How did Canva grow into a $1.5 billion company without competing on creativity? ft. Melanie Perkins

I started teaching things like Dreamweaver and Photoshop and InDesign and iMovie and all these different programs and I just watched my entire class struggling learning to use them. It would take so many clicks for people to be able to do anything, literally like adding a triangle was so many clicks. Turning it into a PDF to print was ridiculous. I think it was 22 clicks. But I think what was really interesting is it made the students feel stupid that they had to navigate all of these things that they couldn't remember all these weird buttons. And I had this belief that it shouldn't be the software that makes people feel stupid. It's actually the software that's got the problem. It was really hard and complicated, which was very interesting and frustrating. It would take a whole semester for people just to learn where the buttons were. They'd learn how to actually make something that looked good.

I was teaching a different program. It was Dreamweaver for websites and different programs for videos and a different program for graphic design, a different program for brochure design, a different program for literally every single thing that people wanted to design. And so the patterns between those programs were completely different. And so not only were the programs complex, it was a different one every time, but then you'd also have to go to different programs to get the photos and different programs for the illustrations and different programs for the videos and then different programs for the fonts. And so the only people that could navigate all this incredible complexity were people that spent years upon years learning and then designing those things.

But then it's not just the tool that you have to learn. You then have to go and purchase photos from a stock photography library and then go to a font library and a template library and collaborate over email and go backwards and forwards many times getting all the content from people then you can design. Then you have to prepare it for web or print. And I'm like, we thought this was completely ridiculous and it was all desktop based and thought that it should be online and collaborative. It seemed ridiculous because there was all these other programs that people could just jump online like social media and they wouldn't have to have any practice. And so it seemed like it was really obvious that in the future design was going to be online and collaborative and really simple and accessible to the whole world.

And after all of that work, people's first impression was actually that they were scared to use the product, which was not really what we were aiming for. They were like, 'Oh, I can't design.' And they just kind of like made... didn't really click around very much, didn't explore. And so we spent months then perfecting the onboarding process. So we wanted to invite the concept of play. So people needed to drag a hat onto a monkey and change the color of a circle and we call them the starter challenges. So really, really small things that people needed to do to help build their confidence and realized really quickly that it wasn't just a tool that had to be really simple to use. We actually had to build people's own confidence in their own abilities themselves. Any single point that someone doesn't understand what a button does or it doesn't work the way they expect makes people feel stupid. And so it was really important that we got this foundation right.

And I started to learn a lot more about gamification. And so we started with these things that we called five starter challenges. And people would drag and drop and put a hat on the monkey and change the color to red and build up their confidence rather than it being a long time between hearing about Canva and then having a design need. They'd be able to jump in within a few minutes, build up their confidence and then feel much more confident. One of our philosophies was click minimization. So the idea is trying to ensure you have the least number of clicks to get the maximum amount of value or to move you towards your goal as quickly as possible. And so if you look at the number of clicks that would previously been required to create a presentation and going to all these different libraries and all these different content places and collaboration compared to what it requires, what you can do in Canva is pretty phenomenal. So a lot of people really struggle with design because design programs are so complicated and so we really set out to change that and to make design programs really simple and accessible to everyone.