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

26:39Part 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. But the other part of it was us figuring out exactly what we wanted and how we built 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. For us, product managers are really connectors. They connect the team ideas, data, a whole bunch different things. And it's very messy. There's no exact recipe for how to do it. But connecting these disparate areas and moving the team and the technology and our customers to a new place, a new vision is essentially what product managers do.

27:28And it's going to involve compromise. It's going to involve changes in the features. It's going to involve timelines of like, okay, we can't shift it in May. It's going to have to be July. Let's 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 Canva. You mentioned a melancholy 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.

28:08Now they're married. 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 married? It is always tricky working with a couple because they're on at 24 -7. When you leave the office and they head home, they're still talking about product, business strategy, all the things. I think they've done a really good job of evolving those ideas over night through the conversations they have over dinner and walking, but then bringing that back the next day and being transparent about that.

28:47And that's super important if you're working in that kind of dynamic. There are definitely moments where I have missed out on a memo and stuff is kind of rapidly preceded. And I think I've just gotten used to that and gotten used to catching up really quickly, having a word with them on the side to like clarify what the motivation is here and just constantly maintaining that alignment. 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 to years. And you need to realign at some stage. I think it happens with friendships that happens with my wife.

29:28It happens with our product teams. There's always these moments where you need to re -communicate things and relay the land of it. And I think we've been great at doing that. And as co -founders, even for the small things and also for the more tectonic things. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top -notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now you can assess risks, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform Vanta. Vanta's market leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risks.

30:13Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1 ,000 off Vanta Go to Vanta .com slash Lenny. That's V -A -N -T -A dot com slash Lenny. I want to go back to the beginning of Canva. I know that it took you guys a year of building before you launched it. So it took you a year to build an MVP. Essentially, and then you have some strong opinions on how long to wait. How MVPs are often way too early. You talk about that, just why you guys waited so long before launching.

30:55It clearly worked out. And so I'm just curious your lessons from that experience. Yeah, so when we launched or when we were building the Lean Startup book came out. So that was all anyone talked to us about investors. Other people building products trying to give us advice. They were like, just get something out the door as crappy as it is just to get in front of users. I think for us, 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 of being enthusiastic about it has been how we've spread the word of Canva.

31:39And organic word of mouth growth was the biggest driver of Canva's growth for many years. And probably still is, I think, people just telling someone else to jump on this amazing product. I don't think we would have had that. We just put our 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, then that wasn't a bar that we wanted to hit. So we did hold off on launching the product for a long time. And investors did ask us many, many times when you're launching. Can you just get this thing out the door?

32:18But we had done enough research. We knew the problem space. We knew what people wanted from the product. Part of that was due to the work that Mel and Clif did on Fusion Books in kind of a very constrained area. They had looked at school yearbooks. 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. It also worked for me who'd worked in a lot of creative tools and built a lot of creative tools over the previous 15 years. So I had a lot of understanding how people interact with these systems and each experience that we wanted to build.

32:57So we did hold off. And the product we launched launched, we obviously went happy with. You have to launch something that you're not completely happy with. You know all the rough edges. But you're releasing it knowing that the rough edges are going to be outweighed by the joyful experience. We still did a ton of user testing. It's not like we just launched this thing blind and said 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. And we built that up over time. And one year to me actually seems like short time. A lot of people think it's a long time.

33:37But one year was just enough for us to scrape in with an experience that people did truly love when we launched. And particularly the market that we went after when we launched really loved it. I'm curious to 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 how awesome does my MVP need to be? When thread I picked up as you were describing your experiences, you all had deep experience in the space. So you kind of knew what you wanted to build. It wasn't like this dark forest of exploration is like we know what we want generally.

34:11You have kind of advice you share with founders of how how awesome their MVP should be. And when it takes when it's worth spending a year or two or three building it. There's a couple of points in there. The first is that even today we build for ourselves. And I think this is advice that 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 problems we experience are the problems that hundreds of millions, billions of people experience. I think that is maybe a fortunate part of just the problem area that we're interested in.

34:52But it is 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. And I think that is also about being passionate. Like you entering an area that you're extremely passionate about. I often hear people are like, I want to do a tech startup. What is the best area I should focus on to build a product in? And to me, that is totally the wrong way to go about building a company that you're going to spend the next 10, 20 years in. If you're in an area that you are particularly passionate about, but you see the opportunity to make a bit of money or have some external measure of success, that is a terrible way to go about being a founder because you're going to hit the rock bottom dark places.

35:43And if the passion isn't driving you through that, you are going to have incredibly hard time getting to the next step. So that's probably the first area I talk about in terms of knowing when a product is amazing. The second one is that it really needs to spark joy and delight in people and just 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 other people about it because in the early days of your startup, you don't have marketing dollars.

36:25You don't have channels which you can go to to immediately get access to a million people. You need to really foster the first people that are going to use your products. And they're going to be the ones that are going to spread it and then they're going to set the foundations for your growth. Interesting. So, piece of advice number one is work on something you really want yourself. They are 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 impossible to do this sort of design in a browser?

37:00It was 2012, 2013 when we launched. And visual content was still in its infancy. Instagram had only been out a couple of years. Pinterest was on the rise. People were just getting used to creating visuals. And it was kind of hived off to a very select few because to create those visuals, you needed to forward some expensive software and know how to use that expensive software. No way 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. It was something that only 1 % of the world could do. And democratizing design empowering the world to design is cameras entire mission.

37:45And we saw this sweep spot at the time in social media. It wasn't 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 levels of excitement that we saw from different people, social media managers really came to the fore at that time. 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 square landscape and portrait graphics and blog post graphics.

38:28And that got a 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. But with a team of 10 people in the space of a year, building something that really got social media managers excited was what we could 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 going to be. We knew it was a tool that anyone could use. But in that last six months of user testing and refining is when we really identified that first target market and we just lent into it.

39:07There's so many things you all nailed early on. One of them is the focus persona slash ICP, which is you said social media managers. 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 this group. Is that right? Exactly. And was it like an order magnitude more excited? What do you, what do people look for there that tells them this is the one? Is it like some, what did you see there other than just more excitement? It was just incredibly emotive language. Just like, like, by the way. She enjoyed particularly coming into the product.

39:47We worked a lot on the onboarding process in the last couple of months of a launch. And that was really pivotal because the product features were kind of there. You could add text, you could add images, you can change the color of things, you can move stuff around the page. It was a simple but powerful product. But there was this thing holding people back from actually using it and understanding what camera could do for them. And we use a test of the onboarding of Canva. TAN actually use a testing .com and just kind of launch then which really unlocked us because we didn't have to do these big formal labs or anything like that.

40:30We 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 and to understand the deeper goal with Canva and the deeper impact it could let them have. It wasn't just about letting them put a pretty picture on the page. It really unlocked their ideas and let them do things they couldn't do before. And we shaped 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.

41:11And in the first minute of Canva with the right onboarding, you just unlocked the whole realm of productivity and impact that they didn't have before. And that's why they got super excited. We talked a lot in the spot guest about the power onboarding and 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, particularly with Canva and any, I think creative tool. There's a real fear of the blank page.

41:47So prior to like any onboarding thought from us, we had a blank page, we had a few coach marks that said, here's what you do this, here's what you do this. And then they'd be left on this blank page and people would freak out. So what we 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 was to encourage a really simple step. So the first one was click on the search box and search for a monkey. It literally said that. Searching for a monkey is something you probably don't do in most tools.

42:22So it's a little surprising, which was a good kind of inroad. But it was still super easy. Like anyone can type monkey and then you type that in. It comes up with this whole sway that monkey images, which kind of look hilarious. And just dragging one of those out onto a page is another simple step. And we just got people to walk through that, keeping that 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. And it surprised them. The words that we literally got out of use at testing where I didn't know I could be a designer.

42:58And that was what we managed to do through several rounds of refinement on the onboarding process. So it's those, it's lowering the barriers to entry and also increasing the amount of delight. And I think those two things where you should be aiming forward with your onboarding. That's an incredible insight. Is there a video of that original onboarding out there? Or is the current one still similar? The current one isn't similar. We have constantly gone back to it because it performs really well. We do actually apply the same approach of little steps building up into bigger accomplishments. 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.

43:44So we've ever re -launched what we do now. We think about how to teach people about that feature and how to get them really involved in it. We have a whole series of Learn and Plays where when we launch 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, but it still didn't work until you figured out the onboarding and that you needed to figure out the persona to focus on.

44:19So all those things end up being essentially incredibly important. It's not just built something amazing and delightful. Definitely. Staying within as a realm of growth. You've grown in large part thanks to this incredibly successful SEO template strategy. You mentioned in your view, there's this guy Andre that came on early and helped you figure this stuff out. Is that true? And if so, what was kind of the key insight that he had that led to such a great success in terms of growth for you all? Andre is an amazing guy. He's actually been in and out of camera three or four times now. Keep pulling him back.

44:56Yeah, keep pulling him back. We originally found him. He came from a startup that was kind of going under here in Sydney. And he just we had thought about SEO. We knew it was this thing that you could use. And I think in a couple of our pitch decks, we had SEO is a whole growth channel that we're going to execute a fine in order for investors to make a ton of money. But we've pretty much knew nothing about it. And it was kind of sitting away in our backlog of things to do in the first couple of years of camera. And we came across Andre and he just really crystallized what SEO was and how it would actually help us grow.

45:38So we brought him on. He rolled out his strategy and it was fantastically effective. 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 and the top jobs to be done that camera could service. He then mapped that through the entire experience of going into Google, typing a search query, getting that search query, seeing that it was a great result. Like, experience after they landed on camera. So if they search for want to make a Halloween poster, the top Google result would be camera. They'd click on it. They'd land on the Halloween poster landing page.

46:26It would tell them how they were going to do it, show you how the product was going to do that. Have a button there that immediately took them into a Halloween poster 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. 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, can it just help me do something amazing? And I want to do it again. Amazing. Okay. So a few things I'm hearing there.

47:00One is figure out the jobs to be done of potentially users figuring out where their search volume figure out ones you can actually solve for them like say Halloween poster. And then think about that experience and to end from search to landing. And obviously, I have to deliver on that promise. You have to actually show them a really cool Halloween poster that they can create. Right. Yeah. Again, it's like product led, Trillium end product led because you can't just SEO the hell out of something that is a terrible experience. So time that product experience at the end of the SEO journey is just as important as the technicalities of SEO itself.

47:36And Andre really honest the whole spectrum of that to produce the end experience, which ultimately ended up with 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 because it's it's probably one of the most well 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 the on -rate drives that can get quite technical.

48:11But 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 25 million people here. It's okay, but it's not sizable. It's not going to make you a huge success. Whereas probably a startup that starts in the US will tend to focus on the US because it's a huge market, it's a huge monetizable market and you can entirely create a great company that just services the US. But from Australia, we needed to think about the world. And that meant that we very quickly got into internationalization.

48:52We started localizing and internationalizing our product three years after launch, which is quite early compared to a lot of other companies. And we tackled it with real vigor. We had a goal of being in five different languages within the first year of localization. And 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 at the end of 2017. And it has drastically changed Canberra's 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 and the way the products used, internationalizing into Brazilian Portuguese, meant that we had to focus a ton more on the Android mobile experience, which was really different for us because we focused a lot on the desktop experience for the first four years.

49:58People also in Brazil run into our businesses from their mobile phone and the types of content they're creating to interact with their audiences totally different. So it's actually shaped our product and change our product trajectory as a result of thinking about internationalization. And it is just fuel tremendous growth. Brazil, India, Indonesia, they're all in our top five markets and they grow way faster than the US does. And I know you went international like in your four, something like that, which is really early for a company. It also makes sense for SEO plus internet, internationalization makes tons of sense.

50:35It's a lot more surface area. Okay, and we have two more questions. One is around your premium strategy, another thing you all nailed. There's just this, you're both seeing incredible growth and incredible monetization. I'm curious what your kind of philosophy is on what to include in the free plan versus what to people should pay for because it's clearly worked out great. Premium for us wasn't so much a 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 democratize 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.

51:21So, premium just made sense to us because we could get the tool into billions of people's hands. They wouldn't necessarily have to pay for it. Much of the world can't pay for products because they just don't have access to that level of income. Providing that equality was really important to us, 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, premium just really hit this sweet spot for us between philosophy and business building. So, it was always part of our plan since day one. We initially had element sales as our business models.

52:02So, when we first went to pitch camera, it was all about creative design, 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 the money. I haven't done that many times. Yes. It was really exciting to invest 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. It unlocked, I think, an area that a lot of people were unfamiliar with, which was stock photography. Most people had not paid $100, $500 for a photo and that really held them back from being visual content creators.

52:41So, it was a really unique innovation for us. And for the first two years of Cam with life, that was how we derived our revenue. It grew pretty well. It was still like, I don't know, 30 % month -to -month growth in terms of revenue, but you can do that in the early stages of the startup. It wasn't until we introduced our first subscription product that we saw really hockey stick growth in our revenue. That was 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, we knew we wanted to put it in a subscription.

53:18What exactly that subscription would look like? We didn't quite know. And through the first couple of years of Camber, 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 Camber for work, which is now called Camber Pro. 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 $1 image payments. So much so that three or four years later, we made image element payments part of the subscription.

54:02And again, that was like a second hockey stick in growth in terms of the revenue from the subscription, because all you can eat images inside the Camber Pro subscription was just amazing value apps for people. And I don't even know if we can get any revenue from image elements. I don't know if all about just going into this subscription. Amazing. Just hockey stick after hockey sticks. Speaking of another hockey stick, I want to talk about AI. Oh, a low hockey team of hockey sticks. Just need that choir hockey teams. I want to talk about AI, something on the top of everyone's minds these days. It's another area you guys have nailed.

54:40You're doing amazing work with AI. It's providing actual value and business impact. I hear you have an amazing internal AI ops team. Is there anything that you've learned so far that you can share but just how to integrate AI successfully and effectively into a product? As a technology company, you always just need to be constantly evolving and using the best technology. And when we started, that was mobile phones and cloud computing, like that were the innovations that came in that really unlocked Camber. AI is the next decade, I think, of innovation. It's the next pivotal piece of technology that helps you build better products.

55:19But it also can't just be the basis for your product. You can't just be a product that's purely built on AI, on being a rapper around an LLM 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 chap bike on something that already stood out deeply thinking about how AI can help them get to that goal even faster. And we view AI as the next way of democratizing design and empowering the world to design, helping more people design, helping more people design quicker, helping more people design quicker with better quality.

55:58And that's how we approach every aspect of including AI in the Camber platform. We've had a team of machine learning engineers for probably seven years now. I think their work has become a lot more visual now and more customer facing. Way back when they were just doing recommendation engines inside our emails and our homepage and suggesting templates to you. But now they get to work with some really cool technology, which lets some produce images for people and create designs and summarize text and translate to 100 different languages. Like it's really stuff that you can put directly in front of customers now.

56:39And that's super exciting. But we've over the last couple of years we've built up more and more visual AI experts inside Camber. And we approach AI inside the product through three kind of pillars. First of these is that we need to build some of our AI tech. And we focus on building AI tech that we have the biggest advantage in that we have the most data that we can put into it the most insights, the most criticality to our product and our business. So we have teams building our own AI models around design and images and that kind of stuff. Second pillar is just finding the world's best AI people to partner with.

57:20And there's a whole bunch of stuff that you don't need to internalize in your company. 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 and we partner with Runway ML to do video generation like finding the world's best and bringing them into your product with a great integration. This is the second pillar. And for us the third pillar is our app ecosystem. So we're fortunate now. We've got 170 million people using the product every single month.

57:57We have quite an audience that people want access to. And through our app developer ecosystem they can build apps which directly integrate with the camera product to give them access to those hundreds of millions of people. When people are quite eager to do that now. We've seen you just taking that from AI developers who have included stuff in Canva from music generators to virtual avatars that can present your presentation to you to a whole slew of things. And those three pillars have I think allowed us to create a really coherent experience. And one that still keeps the focus on what people want to do.

58:35How to help them reach their big goals 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 looking at the GBT story of the fifth most popular GBT custom GBT where people can generate logos using it. So maybe that's driving some growth too. I know you wanted to share something that you guys are launching or have launched by the time this episode comes out. Is that true? Yeah, so we've got a big event in Los Angeles in a couple of months. It's our camera create, which is kind of an evolution of the season open as we used to do.

59:18So season open is a no longer just inside Canva now. We actually invite our whole community in and we're going to have probably about 4 ,000 people in the theater in LA and a couple of million online. And we're really going to be pulling the covers off pretty much the next decade of Canva. We've focused for the first decade of Canva 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 Canva has grown and people have gotten used to creating this stuff, they've invited their teams in. They now collaborate with people on presentations, on Canva videos, on swag t -shirts that they need to make for their event next week.

1:00:06And as more and more people are using Canva together, it's picking up a lot of steam. We've got 95 % of the Fortune 500 using Canva. We've got huge teams of thousands of people using Canva. And this is really open 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 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 create the work inside large teams, large organizations, large enterprises. So we're kind of redesigned Canva for this collaborative enterprise age.

1:00:52So we'll be pulling the covers off that alongside our work kits, which are a whole verticalized experiences for people inside marketing and sales and HR that want to use Canva, as well as a bunch of improvements to AI products and an actual enterprise skew that we're launching as well. So through this growth and through getting to understand the needs of CIOs and heads of security at enterprises, we've realized that they pretty much needs to be a new enterprise product of Canva that meets the needs of hugely scaled teams. It's been quite different for us because we have scaled from those individuals just using the product all by themselves and organically growing the teams.

1:01:37And now looking at it from all the top -down lens and building that enterprise product is what we've been focused on for the last couple of years. So we'll be pulling the covers off that as well in LA. I see another hockey stick approaching. I'm excited about all these things you're launching. What a business you've built. I feel like it's still way to under the radar even though it's this juggernaut, a nice work, Cameron and team. Two more questions I ask everyone. We're gonna focus on you online and how can listeners be useful to you? They can find me online at themaninblue .com, which is my blog that's been around for 24 years now.

1:02:14What was the other question? 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 at first business or helping a nonprofit that they volunteer at. I just love bumping into someone in the street and seeing the joy of design right up in the right. So please do that whenever you see me. Beautiful. Cam, you're awesome. Canva is awesome. Go check out canva .com. Easy to find. Thanks for being here. Thanks Lenny. 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.

1:02:53Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast .com. See you in the next episode.