🌱19 year old Student to CEO: Melanie Perkins' Guide to Launching Your Dream Venture
The Power of One Idea: Melanie Perkins and the Birth of Canva.
Dear Dreamers and Doers,
Have you ever looked at someone's success story and thought, "How did they do it?" Well, let me introduce you to Melanie Perkins, the 36-year-old founder and CEO of the wildly successful design tool, Canva. Today Canva is valued at $40 Billion with customers in 190 countries. Her journey from just another classroom dreamer with no tech background to a billionaire entrepreneur is nothing short of inspiring.
Imagine this: Melanie, at just 19 years old, saw a problem while tutoring Design that students struggled for months to grasp complicated design programs like Adobe Illustrator and Microsoft Designer. She asked herself, "What if there was an online software that made design easy for everyone?"
“important thing to do is to start niche and go wide”
In 2007, alongside her partner Cliff Obraf, Melanie wrote an 80 page detail of how the app would look, took out a loan of $50,000 from friends and family and asked a software development company to help create Fusion Books—an innovative platform aimed at the creation of high school yearbooks.
“In those days, both Cliff and I were studying full-time, and working a couple of part-time jobs to get some money together. We’d work on Fusion Books whenever we could- in the morning, the evening and on the weekends.”
Eventually Fusion books grew to become Australia's biggest yearbook publisher but the people kept asking if they could also design other things and soon she realized that there was still a gap in the market. Thereafter she set herself to create yet another platform that would be a one-window solution for all publishing problems, today known as Canva.
They were invited to a conference where they met Bill Tai- a well known Silicon Valley Investor who said if they ever came to Silicon Valley he´d meet. While Cliff was still working on Fusion books, the ambitious 21-year old Melanie printed a detailed plan for Canva, got a visa for San Francisco and left for her 2 weeks trip to present “The future of publication” before her only hope-Bill Tai. Bill agreed to support the idea only if Melanie managed to find a Technical team and for that Bill introduced her to Lars -the founder of Google maps, to help her recruit coders.
“That two week trip to San Francisco, quickly turned into three months — the entire duration of my visa. I attended every single engineering conference that I could. I reached out to people on LinkedIn. I cold-called people. I set up my ‘office’ in the food court at the Nordstrom shopping center as I had a table, I felt safe, had space to work and a little portable WI-FI connection. Oh, and it was free!”
But every single person Melanie proposed was rejected and that continued for an year. Frustration was natural at this point.
“The constant rejection was difficult to deal with, the long days were exhausting and success seemed like a world away, an impossible world away. It was one of my deepest darkest moments, I’m impressed that I was able to give myself some good advice:”
“thought it’d be fun to create a one minute video every Monday, though this is one of the few we created:”
They attended a kiteboarding and entrepreneurship conference called MaiTai. Reached as many people as possible asking to have onboard from Co-founder of fluent.io, CEO of Shutterfly to anyone they would encounter. And finally at their 44th pitch deck and finally Cameron Adams (an ex-Googler) agreed to be the tech co-founder of Canva. Now it would be easier to get more amazing people on their team and attract investment due to his credibility.
“ I just kept on planting seed after seed, and in some cases the same seed in different patches of the field, until eventually eventually one grew!”
Now that they had a tech co-founder, had already built a successful product (Fusion Books) was the time for the first funding round. But they did not have any code, prototype, A/B test or pretty looking graphs.
“we were faced with a wall of problems and rejections and Questions…”
“I revised, I pitched it over 100 times so when you face all of rejections what do you do you have two options you can stop people or you can assist over and over and over again until eventually eventually you land investment”
Early days required even hundreds of pitching to even get noticed but Melanie remained undeterred.
However the engineering team was still missing to build and launch Canva and here they needed Dave, top engineering talent at Google. And who Google wasnt willing to let go.
“I sent him an email from our team: Hey Dave, our team wanted to share something with you (see attached).”
Soon after the joining of Dave, Canva was launched. it was used all around the world
“Very fortunately, that trajectory has continued and we now have over 34 million designs created each month. Which is completely baffling, and amazing, and crazy all at the same time…”
So, dear dreamers, take Melanie's story as a beacon of hope and inspiration. Dream big, start small, and never lose sight of your vision. For if Melanie can turn a simple idea into a billion-dollar empire, then surely, each of us has the potential to make our mark on the world.
Ending with my favourite quote from melanie:
in order to have wild dreams, a strong sense of character, wisdom and a sense of justice — cherish the challenges you face, the things you don’t have, the things you are afraid of, falling down and making mistakes. It’s this gap that inspires us.
With Boundless Determination
Laiba Aftab
P.s: Reply to this newsletter and let me know what other startups you would like to discover :)