by following the Dale Carnegie - business negotiation antics.
Customer Success = Product Success
Meanwhile, on the product end, the Canva team realized the users were scared of using much of the functionalities they were offering. They introduced friendly tutorials and challenges to help new users get accustomed to the interface and visual elements. On completing these challenges, users felt comfortable. They could now start their projects. Reid and Melanie draw the example of Linkedin Profile Completion Bar - this gamified view delights users with quick wins.
Melanie credits Canva’s growing userbase to its unrelenting efforts towards customer success. The team takes user feedback quite seriously. If there is an errant usage of any feature, they do not try to straightaway talk to the users and help them learn the right way. Instead, the product team relooks at how the feature is currently placed and if there is a fault with it rather than customers.