📂 Melanie Perkins' 10 lessons for growing Canva to get to $1B+

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When you're in scale-up mode and you have KPIs to hit... the pressure is on to deliver demos and signups. And it's a lot to handle: multi-channel strategy, remarketing, landing pages, email sequences, revenue ops, conversion rate optimization.

42/Agency, founded by my friend Kamil Rextin, has worked with companies like Sprout Social, Klue, Qwilr, Uptick, Onfleet, and many more to help them with all things demand generation. They're always my top agency recommendation for specializing in SaaS demand gen. Go read some spicy takes on freemium, "inbound marketing", and category creation and then schedule a free consultation.

In 2018, Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins wrote a LinkedIn article that goes in depth on the Canva journey.

It's one of the most detailed founder accounts I've ever read and a fascinating look into their history.

One bit that stuck out to me in particular is her 10 lessons for growing Canva:

1. Solving a real problem. I think the most critical ingredient has been providing a product that solves a real problem that lots of people care about.

2. Offer a free tier that delivers a lot of value. If you can offer a free tier that provides a lot of value it will naturally help your product to spread much more rapidly.

3. Start niche and go wide. By starting ‘niche’ (with Fusion) and then going wide (with Canva) we were able to really get a deep understanding of our customers’ problem and solve it well.

4. Our whole company focuses on growth, but not in the short-term optimisation sense. Everyone is either working on long-term growth initiatives or shorter-term optimisations. For example, internationalising our product or launching Canva on a new platform like our iPad, iPhone and Android apps all unlocks new markets, so we consider them long-term growth initiatives.

5. We structure our whole company around goals. The old school hierarchies of years gone by with rigid structures and hierarchies were certainly not made for rapidly growing startups. We structure each team around ‘crazy big goals’ with a lot less emphasis on titles. Every team has a goal and then celebrates when they hit that goal.

6. Ensure great onboarding: so users get immediate value and then share your product. We use usertesting.com a lot to test our product and watch user’s reactions. We spend a lot of time refining every detail.

7. SEO: when people are looking for your product it would be crazy not to let them find it.

8. Learn to love every type of data: we got off to a rocky start with A/B testing, when investors were asking if we’d A/B tested our vision. It’s important to use the right data for the right occasion — from using usertesting.com, to A/B tests, user surveys, Google surveys and many others.

9. Provide real value: the power of this cannot be underestimated in both your product and marketing.

10. Aim to make your product affordable: while of course this doesn’t apply everywhere — a pretty apparent macro trend is that most things are getting cheaper, faster and more efficient. Doing this bring more equality and is good for business.

Go read the full article to soak up more insights.

—Corey

p.s. did you see that I launched my new course, Marketing Like A Media Company? Would love for you to check it out →

Thanks again to our featured sponsors:

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📂 Melanie Perkins' 10 lessons for growing Canva to get to $1B+

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Founder Weekly - Issue 634