Why Canva worked (In Depth)

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The team had an obsession with the perfecting the product before launching. They didn’t want to do the lean startup way and launch the product when there were missing bits. Waited for 6 months just perfecting the product — product was really buggy early on and they didn’t want to launch when it had obvious issues

When to know when to actually ship?

  • Core idea for Canva was that you take this incredibly complex fragmented process of creating a design, where in the past you would have to go and purchase expensive design software, fonts, and stock images and then send emails back and worth with PDFs etc. Canva wanted to make all of this dead simple, and they only launched once they were able to do this
  • Used usertesting.com to learn what people thought of the product, and the first initial response was super disappointing and underwhelming. People just couldn’t understand how to use it! Just iterated a lot until they got to a version that people could use -> insights from testing helped perfect their UI
  • Asked users to do simple things, like change something’s Color to red. When they couldn’t, Canva realised that they must update their colour picker
  • Also so how user’s tried to search in the app. Though iterations, eventually got to a point where most users deeply understood the product on their first try and had a lot of fun using it and then shipped

How to know you was the ideal customer in the early days?

Who was this new design tool for? If you went out and targeted high-end photographers and photo retouching in photoshop, it would’ve been a bad idea. How to get the identify the right early customer segment?

  • Started to run design workshops, where they would teach people the fundamentals of design. This was literally the best way for them to understand how people used the product
  • Because of this, identified people who had a really frequent need for visual content. These were social media marketers and content creators. Started to really zero in on these communities, and started to create templates for Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook etc
  • Started to blog and write about social media topics and trends, and going to conferences and events in this space

How to scale PR?

  • PR was a big part of it. The seed round announcement got them a lot of users
  • Used that to drive people to a waiting list, and gathered 50k people’s email that were excited to get on Canva
  • Pitched every single publication that they could find – Australian press, Techcrunch, Kendo daily, and a bunch more
  • Thinks that this strategy is still workable. It’s about telling the story in a unique and interesting way

How to get more initial users?

  • Just focused on the product and product-led growth, along with investing strongly in communities