Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of online design platform Canva, one of Australia's fastest growing startups, currently serving over 10 million users worldwide.
It dates back to the teenage years of Melanie Perkins when she wanted to start her own business with creative ideas. She was only 14 when she designed and sold her first small-scale venture, handmade scarves.
Melanie Perkins (born 13 May 1987) is an Australian billionaire technology entrepreneur, who is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Canva. Perkins is one of the youngest female CEOs of a tech start-up valued over A$1 billion. As of May 2021, Perkins was one of Australia's richest women.
In 2007, Melanie, 19, was a Business and Communications student at the University of Western Australia. Around that time, she was beginning to complain about how difficult it was to learn to use many of the programs taught in school for design, such as InDesign and Photoshop. Like her, many students had a hard time learning these programs.
Melanie expresses the difficulty of the programs in these words:
“It took the whole semester to learn the basics of the program. Even a simple operation like saving a design as a high quality PDF file required 22 clicks!”
While most people did nothing more than complain about it, Melanie used the problem as a business opportunity. She realized that design in the future would be very different: collaborative, online and easy to learn would be a priority. And she asked herself the question “Why can't 'everyone' be able to easily create their own designs?”
With this in mind, Melanie and her boyfriend Cli Obrecht decided to test the idea first on a relatively small-scale field of school yearbooks. They set up a site they call Fusion Books that lets them design high school yearbooks online. They turned Melanie's mother's living room into an office to create this site, which is an impressive prototype of the Canva system. And they borrowed money from their relatives to pay the software developers who would install the system.
Within a few years, Fusion became Australia's largest annual publisher and later expanded to the French and New Zealand markets. With her business growing rapidly, Melanie decided to drop out of college to better focus on her work.
Melanie and Cli believed that the technology they had developed could be applied beyond the school yearbook market, and they knew they needed to pursue their vision.
Thus, in 2010, Melanie flew from Perth, Australia, to Silicon Valley, the center of technology, to bring the idea from Fusion to Canva, which she thought would shake the design world, and present it to famous technology investor Bill Tai. This journey, which Melanie was both excited and nervous about, was the beginning of the Canva adventure.
In an interview, Melanie says that she had read "ways to influence the other person with body language" somewhere and that she applied this method by imitating Bill Tai's movements during the interview she went to present Canva. Things like Tai putting his arm on her chair, trying to impress her, and Tai taking care of his phone while she's talking is a pretty funny memory for Melanie when she thinks about it now. However, this tactic worked, as Tai was actually inspired by the idea of Canva and introduced Melanie to her network while she was fiddling with her phone.
However, it took 3 years for Melanie to get an investment in Canva.
In another interview, Melanie says she experienced a culture shock in Silicon Valley as there is a huge difference between Australia and America when it comes to self-promotion. She explains this by saying: “In Australia, people don't listen to your achievements, they only talk about their own. In Silicon Valley, you have to be able to talk about your own achievements when you are trying to find investment or to get an engineer on your team.”
Perhaps this cultural difference delayed Melanie's investment in Canva by 3 years. In 2013, however, Canva received $3 million in support, and Canva got its start in the industry, with former Google executive Cameron Adams joining Melanie and her boyfriend Cli as co-founders.
At the same time, Melanie states that this 3-year wait has contributed significantly to their current success:
“It took three years for us to get the investment once I started convincing an investor of my business idea. It's been a really long time, and we've had hundreds of rejections in the process. But I think this process has helped us a lot because it has allowed us to fix things and really clarify our strategies before we get started. So when we got this investment, we were able to exit quickly and effectively.”
Subsequent investment rounds have increased Canva to a total value of $82 million. With Canva, where its basic service is free to use, you have to pay a subscription fee to access more advanced tools.
Today, Canva, the online design and publishing platform, has raised $40 million in the last round to reach a valuation of $1 billion, making it Australia's top unicorn startup. Since 2013, it has reached more than 15 million users in 190 countries. Today, more than 1 billion designs have been created in the program, which produces 33 designs per second.
Together with more than 500 team members who are growing stronger every day, they work on their mission of enabling everyone to create beautiful designs. Another achievement for Melanie Perkins: She was selected for the "30 Under 30 List" in the Enterprise Tech category of Forbes Asia in 2016.
Melanie is currently the CEO of the company and her boyfriend Cli is the COO of the company. Melanie and Cli are still the owners of Fusion Books, but they have appointed a number of managers to run the business.
Canva, which is growing day by day, in 2018;
- To be a truly global company, it has enabled different nationalities to use Canva in their own language by offering more than 100 language options, including right-to-left languages such as Arabic, Urdu and Hebrew.
- Unveiled Canva China, a fully localized experience with local fonts, local templates, and a local team in Beijing.
- Thanks to Canva Print, designers in 44 countries today have the opportunity to turn professional copies of their designs into professional prints delivered directly to their doorstep.
In May 2019, it expanded its library of free stock photos for users by acquiring Pexels and Pixabay.
Melanie says Canva's growth has mostly come from using positive words, and it takes ambitious goals for the company to continue growing.
Here's how Melanie describes her vision:
“Our goal is to make it possible to design all over the world.”
PROFILE
Melanie Perkins
Cofounder & CEO, Canva
https://www.forbes.com/profile/melanie-perkins/?sh=6fba8e041265
Melanie Perkins
@MelanieCanva
https://twitter.com/melaniecanva