Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably | Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO)

0:00 Canva is bigger than Figma and Miro and Webflow combined. You guys are generating$2.3 billion in ARR, and you're profitable. You're also growing 60% year over year, and it's accelerating. I run everyone through the culture of Canva. One of those sections is on giving away your Lego, finding joy in the other things, and building a team, passing on your experience. Helping other people do great writing or great product building or great engineering. When is this coaching concept? I have never heard of this. We don't really have managers, but everyone in Canva has a coach that constantly working with you to look at your skills, but also when it might be time to move on to the next level. I'm curious just how you think about product management. I didn't want to do product management. management like they did at Google. And that's because of the different cultures. I have seen product managers at other companies who are very independent of teams, and that seems very weird to me. For us, product managers are really connected. It feels like Canvas has just been this nonstop up and to the right. All win, all success. In reality, that's never actually the case. How many failure stories do you want? We got plenty. Today, my guest is Cameron Adams. Cameron is the co founder and chief product officer at Canva.

1:09 Which is a truly incredible business and company. At the top of the episode I share a bunch of stats that'll probably surprise you about the scale that Canva has reached these days. In our conversation, we cover a ton of ground, including how Canvas stays product obsessed, their freemium strategy, lessons about building MVPs. how Cam and the product team think about AI within their product, also peek into their unique team culture, their SEO and growth strategy, and also peek into some of the stuff they just launched. This episode is for anyone building or growing a product or company, and I guarantee by the end of this conversation, you'll be as blown away with Canva as I am. With that, I bring you Cameron Adams, and if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it on your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.

1:53 It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. Cameron, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. It is so great to be here, Lenny. I'm very excited. I'm even more excited. I have at least a billion questions for you. I'm hoping I get through at least half a billion.

2:12 There's so much I wanna talk to you about. But I wanna start with kind of a warm and fuzzy question. Did you ever just take a a moment to reflect on the insane success of this business? They've built. Before you answer that.

2:25 I'm gonna share some stats about Canva that I think are gonna blow people's minds, so think about the answer. So I was researching Canva, all of this was just I didn't know any of this actually in I think that it'll surprise a lot of people just the scale that Canva has reached at this point. Okay, so Canva is bigger than Figma and Miro and Webflow combined. Both in terms of valuation and in terms of revenue.

2:46 You guys are generating Two point three billion dollars in ARR per year. And you're profitable. You've been profitable for about seven years at this point. You're also growing sixty percent year over year. And it's accelerating.

2:59 Faster than last year. I think this is all uh quite unheard of at the scale. Uh Do you ever just reflect back on this and like

3:07 Okay. This is I I've done well. Well, when you say it all like that it sounds pretty amazing. Um You don't

3:16 I don't think every day you Yeah. Cognizant of the growth and that achievement. But there are particular moments where you get to really reflect. And for me It's most of the time when we bring the team together.

3:28 Obviously now we're in a pretty virtual world, hybrid in Some best cases. But when the team all get together and we celebrate is when we finally have those moments where you get to kind of step out of yourself. look at this huge sea of people and realize what you've achieved together. Probably the most recent moment we got to do that was for our tenth birthday last year.

3:52 Uh so cam is largely centered in Australia. We got lots of offices around the world, but we had a big birthday celebration in Sydney. Right on the harbour there in front of the water. And we had Thousands of people there and we just got to look back on everything we've achieved over the previous ten years. Uh, and that was a pretty amazing moment.

4:11 What about just personally? You basically went from A designer on Google Wave. to uh co founder of the of one of the most Generational successful Startups.

4:22 In the past decade. How does how does that feel? I still think like I'm constantly growing, I'm constantly learning stuff. I don't feel like I've achieved, you know A ceiling or Mm. Been a massive smash hit.

4:35 We're always Changing how we're doing things. We're always Doing things we've never done before and we feel totally like a fish out of water. Um, so Yeah, I've a

4:46 achieved a few things personally, but I still feel like there's so much more to go. That sounds right. I want to talk about the flip side. From the outside. Like I described, it feels like Canvas has just been this nonstop up and to the right, all win, all success, just killing it all the time.

5:00 In reality, that's never actually the case. It's often really helpful for people to hear a story of okay, there's actually this moment of This may be all falling apart or a struggle for yourself. Is there a moment that comes to mind of just like, Oh man, this was really scary and And hard for for me.

5:17 I think there's probably a few different stories that would resonate with your audience'cause there's like There's business kind of stories of like how the actual company's tracking, there's product stories of stuff we launched that didn't go anywhere. There's team stories where you Dealing with people and all the different quirks that that entails. I think I'll choose a business story. There was a moment

5:38 Kind of around our hundred million valuation mark, where We were putting together around Um we had A lot of existing investors who are really keen to invest. This is probably um.

5:51 Third or our fourth round by the stage. And it was all looking good. There was a particular investor who was really keen to lead out. We were fine with that. So we're doing due diligence. Got to the stage where every other investor in the round had

6:05 Signed on. They were like Super excited. They'd wired the money into our bank accounts already. They'd signed all the long docs, but the lead investor hadn't. And about Two days before they were due to You know, sign and get all the money into our account.

6:21 They came back in third. Look uh Business is going great. But Essentially we think we can get a better deal, so we're gonna cut your valuation by fifth.

6:32 Um It was A huge surprise and Totally screwed up the entire round. Uh all the other investors were like, What the hell are you doing? My co fan is Melancliffe.

6:45 Pretty much jumped on a plane that night to go to Silicon Valley. rallied around a whole bunch of other investors, found a new lead investor Took them about a week. This was like the week right before Christmas.

6:59 Um It was Incredibly stressful, incredibly tumultuous. We eventually came out of it better. We actually got better. Terms on the deal that we came up with.

7:10 Uh That investor has Kind of fallen to the wayside now. And It was a real learning moment for us in terms of

7:19 How to approach fundraising And also how to be Totally independent. And that's one of the reasons why we've focused on profitability for so long now. We've been profitable for spent the seven years, and one of the reasons is that We never want to be put in the situation where we have to go someone

7:37 have to go to someone for money. To ensure the survival of a business. And being profitable means that We never have to do that. We can always do it on our own terms and in our own time. This episode is brought to you by Work OS.

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9:54 And you'll get 15% off your first year. That's at io.com slash letting. Something that I've heard from one of your investors actually will not be named. Is that at your board meetings? You have One slide on the financials of the business.

10:11 And then the rest of the deck is Product updates, the roadmap. I think this is very rare, especially for companies at your stage that become really focused on financials in the business. uh from the kind of the CFO perspective. And a lot of founders lose sight of the product.

10:27 Can you just talk about this element of how you all think about the product that's so central to the business? I think one key thing is that we don't know it's very rare. Like we approach a board meeting just like we do anything, we craft the experience about How we think it should be and how we think it's gonna be useful. So we Just like our board meetings or our product meetings or the way that we do launches.

10:49 Like we have shaped in the image We want it to be and in the way that we think it's gonna be most effective. We've always been an incredibly product led company. We always think First and foremost about the product. That was the whole genesis of camera itself. having a product that

11:05 We thought people would love to use and desperately needed to get out into the world. Uh and that's the lens that we approach. Uh everything through. In terms of board meetings. I think it's been very helpful that our financials and our growth have been amazing for so many years that we don't need to focus on it and we can just have that one slide with the graph going up and

11:24 Up and to the right. We've also attracted investors Mm. believe in us and who understand that us Driving product and getting as much product value out to our customers.

11:36 Probably the most important thing we can be doing. So that's why the board meetings do focus on that, because what we are launching in the product what's And is really determining the success of the company. Obviously financials are important and you can do a bunch of lever pulling and thinking about margins and all that kind of stuff.

11:55 Uh. product is at the end of the day the most important thing to camera and the thing that's gonna help us Stand out and continue to have success. I really like this point you made about how you didn't know any better almost, and it reminds me of something el else I heard about Canva is It took you guys a long time to hire outside execs almost all your

12:12 Leaders are home grown, and it took you a long time to even hire outside of Australia. It's even higher in the US. Can you just talk about why that's been so important and just kind of the impact? that has come out of hiring people internally and helping people You promote it internally?

12:26 One thing really Focus on is team and culture. I think You can probably bring in the world's best person at X, Y, and Z, but if they're not fitting in with your team and understanding your culture and have the same passion and vision that you do

12:41 They're not gonna succeed. So it's super important that we have people along with us for the ride. That might mean Yeah. Everyone on camera is awesome.

12:51 They mightn't be the number one person in the world for that particular thing. But they get more done than the number one person could because They've built that trust and that safety with their team. They know how to communicate their ideas. They know how to bring other people along with them and Layer a vision in the way that we understand it at Canva. And uh

13:11 is a critical thing to building a great company, I think, is having that alignment cross everyone, across your product teams, cross your marketing teams, across your customer happiness. They all need to be aligned and we all need to be rowing in the same direction. We have brought in leaders and Some of them have been incredibly successful.

13:30 We have brought in leaders and they've exited the company after a few months. Because there wasn't that fit and they didn't manage to figure out Or understand what Campbell was and how to work within this Big ecosystem now. We've got four thousand five hundred employees now. And it's not just a matter of you coming in and bringing all your ideas.

13:50 You also need to work together with all the other leaders that we have. And the team that's surrounding you. As a lens into what is important Canva when you say that they didn't understand what Canva is. What's something that kinda doesn't click for people a lot of times that

14:04 Forces them to not. To be exited, potentially. What is it that's so maybe unique or important to the way you all think about stuff. Uh I have this theory that

14:15 Type of product you're building. Very much influences the way that you think. Uh and this kinda stemmed out of a chat I was having with one of the product leaders at Spotify and they said uh Uh at Spotify they do an incredible amount of talking. about problems. Like they'll have a meeting, they'll talk about this new product feature and they'll just hash it out through conversation.

14:37 And I kind of Imagine that that was because Spotify is a very auditory product. Everyone there thinks about Music, sound, podcasts like that is their mindset. At Canva we're all about visual communications. It's

14:52 pitch text, it's social media posts, it's video, it's T shirts that you can make. And That's how we think about things in a very visual manner. So one of the things that's very particular about Canva

15:04 It's really setting visions. And I mean visions not just in the sense of looking forward two, three years, but also visions in the very visual sense. We need to be able to see it, we need mock ups, we need prototypes. You need to get that idea out of your head and present it to someone. in a visual form that helps you talk about and communicate about it.

15:25 That's one aspect of Why some people I think don't land on their feet of camera because they aren't necessary visual thinkers and they don't end up communicating what they want to do in a visual way to the rest of people at camera. Another way is that

15:39 You know, the way that we've Grown the way that we build Product has Being quite Idiosyncratic over the years. And as I said, we've learnt so much just through doing and established our own processes.

15:52 So And I think in any system if someone comes up from the outside with preconceived notions Or this idea that they're an expert and tries to bring that in. It's Gonna be rejected.

16:04 So you really need to work Together and I think my the advice that I often give to people coming to camera is just listen for A couple of months. Like you're uh What it's really working at camera and why it works before you try and change it.

16:20 We're very open to change and to new ideas. But just coming in wholesale and Totally changing the process just because that's what you've done somewhere else. Isn't gonna get you the most levels, yes. That makes so much sense.

16:33 We're talking about cultural Elements and I have one more question around culture. I saw a video uh interview we did once about Uh how you love this concept of giving away your Legos. That's kind of part of

16:45 your culture and the pol culture at Canada broadly, potentially. And this was originally popularized by Molly Graham and this First round review article. That's something something you still believe in, and if so, can you just describe that concept briefly,'cause a lot of people haven't actually heard about this. Yeah, Molly wrote a great article, which I actually refer Everyone who joins Kavity.

17:05 in uh the cultural onboarding session which I give them. So I run everyone through the culture at Canva. And what they can expect over the next few years as they work here. One of those sections is on giving away your Lego and it's really important to us because Part of being in a startup is scaling.

17:23 When you're scaling from zero users to a million to a hundred million. And when you're scaling from free founders to ten employees to a hundred employees to four thousand employees. Like you're scaling everything. From the product to the internal processes you have.

17:39 The finance team paying people How you deal with user feedback, everything's just constantly growing, growing, growing. And I think this is slightly Different to a traditional job where you

17:52 get good at the thing that you always do and you try and turn that into a process that just continually works all the time. As a startup, you just have to be changing. And we want people who are flexible You can bring new ideas, he can go to that next level, he can think about not just a million people, but ten million people, a hundred million people. A billion using the product.

18:13 And constantly ratchet up that multiplier. You need to change yourself. Which means that You probably need to give away some of the stuff that you're doing now in order to get to that next level. If you're the first email copywriter at Canva.

18:28 You can get away from writing all the emails for the first year, maybe. But when you're writing emails for a hundred million people in a hundred and ninety different countries, in a hundred different languages. all at different stages of their journey through using Canva from beginners Expert.

18:47 That just massively multiplies the complexity of the job that you have to do. And if you're trying to write every single one of those emails, you have no chance of scaling. You need to think about Who you gonna bring in to help you, what systems you're gonna introduce, what are the processes needed to get a hundred different languages translated every time you send out an email.

19:06 And that requires you to hand off that stuff. You need to maybe stop writing every single email, give that to someone else. Be comfortable with doing that because You often build up a lot of self identity in doing that and you get a lot of joy out of it. Like that's why you're a writer in the first place. But finding joy in the other things of building a team, passing on your experience, helping other people do great writing or great product building or great engineering.

19:31 Uh is really what giving away your Lego is about. And we Still encourage everyone to do that. To think about those moments where they need to Level up in their impact. How they can bring their team along with them, how they can pass on their experience and help everyone. Really

19:47 have a tremendous impact with the skills that they have. I think a lot of people and a lot of companies struggle with this idea and I'm curious if there's something you've learned about how to actually implement this. Is it Just like hey, go read this article and then I might bring it up sometimes when things are changing and there's a reorg. Or is there anything even deeper of just this is a cultural element of like we are constantly giving up our Legos.

20:08 Giving up things that we own. Probably the deeper thing I think is giving people opportunity. Uh you can talk about growth and just say Please grow. Um that's not gonna be terribly effective.

20:19 But Giving them The opportunity and the support to do so is super important. Mm-hmm. We have a system we call coaching at Canva, where you have a coach and they're constantly working with you to look at your skills, how you can improve each of those individual skills, but also what it is that you're actually doing and when it might be time to move on to the next level. Say you're just doing a product

20:41 mm role in this particular product, then now you need to be a coach of other product managers and help them build products. Like understanding those pivot points is really important and our coaches help Everyone at Canva, everyone on Canva has a coach that is constantly thinking about this aspect of their personal growth. And finding those opportunities where you can kind of

21:03 push someone to do something that they haven't done before or to expand upon an idea that they've had and give them ownership of that idea. is super important. So when People do come to us with an amazing product idea or a feature that they want to build. Or an entire team that they think should be spun up.

21:21 We really listened to them. And if it makes sense. We go s we say, go and do that. I Go and build that part of the product.

21:28 Grab a couple of people and start building video at Canva. Like do that thing that you're talking about. And I think if you give them the opportunity and a little push to go beyond what they think they're comfortable with right now. That is the best way to drive growth in your team.

21:44 Okay, there's two things I wanna follow up on there. One is this coaching concept. I I have never heard of this So what does that work? There's like do they have a bandager and they have Coach and who is this coach? We don't really have managers. Um So

21:58 Your coach is the person who thinks Uh, about you in a specialty sense. So we have specialty is engineering, product, design. There you go. Tens of different specialties across Canva. And

22:10 Your coach really helped. Similar specialty leads uh You're a product manager, they're a product manager. So they know the skills that you have to uh

22:21 used, they know the trajectory that you could possibly grow into, they know the structures that are around Canva that you could slot into when you want to go to the next level. And you your coach constantly checks in with you, has sessions Might help you with the strategy doc, might have a one on one with you. They just

22:38 Constantly thinking about those ways that you can grow and improve at Canva. And then we have Probably more of a I would say a collegiate managerial circle of uh colleagues to help you

22:53 Yeah. Do three sixty feedback, all that kind of stuff. That's the structure we've arrived on and it's Work pretty well for us and it was driven actually by a formative coaching experience that we had as founders quite a few years ago.

23:05 From an external coach and we decided to bring that into Canber as a whole philosophy. Okay, and these coaches, are they like professional coaches or are there people in the company that are like I will be a coach for this function? Yeah. People in the company, so we've got Probably close to eight hundred or a thousand coaches now at Canva. Wow. Um we do have like

23:24 very specific coaches who are just coaches and they can drop into any situation They're not product managers, they're not designers. But they're relatively few. I think we've got Probably five of those type of coaches and they They

23:38 Work in very um special situations. But what we're focused on is enabling the broader circle of coaches to those eight hundred people to understand what it is to be a coach and have the skills of coaching. So we focus a lot on Teaching them the skills of coaching. Had to

23:56 Build a growth mindset in there, coaches. All the skills that you need. Uh so yeah, it's a massive part of Canva. And so there's like a product management coach and This person helps all the PMs to get become better at the craft of product management.

24:09 Yeah. Wow. So interesting. Okay, and then the performance review piece. Your s how does that work? Yeah, so your coach feeds into that, but we also need three sixty feedback from all the people that you work with. And we do that on regular cycles. As with everything in Canva, the cadence of those cycles has changed over the years.

24:27 Uh but now we do that every six months. We talked about product for a little bit. I wanna spend a little time on product management. I'm curious just how you think about product management. There's this kinda constant debate across tech companies about the value of PMs. Are we better with more PMs? Are there too many PMs? What are PMs do for you? You're a chief product officer.

24:44 Where do you Where do you find product managers bring the most value? to Canva and then do just have thought on the future of the field of product management. I don't know, it's kinda one of those things that I don't want to

24:58 quantify. Like I don't want to put it in a box and say this is product management because I've worked at a few places now. Nope. I've actually only had one real job, which was at Google, where I got to experience product managers the Google way. And

25:14 The way that they do product management is totally different to the way that we do it at Canva. And That's partially by design because I didn't want to do product management like they did at Google. And that's because of the different cultures that they have. Like Google's a fantastically engineering driven culture. And the way that they think about product management is mostly in the technical sense of like

25:35 Here's a piece of technology. What can that technology do? How do we scale it? At Canva, we focus a lot on experience and as I said before It's a very visual experience. So we require a different Product management process, but also a different product management mindset.

25:51 I think we Probably did that more from the ground up than a lot of other startups. Because Uh Mellon Cliff were a lot less

26:02 I think inculcated into how product management is done other places. I had a bit of experience from Google, but was still fairly independent in my thinking. So we almost went back to first principles on how product management should be done. And To be honest.

26:16 We didn't want to have the term product manager for a long, long time. Uh it wasn't till about Yes. Six or seven where we actually had Product managers.

26:27 Uh, we decided cave just because it was easy to explain to people. But It also took it. Four or five years before we even had another product owner who wasn't us. Um Part of that was us giving up our Lego, and I think we took a little too long to give up our Lego on that one.

26:45 But the other part of it was us figuring out exactly what we wanted and how we Your product and how to communicate that to someone else and get them to do it in a similar way and Work with the teams in the way that we did. Um

27:00 Прос Product managers are really connected. They Connect. The team, ideas, data, whole bunch of different things and it's very messy. There's no

27:12 Exact recipe for how to do it. But Connecting these disparate areas and moving the team and the technology and our customers C

27:24 A new place, a new vision is essentially what product managers do. And it's gonna involve Compromise, it's gonna involve changes in the feature scope. It's gonna involve timelines of like Okay, we can't ship it in May, it's gonna have to be July. Let's

27:39 figure out what we can do with marketing to make that work. Like This constant movement and connection and reorienting around constraints that have suddenly arisen in the last week. And that's where we see great product managers operating in Canada. You mentioned uh Melling Cliff.

27:58 For folks that don't know they're the other two. co founders of Canva and they were dating When they were starting Canva, I think it was called Fusion Books back in the day. Before Canva. Now they're married.

28:09 What's it like working with a married couple as the other two co founders? And is there something they Did well that Didn't make you feel like this third wheel. person that isn't, you know, married. to them. Uh it is always tricky working with a couple because they're on it twenty four seven.

28:27 Mm-hmm. When you leave the office and they head home, they're still talking about Product, business, strategy, all the things. Um, I think they've done a really good job. Uh Evolving those ideas overnight through the conversations they have and over dinner and and walking, but then bringing that back the next day.

28:45 And being transparent about that. That's Super important if you're working in that In that kind of dynamic. There are definitely moments where I have missed out on a memo.

28:55 And and stuff has kind of rapidly proceeded. And I think I've just gotten used to that and gotten used to catch up really quickly. Having a word with them on the side to like clarify what You know what the motivation is here. And just constantly maintaining that alignment.

29:11 And I think it happens in any partnership or team like There's moments where there's small alignments, there's more tectonic stuff that happens over months or years. And you need to realign at some stage. I think it happens with friendships, it happens With

29:27 My wife It happens with our product teams. There's always these moments where you need to recommunicate things and and relay the land of it. And I think what's been great is Right at doing that as

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30:37 I wanna go back to the beginning of Canva. I know they it took you guys a year of building. before you launched it. So it took you a long a year to build the MVP. Essentially, and I know you have some strong opinions on how long to wait, how MVPs are often way too early.

30:52 You talk about that, just why you guys waited so long before launching. Clearly worked out. And so I'm just curious your lessons from that experience. Yeah, so when we launched or when we were building uh the Lin Startup book came out. So that was all anyone talked to us about investors Of the people building products, trying to give us advice.

31:13 They're like just get Something out the door as crappy as it is just to get in front of users. Uh I think For us.

31:21 The product is the experience and giving people a great experience is an intrinsic part of the product. It's also an intrinsic part of how we've grown. People having a good experience and being enthusiastic about it. has been how we've spread

31:37 The word of Canva. And organic word of mouth growth was the biggest driver of Canvas growth for many years and Probably still is, I think. People just telling someone else to jump on this amazing product.

31:51 I don't think we would have had that if we just put uh Pretty crappy product. That People didn't have joy in using. Sure, it might have got the job done, but if they weren't excited about using it the next day

32:05 Then that wasn't a bar that we wanted to hit. So we did hold off on them. launching the product for a long time and investors Did ask us many, many times when are you launching, can you just get this thing out the door. But we had done enough research.

32:20 We knew the problem space, we knew what people wanted. From the product. Part of that was due to The work that Mellon Cliff did on fusion books in kind of a very constrained area. I had looked at school yearbooks.

32:35 They had built an experience for that. And they had observed what worked and didn't work and how they might scale that into a bigger product. Uh it also worked for me, who'd worked in a lot of creative tools and built a lot of creative tools over the previous fifteen years. So I had a lot of understanding of how people interacted with these systems and the experience that we wanted to build.

32:57 So we did hold off. And We The product we launched launched we obviously weren't happy with. You have to launch something that you're not completely happy with. You know all the rough edges and But yeah.

33:09 You're releasing it knowing that the rough edges are gonna be outweighed by the joyful experience. We still did ton of user testing. Like it's not like we just launched this thing blind and said Uh we hope people like it. We did a ton of user testing. We did a ton of user research into the features that people wanted

33:29 And we built that up over time and You know, one year to me actually seems like short time. A lot of people think it's a long time. But one year was just enough for us to scrape in with an experience that People did truly love when we launched.

33:44 And Particularly the market that we went after when we launched. Really loved it. Yeah. I'm curious just what advice you share with founders when they're asking you How long? How how joyous does this first version have to be? How long?

33:57 How awesome does my MVP need to be? One thread I picked up as you were describing Your experiences you all had deep experience in the space, so you kinda knew. What you wanted to build. It wasn't like this dark

34:08 Forest of exploration is like we know what we want, generally. Do you have kind of advice do you share with founders of how how awesome their M VP should be? And when it takes a When it's worth spending a year or two or three. Building it.

34:19 There's a couple of points in there that First is that even today We build for ourselves. Uh and I think this is advice that

34:29 Probably a lot of product people wouldn't give you is that you shouldn't build for yourself, you should build for your customer. But I think we're fortunate that we are our customer. And the the problems we experience are the problems that Hundreds of millions, billions of people experience. I think that is maybe a

34:47 Problem area that we're interested in. But it has enabled us to move really quickly on the product because we can quickly know what's working in the product, whether this feature is useful, whether it's reached that bar. Of a great experience. That's one aspect of it.

35:05 That is also about being passionate. Like You entering an area that you're extremely passionate about. I often hear people who are like I wanna do a tech startup. What is the best area I should focus on to build a product in? And to me that is

35:20 Totally the wrong way to go about building company that you're gonna spend the next ten, twenty years in. It's if you're in an area that you're on? particularly passionate about, but you see the opportunity to make a bit of money. Or have some

35:34 External measure of success. That is a terrible way to go about being a founder because you're gonna hit These rock bottom dark places And if the passion isn't driving you through that, you are gonna have Incredibly hard time getting to the next step.

35:50 So that's probably the first area I'd Uh talk about in terms of Knowing when a a product is amazing. The second one is that it really needs to spark if Joy and delight in people and just

36:04 Pure excitement. It can't just be like, Oh yeah, this is a useful tool for me. It needs to light up their eyes. They need to be like How do I sign up for this thing tomorrow? How do I get it? How do I pay for it? And they need to want to talk to a

36:19 Other people about it. Because in the early days of your startup. You don't have marketing dollars, you don't have channels that you can go to to immediately get access to a million people. You need to really foster the first people that are gonna use your product. And they're gonna be the ones that

36:36 Gonna spread it? Then you're gonna set the foundations. For your grass. Interesting. So Piece of advice number one is

36:45 Work on something you really want yourself. That you're excited to work on. Two is Get it to a place where it lights up people's eyes. They're just like so excited with this thing. For that second part, what was it for Canva? Was it just that it was even possible to do this sort of design in in a browser?

37:00 It was Two thousand twelve, two thousand thirteen when we launched. And visual content was still in its infancy. Uh Instagram had only been out a couple of years, Pinterest was on the rise. People were just getting used

37:17 Creating visuals. And it was kind of hived off to a very select few because to create those visuals you needed to for some expensive software, know how to use that expensive software. Nowhere to go to get fonts and photos and illustrations, know how to put that together into something that looked decent. And then ship that off.

37:36 It was something that only one percent of the world could do. And democratising design, empowering the world to design is Cama's entire mission. And we saw this sweet spot. At the time in social media. It wasn't

37:51 What we set out to go after. We set out to democratize design, to bring design to literally everyone in the world and to everything that they're doing. But through the user testing that we did. through the level levels of excitement that we saw from different people. um social media managers really came to the fore at that time.

38:11 So we knew that They really Fit what we could ship right now. We didn't ship a presentation product or a T shirt builder in our very first version. We shipped a thing that could make

38:23 Square landscape and portrait graphics. And blog post graphics. And that got it particular segment of society excited. We added on all the things afterwards because that was part of our vision and ultimately what we wanted to build.

38:37 But with a team of ten people in the space of a year. Building something that really got social media managers excited was what we could uh pull off. And that's something we kind of realized in the last six months of that launch year. We didn't quite know who our audience was gonna be. We knew it was a tool that anyone could use. But

38:59 In that last six months of User testing or refining is when we really identified that first target market and we just lent into it. There's so many things you all nailed early on. One of them is the focus Persona slash I C P which is you said social media managers.

39:17 Just to take the lesson from that. You basically saw that segment getting the most excited about the product. And that told you let's focus on the script. Is that right? Exactly.

39:28 And was it like an order of magnitude more excited? Like what what do you what do people look for there that tells them This is the one, is it like Some what what did you see there other than just more excitement? It was just incredibly emotive language. Like Like.

39:44 Um Sheer joy, particularly coming into the product. We worked a lot on the onboarding process in the last couple of months. Oh Of launch. And that was really pivotal because

39:57 Product features are kinda there. You could add text, you could add images, you can change the color of things, you can move stuff around the page. Um It was a It was a Simple but powerful product.

40:08 But there was this thing holding people back from actually using it and understanding what camera could do for them. And we use the test of the onboarding of Canva. Ton. Yeah.

40:22 Actually user testing dot com and just kind of launched then, which really unlocked us because We didn't have to do these big formal labs or anything like that. We could just go online and get results in the space of half an hour. So that was like a pivotal unlock for our product process. And that's something we still employ today. And Through that we tailored the onboarding process to get people excited.

40:45 And to understand But Deep uh goal with Cameron the deep uh impact it could let them have. It wasn't just about

40:55 letting them put a pretty picture on the page. Really unlock their ideas and let them do things they couldn't do before. And we shape the onboarding to do that. And it resonated the most with social media managers because They had this massive content need that they couldn't really service.

41:11 And in the first minute of Canva with the right onboarding It just unlocked the whole realm of productivity and impact that they Didn't have before. That's why they got super excited. We talk a lot on this podcast about the power of onboarding and the

41:27 the impact that can have on retention and everything down funnel. Do you remember what the unlock was in terms of onboarding and getting more people activated? Is there anything that's Something that other people can learn from. For us it was taking that first step. Like

41:41 Particularly with Canva and any I think. Creative tool. There's a real fear of the blank page. So Prior to like any onboarding thought from us. We had a blank page, we had a few coach marks that said

41:54 Here's why you do this, here's why you do this. And then they'd be left on this blank page and people would freak out. So what we were really focused on was just taking that first step and then the next step and then the next step. And before they knew it, they'd built a design. And the way that we did that

42:08 was to encourage a really simple step. So the first one was Click on this search box and search for a monkey. It literally it literally said that. Searching for a monkey is something you probably don't do in most tools, so it's a little surprising.

42:24 Which was a good kind of inroad. Uh, but it was still super easy. Like anyone can type monkey and then you type that in, it comes up with this whole Sway the monkey images. Kind of look hilarious.

42:37 And just dragging one of those out onto a page is another simple step. And we just got people to walk through that, keeping their interest up. Keeping the bar of effort quite low, but within three or four steps they'd built up something that they'd never been able to do before. I surprised them. The words that we literally got out of user testing were I didn't know I could be a designer.

42:58 Um That was what we managed to do through several rounds of refinement on the onboarding process. That's that is It's It's lowering the barriers to entry.

43:09 And also increasing the amount of delight. And I think those two things are what you should be aiming for with your onboarding. That's an incredible insight. I won is there a video of that original onboarding out there? Or is the current one still similar? Uh the current one isn't

43:23 Similar. We have constantly gone back to it because it performs really well. Um we do we do actually apply the same Approach of little steps building up into Uh

43:35 bigger accomplishments. Um and that's actually rolled out Through our last round of launches for the last couple of years through something we call Learn and Play. So with every launch that we do now We think about how to teach people about that feature and how to get them really involved in it. Um we have a whole series of learn and plays where when we launch

43:55 AI photo editing They can try it out right then and there. They've got some great content that they can immediately operate on. And it's a super simple step for them to type in a prompt and see the result of that. I think an interesting and really important takeaway here is you built a very delightful Incredible innovative product.

44:13 But it still didn't work until you figure it out. The onboarding and that You needed to figure out the persona to focus on. All those things end up being essential uh incredibly important. It's not just build something amazing and delightful. Definitely. Staying within this realm of growth.

44:27 You've grown in large part Thanks incredibly successful SEO template strategy. You mentioned in an interview there's this guy Andre that came on early and helped you figure this stuff out. Uh is that is that true? And if so, what was kind of the key Insight.

44:43 that he had that led to such a great Success in terms of growth. Real. Andre Andre is an amazing guy. He's actually been in and out of Canva three or four times now. Um keep pulling him back. Yeah, keep pulling him back.

44:57 We originally found him he came from a startup that was kinda going under here in Sydney. And Uh Hm. He did

45:08 We had thought about SEO. We knew it was this You could use and I think in a couple of our pitch techs we had SEO, the whole growth channel that we're gonna execute upon in order for investors to to make a ton of money. But we we pretty much knew nothing about it.

45:24 And it it was kind of Sitting away in a backlog of things to do in the first couple of years of Canva. And we came across Andre and he just really crystallized what SEO was and how it would actually help us grow. So we brought him on

45:40 He rolled out his strategy and it was fantastically Effective. Uh it was also incredibly cheap. And it was super easy for us to do ourselves. He set up a whole team of people who looked at people's motivations.

45:55 And Uh the top jobs to be done that can but Good service. He then mapped that through the entire experience of Going into Google, typing a search query

46:07 Getting that search query, seeing that it was a great result, like firstly getting to the top result. But then also the experience after they landed on camera. So if they search for Wanna make a Halloween poster. The top giggle result would be Canva, they'd click on it, they'd land on the Halloween Post the landing page. It would

46:27 Tell them how they were gonna do it, show you how the product was gonna do that, have a button there that immediately took them into a Halloween post a template. Went through our fantastic onboarding of like customizing that poster really simply. And then they would hit Done. Download the image and they had a fantastic experience.

46:45 And he thought through that whole end to end flow from First landing on Google and typing into the search box through to that magic moment where they're like Camera just helped me do something amazing and I wanna do it again. Amazing. Okay. So a few things I'm hearing there. One is

47:00 Figure out the jobs to be done of potential users. figure out where their search volume Pig out ones you can actually solve for them, like say Halloween poster. And then think about that experience end to end from search to landing. And obviously you have to deliver on that promise. You have to actually show them a really cool Halloween poster that they can create.

47:18 Right. Yeah, again it's Like Product led truly means product led because you can't just SEO the hell out of something that is a terrible experience.

47:28 Time that product experience at the end of the SEO journey. is just as important as the technicalities of SEO itself. And Andre really harnessed the whole spectrum of that to produce the end experience which ultimately ended up with

47:44 An active user having a delightful experience. Is there anything else along those lines that was really surprising to you or really Wow, that worked a lot better than I thought'cause it's It's probably one of the most well

47:55 executed most successful SEO strategies in history. And I'm so curious just if there's anything else there that's just like, Oh wow, that was really effective. And I didn't expect that. There's You know, there's a ton in the SEO realm that that Andre drove the Can get quite technical.

48:12 But I think one of the other kind of pivotal growth moments for us was internationalization. I think as an Australian company we're kind of fortunate in the Australia isn't a great market to focus on. We've got twenty five million people here. It's Okay, but it's not.

48:29 sizable, it's not gonna make you a huge success. Whereas probably a startup that starts in the US. We'll tend to focus on the US because it's a huge market. Huge monetizable market. And you can entirely create a great company that just services the US.

48:44 From Australia we need to think about the world. And that meant that we very quickly got into internationalization. We started localizing and internationalized internationalizing our products.

48:57 Uh Three years after launch, which is quite early compared to a lot of other companies. And We tackled it with real vigour. We had a goal of being in five different languages within the first year of localization and

49:11 We actually hit eight in that first year and then we set ourselves a goal of being in a hundred different languages the next year. And the internationalization team smashed that goal by the end of twenty seventeen. And It has drastically changed Canvas growth trajectory because being in other languages offering a localized experience, something that people in Brazil or Indonesia or Spain or Poland can authentically feel like they're using a product that's made for them. has totally changed who our market is, how quickly we can grow.

49:44 And the way the product's used. internationalizing into Brazilian Portuguese meant that we had to focus a ton more on the Android mobile experience, which is really different for us because we focus a lot on the desktop experience for the first four years. People also in Brazil run entire businesses from their mobile phone, uh and the types of content they're creating to interact with their audience is totally different.

50:08 Um, so it's actually shaped our product and changed our product trajectory as a result of thinking about internationalization. And It is just fueled tremendous growth. Brazil, India, Indonesia, they're all in our top five markets.

50:22 And they grow way faster than the US does. Mm-hmm. And I know you went international Like in year four or something like that, which is really early for for a company. Uh it also makes sense for SEO plus internationalization makes tons of sense. A lot more surface area.

50:37 Okay. I'm gonna have two more questions. One is around your freemium strategy, another a thing you all nailed. There's just this uh You're both seeing incredible growth and incredible monetization.

50:50 I'm curious what your kind of philosophy is on what to include in the free plan. Versus what's it? People should pay for'cause it's Clearly worked out great. Premium for us wasn't so much

51:02 growth strategy or a monetization strategy, as much as it spoke to our core mission of empowering the world to design. We truly want to democratise design, which means we want to get design into the hands of as many people as we can because we think that the world is a better place. when more people can create really rich visual content. So frame just made sense to us because we could get the tool into Billions of people's hands and

51:29 they wouldn't necessarily have to pay for it. And much of the world can't pay for products because they just don't have access to that level of income. So providing that equality was really important to us. Uh, but also you need to build a viable business because you can't Help the world design if you can't afford to keep the lights on. So Freemium just really hit this sweet spot for us between philosophy and business building.

51:53 So it was always Part of our plan since Tai one. We initially had uh element sales as our business models. When we first went to pitch camera, it was all about creative design.

52:06 Anything you use in that design will cost you a dollar. So if you dragged in a monkey And you wanted to export that whole design, you'd have to pay a dollar for that. I've done that many times. Yes. Uh, it was really exciting to investors at the time. It was also really exciting to the content creators who were giving us the monkeys to put into our product. It was a totally new business model.

52:26 Yeah. Unlocked, I think. And an area that a lot of people were unfamiliar which was stock photography. Most people had not paid A hundred, five hundred dollars for a photo and that really held them back from being

52:40 Visual content created. So it was a really unique innovation for us. And for the first two years of Camba's life. That was how we derived our revenue. Grew pretty well. It was still like

52:52 I don't know, thirty percent month on month growth in terms of revenue, but like you can do that in the early stages of a startup. It wasn't until we introduced that first subscription product. that we saw really hockey stick growth. in our revenue. That was

53:07 Always the plan to launch a subscription product? But As with many things, it was a vision That we didn't quite have meat around the bones. So

53:16 We knew we wanted to put in a subscription what exactly that subscription would look like. We didn't quite know. And through the first couple of years of Canva We started noticing what people were asking for, what they would be more likely to pay in a subscription for. And that formed the first few features that became What was then called Canva for work.

53:35 Um, which is now called Canva Pro. Uh and we launched our first subscription I think about three years after we launched the first product. And we just rapidly saw the revenue from the subscription start overtaking The one dollar image uh Payment.

53:53 So much so that uh Three or four years later. We made image Uh element payments. part of the subscription. And again, that was like a second hockey stick in gross in terms of

54:07 the revenue from the subscription because Or you can eat images inside the Canva Pro subscription with just amazing value. uh value add for people. And I don't even know if we get any revenue from from image element sales now.

54:22 Uh going into the subscription. Amazing. Just hockey stick after hockey stick. Speaking of another hockey stick, I want to talk about AI. Just need acquire hockey teams.

54:34 Um I wanna talk about AI, something on the top of everyone's minds these days. It's another area you guys have nailed. You're doing amazing work with AI. It's Providing actual value and business impact. I hear you have an amazing internal

54:47 AI ops team. Is there anything that you've learned so far that you can share but just how to Integrate AI. uh successfully and effectively into a product. As a technology company, you always just need to be constantly evolving and using the best technology.

55:03 And when we started that was mobile phones and clo computing, like they were the innovations that came in that really unlocked Canva. AI the next decade I think of innovation. It's the next pivotal piece of technology that helps you build better product. But It also can't just be the basis for your product.

55:22 You can't just be a product that's purely built on AI on Being a rapper around an L L M or something like that. You still need to think about what it is that people want to do and how you build a product that actually meets that need. It isn't just about slapping a chat bot on something that already existed. It's about deeply thinking about how AI can help them get to that Goal even faster.

55:45 And We view AI as the next way of democratizing design and empowering the world to design. Help more people design. Helping more people design quicker. Hopefully more people design quicker with better quality.

55:57 Mm. And that's how we approach every aspect of including AI in the Canva platform. We've had a Team of machine learning engineers for probably

56:09 Seven years now? I think Their work has become a lot more visual now and more c uh customer facing. Way back when they were just doing recommendation engines inside our emails and our home page and suggesting templates to you. But now they get to work with some really cool technology which

56:27 Let's them produce images for people and create designs and Summarised text. And translate to a hundred different languages. Like it's really stuff that you can put directly in front of customers now. And that's Super exciting.

56:41 Uh, over the last couple of years we've built up more and more visual AI experts inside Canva. Um We approach AI inside the product. Through three kind of pillars. First of these is that

56:55 We need to build Some of RNA, I take. And we focus on building the I tech that we have the biggest advantage in, that we have the most data that we can put into it, the most insights. uh the most criticality to our product and our business. So we have teams building our N AI models around design and images and that kind of stuff.

57:15 Second pillar Is just finding the world's best AI People to part. And there's a whole bunch of stuff. That you don't need to internalize in your company.

57:24 You don't need to create an LLM because It's a commodity thing now and there's a bunch of providers who can do it way better and have way more resources to do it with than you do. So finding a great partner like OpenAI We partnered with Runway ML to do video generation. Like finding the world's best

57:43 And Bringing them into your product. With a great integration. The the second pillar? And for us the third pillar

57:50 Is a app ecosystem. We're fortunate now we've got Hundred and seventy million people using the product every single month. We have quite an audience that people want access to. That's right.

58:02 app developer ecosystem, they can build apps which directly integrate with the Canva product to give them access to those hundreds of millions of people. And people are quite eager to do that now. We've seen a huge uptake in that. from AI developers who've included stuff in Canva from Music generators to virtual avatars that can present your presentation to you, to a whole slew of things.

58:25 And those three pillars Have I think Allowed us to create a really coherent experience. And one that still keeps a focus on what people want to do. How to help them reach their big goals.

58:38 In a way that doesn't just Push technology in the face. In a way that just is part of the experience and is a natural way of getting them to where they want to go. I was also s looking at the GPT story of the fifth most popular GPT, custom GPT, where people can generate logos.

58:56 Using it. So maybe that's driving some growth too. Uh, I know you wanted to share something that you guys are launching. Or h or have launched by the time this episode comes out. Is that true?

59:08 Yeah, so we've got a big event in Los Angeles in a couple of months. Um It's our camera create, which is kind of a evolution of the season openness that we used to do. So season openers are no longer just inside Canber now. We actually invite our whole community in and we're gonna have Probably about four thousand people in the

59:28 Theater in LA and a couple of million online. And We're really gonna be pulling the cov Pretty much the next decade. Canva.

59:38 We've focused the the first decade of Canber on unlocking individuals and small businesses. giving them the tools that they need to design and to express themselves and create visual content. And as Canber has grown and people have gotten used to creating this stuff, they've invited their teams in. They now collaborate with people on presentations.

1:00:00 On camera videos. On Swag T shirts that they need to make for their event next week. And as more and more people are using Canva together It's picking up a lot of steam. We've got ninety five percent of the Fortune five hundred using Canva.

1:00:14 We've got huge teams of Thousands of people using Canva. And this has really opened our eyes to Not only the enterprise opportunity, but also just the way to redesign the way people work. And that is what the event

1:00:29 at the end of May is about It's really redesigning work for a whole number of different verticals from marketing to sales to HR To IT to creatives. that work inside large teams, large organizations, large enterprises.

1:00:46 Svoje Uh we've kind of redesigned Canva. The to these collaborative Enterprise age. Uh so we'll be pulling the covers off that. Alongside.

1:00:56 Uh work kit, which are the whole verticalized experiences for people inside marketing and sales and HR that Don't want to use Canva. As well as a bunch of improvements to Uh AI product. And

1:01:09 an actual enterprise SKU that we're launching as well. So through this growth and through getting to understand the needs of CIOs, uh and heads of security at enterprises. Uh, we've realized that there pretty much needs to be

1:01:24 And a new enterprise product of Canva that meets the needs of Hugely scale teams. been quite different for us because we have scaled from those individuals just using the product all by themselves and organically growing the teams. And now looking at it from a Pops down lands.

1:01:41 And building that enterprise product is what we've been focused on. Focused on for the last couple of years. Um so we Pulling the covers off that as well in LA. I see another hockey stick approaching. Uh I'm excited about all these things you're launching.

1:01:54 What a business you've built. I feel like it's still way too under the radar, even though it's this juggernaut. Uh nice work, Cameron and team. Two more questions I ask everyone, uh where can folks find you online and how can listeners be useful to you? They can find me online at uh the maninblue dot com, which is my Log that's been around for

1:02:12 Twenty four years now. Uh what was the other question? How can listener. Yeah, how can listeners be useful to you? I love hearing their design stories. how design has helped unlock something for them, whether it's starting their first business

1:02:26 Or helping a nonprofit that they volunteer uh I just love Bumping into someone in the street and seeing the joy of design light up in their eyes. So please do that whenever you see me. Beautiful. Cam, you're awesome. Canva is awesome. Go check out Campbell dot com.

1:02:40 Easy to find. Yeah. Thanks for being here. See you soon. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

1:02:59 You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast.com. See you in the next episode.

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