Canva CMO on the marketing strategies that built Australia’s largest private company - Zach Kitschke

0:00Zach Kitschke:Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. Now, one of the biggest success stories on the planet right now is Canva, who have absolutely taken the design world by storm by making everyone able to turn into a designer themselves. Now, their CMO, Zach, was employee number five, and he's been on this wild journey with Canva over the last 12 years to turn them into a huge international brand with over 260 million users worldwide. It's an incredible success story, and I was really excited to catch up with Zach and find out what the secret to their success has been, how they've scaled and how they've used marketing to do it.

0:33Zach Kitschke:This is a fascinating episode. There's a lot in here. You'll love it.

0:42Zach Kitschke:Zach from Canva. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Good to be here. Yeah, great to have you, mate. And Canva's been on this wild journey, hasn't it, over the last, what, 12, 13 years? And am I right in saying you were actually employee number five back in the day. How did it all come about for you? That's right. Yeah, I started a few months before we launched the product back in 2013. So it's been a fun ride and an adventure. But yeah, I got introduced to Mel and Cliff, two of the co-founders, a few months before they were ready to launch the product. And at that point, I was working as a journalist, actually covering tech and the sort of emerging startup scene in Sydney.

1:20And they were starting to think about their funding announcement and then launch strategy um so i had a sort of meeting with them and they weren't really kind of looking at that point they said i had a product team a few engineers but you know came away super inspired from from that sort of first meeting so i sent them um some thoughts on how i could help from a comms point of view and so they said why don't you come in and do some contracting and haven't left sort of almost 13 years later now i mean whoa whoa yeah i think i think i read

1:48Zach Kitschke:your interview with the drum where you sort of said i came to write a press release and didn't didn't leave that's right now you're now you're cmo of a multi-billion kind of valuation company um i mean so much has changed in that time what was it um so what was it like in the early days i'm fascinated when you were a challenger you know you're you're starting out small team yeah how did you get the brand noticed in the in the early stages yeah i think we early on had obviously the the incredible vision that we're still building towards today and i think that was definitely the thing that inspired me to want to join you know talking to Mel Cliff and Cam in those early days they were dead set that they wanted to completely transform the world of design and empower anyone that had an idea to to bring it to life and I guess at that point you know the the kind of status quo was you either had the choice of powerful professional tools that took years to learn were very very complex to use or kind of simple desktop publishing but you couldn't really create anything that was kind of compelling or impactful.

2:50And so, I mean, that vision has always been there the whole time. But I think what really helped us in the early days was actually just the power of a good story. And I think that was what really excited me coming in. Canberra didn't exist. There was no brand. There was no product. But that pitch really carried us through. And so, Mel and Cliff and Cam were able to assemble really a world-class pool of investors, which at that point in time was sort of unheard of for an Australian tech company. They closed at that point the largest seed funding round that had ever been done in Australia. So it was$3 million seed round, incredible investors like Lars Rasmussen, who co-founded Google Maps, and Ken Goldman, who was the CFO at Yahoo at the time.

3:32And so that was kind of the first introduction and kind of raised the question like, wow, what is this company doing that all of these people wanted to invest? And then, of course, we came out and launched, you know, sort of a year after they'd started building this design platform and sort of put our stake in the ground about what Campbell's going to become.

3:51Zach Kitschke:That's incredible. Where do you rank in terms of like Australian businesses now? You know, you talk about the most well-funded, but like where are you now in terms of the ranks? I think depending on, you know, how you look at the most valuable private company in Australia and probably the most valuable tech company out of Sydney. But, you know, we really focus on kind of the upside and all that's ahead. I think today, as of today, we've got 260 million people using the platform around the world. You know, we're profitable from a revenue point of view, but really see the opportunity is literally every Internet user around the world, like, has that need to sort of communicate and express themselves visually.

4:27And we're making good strides there, but have a long way to go.

4:30Zach Kitschke:That's incredible. That's like the entire population of the US. Yeah. Isn't it? Yeah. That's wild. Well, Australia is, I think, about 25 million people or something. So it was a pretty big milestone when we surpassed that. Yeah. Yeah, it's a little hard to kind of fathom the numbers today. I mean, looking back, what were the biggest challenges to get to where you are today? Because, I mean, that doesn't happen by accident. I mean, that's an incredible story. A unicorn is kind of rare by definition. What have been the big challenges along the way that you've had to get over? There's been so many.

4:59And I think that's always the interesting thing looking back, you know, on a journey like Canva. from you know the outside the chart looks like up and up and to the right but actually you know every step along the way you're really fighting to find that next growth lever and so in the early days you know we had a kind of big splashy moment with launch I think we had about 50 ,000 people that had sort of registered on our waiting list before the product came out we launched and there was definitely a lot of love for the product but you know then then kind of the press quietness down and same thing on you know social and I think in those early days it was really about trying to find what's that next growth lever and so i think we're really really fortunate to identify um you know organic growth and seo as a real sort of unlock and lever um in those early days and so that sort of came in and complemented obviously the the product user experience um but really finding that when people were actually creating you know if we could truly understand that the goals that they had you know through search um we could actually create content you know and so So if someone's creating a presentation, they're probably trying to get a business plan over the line or close a client.

6:08Or if on the personal side, they're trying to organize a party, they're going to be on Google searching for the theme or whatever it might be. So we created this incredible library of content that we were then able to rank for on SEO. And I think that really connected this sort of even deeper sense of how do we build a product that people needed. So it was like one really big inflection point. I'd say one of the other inflection points early on was really unlocking International as an opportunity. And I think, you know, it was a couple of years into the journey. We were only in English at that point in time.

6:42And, you know, I identified at the start of that year that International was going to be the big unlock. So we invested, I think, set out to localize into 100 languages in 12 months, which seemed wild at the time. but really set the trajectory for today. And so that's sort of compounded. We've got 190 different countries using Canva in 100 languages. Some of our biggest markets are Brazil, India, Mexico, here in the UK, and so on. And so I think that localization and sort of focus on international is compounded. And so I think it's always been about trying to find what's the next growth lever that can compound for us.

7:27Zach Kitschke:And going back to the original kind of idea of like, I guess, you know, if I put my experience in, you know, you're either doing it yourself on PowerPoint or you've got a huge Apple and some very expensive software and so on. And there's this gap in the middle you identified. What do you, what makes a good design? Because you must have spent a lot of time thinking about what makes design good. So what makes, you know, what would make a good design? Well, I think the reason people come to Canva is to achieve a goal that they have. And that's really the fundamental starting point. often the thing that drives a goal forward is the effectiveness of your communication and so I think that's really the crux of what's fueled Canva's growth to date that we've helped more people be more effective at visual communication and so that can mean you know a piece of advertising that is more effective it can mean a presentation that lands the the message more clearly you know it can mean a piece of video content and so i think that's really the power of great design uh when it is really really effective at communicating and i think you know over the years we have focused more on how do we extend to capture more of that process of achieving a goal and so you know more recently we've sort of extended beyond just the the content creation piece to to workflows and how do we close the loop um you know a few months back we launched what we've called like the Canva creative operating system.

8:52And so I think that really articulates what we're trying to do today. You know, really good example of that is product Canva Grow that we've launched where we, you know, for the first time are connecting your performance data on your ad platforms to the creative insight to content generation and actually being able to close that loop of what you create in Canva. You know, how does that perform out there in the real world and how do you take those insights back and learn from that? And so I think that's essentially what Canva's doing. Yeah.

9:25Zach Kitschke:I mean, one of the things I love about it as well is you make things easy. You know, you make it easy to be a good designer. I mean, most people would love to be a good designer, wouldn't they? But they don't know how, but you make that step easy. And the other thing you do as well, which I think for anyone who doesn't work in tech, this seems completely insane, but you give a lot of it away for free. And I know whenever you talk to somebody, you go, you're going to spend millions of pounds building this incredible software that allows you to do amazing things and you give it away for free. What's the kind of business model that goes behind that idea?

9:51Zach Kitschke:I mean, people call it freemium, don't they? The idea of giving something away. What's the thinking behind that? I think it goes fundamentally to the core of our DNA and our mission. I think there's been such an intention with Canva that we wanted to empower the world to design and to express themselves. And so that meant democratizing creativity in a way that, you know no matter where you lived in the world your income your background you too should have access to the tools and so you know that was a big shift away from expensive box software that was sort of limited you know to very few and so it was kind of core to our DNA I think to open it up and yes we have an incredibly generous free product you know hundreds of millions of people using that and that helps us to achieve our mission in the world but it's also become our best marketing like word of mouth fuels so much of our growth and you know over time if people love Canva they get more and more value out of it we can unlock other ways for them you know to access more and sort of monetize in different ways and we've done that through you know premium parts of the product like Canva Pro or you know enterprise version now for for organizations and so it's been really really effective in that way I guess you know in terms of that mission we also give away our product for free to non-profits to education so we've donated you know billions of dollars of product in that sense and i guess at the at the core is this this sort of purpose that the grounds canva so we have what we talk about as our simple two-step plan and you know step ones to really build hopefully one of the world's most valuable companies in the years to come but step two is to do the most good that we can and so that really underpins i guess how we think about everything that we do.

11:45We're incredibly fortunate that we have, you know, founders that live and breathe that. You know, Mel and Cliff have committed to give away the vast majority of their wealth. You know, 30 % of Canva's value to doing good as well. And so, you know, that shows up in so many ways beyond the good that we're able to do through the product as well. That's incredible.

12:04Zach Kitschke:I didn't know that actually. That's incredible. What has it been given away to do? A range of things. One of the big areas that we've been focusing on is a goal that I think is incredibly near and dear to so many of the team's hearts and that's trying to end extreme poverty. And so we have partnered with an organization called GiveDirectly to invest in direct cash transfers in Malawi as a sort of a pilot project. We've committed over a hundred million dollars to that and that's really been super interesting you know and i think we've found that when you actually give cash it can totally uplift and transform you know a society and and putting that kind of empowerment and autonomy in the hands of people that really need it you see them make decisions that are right for themselves for their family for their community and so you know we're sort of in into i think it's probably year three or four of that now and we've seen you know people pay for a roof over their head textbooks for their kids you know a investment for a small business you know buying things that can really sustain them so we're doing a lot of research and that's a big focus which is you know incredibly exciting yeah that's very cool very cool well well done you and and long may it continue in terms of your success that's brilliant here and in terms of marketing as well how do you how do you i mean there's some debates everyone has in marketing like product versus brand where do you invest your money in terms of like product marketing or brand marketing and how do you get that balance right i think for us we are a product driven company um at the core uh we can only grow when we invest in an amazing product experience that really delights our community and so i think marketing has a really important role in helping to connect that with the needs of our community but it's really important that it starts with products for us.

13:56I guess we have a very long-term orientation, as I'm sure you can get a sense for from these lofty goals

14:04Zach Kitschke:of empowering the whole world to design and step one and step two. But I think that has been great as a marketer at Canva because we always optimize for the long-term over the short-term. And so I've really invested in things that will compound over time. You know, we talked about SEO and organic or product or international, but that goes for our marketing as well. We're really trying to build a brand that will endure. I think, you know, the best marketing is where you get the mix working really, really well together. And so I don't think it's an either or thing. But, yeah, having that long-term orientation really guides the decisions that we make.

14:42Zach Kitschke:You did a campaign that really made me smile. I think everyone listening to this is going to know exactly it's going to be there. but based on making the logo bigger, which must be the bane of every designer's life. You know, everyone wants to make the logo bigger. But yeah, describe that campaign and how that did. Yeah, we had some real fun. We did a sort of out of home execution here in the UK. And it was really about those, you know, little things that frustrate every kind of creative. And so we did a takeover at Waterloo Station. They were kind of custom billboards. But yeah, the one you're referencing, you know, is that line that every agency or designer hates of like, can you make the logo bigger?

15:22And so we did a billboard where the logo spills over the top of the billboard. There was another one where we did, you know, a kind of Canberra whiteboard brainstorm of what the billboard should be. Another favorite was, you know, when 16 by 9 should have been 9 by 16 and the format completely off the page. Oh, completely everywhere around. so you know i think a really fun and just sort of uh like cheeky way to to bring that to life

15:46Zach Kitschke:um but yeah people people really love that yeah that is very funny um actually did some research earlier in the year with tiktok uh looking at kind of what makes campaigns memorable and it's really interesting actually because um the logo actually is one of the least important parts right but we all obsess about it because that's the ip isn't it's our thing but but in the research we found you know things like having a strap line or a jingle music actually was really important so So a jingle or a sonic device or characters associated with your brand, all these things signal who you are. Or maybe your product is being used kind of in the ad rather than having to sort of put the logo on it.

16:22Zach Kitschke:But we ended up, you know, you don't just put a logo on it was the kind of report we wrote. There are so many other ways to be creative and interesting without having to use the logo. Should we shrink the logo? I don't know. Exactly. Exactly. Indeed. So and then how do you approach kind of B2B marketing as well? Because obviously, you've scaled up massively and presumably got a lot of B2B customers now as well as B2C. How does that differ? So I guess we really want to empower everyone to use Canva. And so start there. We now have obviously incredible kind of consumer business. And over the last few years, really invested in the B2B space.

16:59But I think the way that we've seen our opportunity in B2B is if we can solve for the individual pain points and challenges, people will adopt the product and then we can build kind of enterprise solutions around that. And that's sort of exactly what's happened for us. you know we've we you know now used within i think it's 95 of the fortune 500 and you'll often have a conversation you know with a cmo or a ceo and they might not even be aware that their team's using canva but you know you look at the data i found this out as well by the way on my team

17:34Zach Kitschke:yeah it's kind of oh that presentation you sent me that's right yeah there's often you know thousands if not tens of thousands of people that are using Canva. And so that's been a real driver for us to then go in and sort of solve for some of the enterprise pain points because you've already got this user base that knows and loves Canva. And so we sort of thought about it from the product point of view. You know, with enterprise, we launched our enterprise version a couple of years ago. When you've got all of these people using Canva, then from an enterprise point of view, you can actually really easily unlock things like brand consistency.

18:08so being able to set up your brand guidelines in a truly connected way to where people are creating so that brand system being able to create templates being able to kind of lock things down manage you know security and sort of content ip and things like that and so that kind of interplay between the two and where we've got the harmonies really fueled both of those things you know and at the end of the day i think we're telling you know it's the same story but with slightly different kind of windows into that for the different audiences.

18:43Zach Kitschke:Your marketing must be working, actually, because when I watched YouTube this morning, I got a Canva Pro ad as I logged into YouTube. And I was thinking, damn, that's pretty good. I reckon it's because yesterday I was Googling lots of stuff to prep the conversation, right? So I reckon it was probably due to that, but it's very, very impressive. Now, we must talk about AI, of course, right? Everyone has to talk about AI. but what kind of magical things is ai enabling enabling you to do now i mean one of the small ones i notice is like changing the background to something you know something that is a real irritation when you used to get a logo and think oh it's annoying because i can't separate from the background and i'm going to put it in a presentation and it's going to look all awkward you know yeah but what are the kind of magical things that ai now enables us to do that couldn't do before so much it's like such an exciting time i think to be in this space i think as a marketing team have a real front row seat and one of the things i love most about being a marketing at Canva is that we're often customer zero for a lot of the products that we build for our community.

19:38When it comes to AI, we've really had a philosophy that people are coming to Canva to achieve a goal and do a job. And so it's not about AI for AI's sake. It's about finding those moments in the workflow where it can be really accelerant. And so that's really fueled, I guess, our philosophy with Canva AI, you know, and we've really focused on that. And the way that that can look is, you know when you're starting a design being able to start with a prompt and we'll generate beautiful templates that are there ready to edit right in canva the ability to generate you know video or imagery or kind of text you know workflow things one of my favorites that was born out of one of our own internal use cases is the ability to record magic translate but you know go from your campaign in english to 100 languages in a click and so you know obviously a huge unlock for for teams like ours that are just operating in many markets.

20:33But there are all sort of examples of that focus on how do we just accelerate the workflow and sort of help people get from A to B quicker than before.

20:42Zach Kitschke:Yeah, because a massive workflow productivity advantage. And then I think the trap everyone falls into with AI is just focusing on that and not focus on how it enables you to be more creative. And I think that's the opportunity of AI, isn't it, to do things you couldn't do before and to imagine, you know, video or print in a way that you just couldn't do on a small budget previously. Totally. I think it's also about how do you extend that workflow and that was a big element of Canva Grow. How do you actually take this data and insight that you've got on platform with the creation tool to help people make better ads?

21:17But at the core is actually really freeing up people to be more creative and really focus on that and taking out the stuff that chews up a lot of time around that.

21:28Zach Kitschke:All right, all right. Sorry to interrupt this conversation. I promise you it's for a good cause. So I've just put a rather large deposit down on a very big venue in central London called the Outernet that can hold 400 people. It's an amazing venue. Now, we're going to be doing the very first uncensored CMO, The Calling. Now, what is The Calling? The Calling is your opportunity to join us live and be inspired by the world's best founders, the most inspirational CMOs, and the best thought leaders. this is one day that will completely transform your career i promise it will be well worth it i'm so excited to be doing this and if you want to find out more details please go to the show notes and check it out and i really look forward to seeing you there it's on the 21st of april do not miss it now back to the show now i noticed you got awarded business insider most innovative CMO which I think was fantastic um what are the most innovative things that you've done in your time at Canva um I mean I think the things that I'm most proud of for Canva is really that we've managed to scale uh you know a brand that feels truly local uh around the world and and really has kind of community at its core you know I spoke earlier about word of mouth being such a critical unlock for us and really that's a reflection of this amazing incredibly passionate community that we've we've built all around the world and so we really do think a lot about how we create experiences one thing i'm super proud of recently we did a very very ambitious thing in october called the canva world tour and so you know with all these communities around the world we often you know sort of communicating with them from from afar but thought what if we take canva actually to where all of our community are around the world.

23:23So in the space of a month, we set out to put on 250 events all around the world. In one month? Yeah, 40 different cities from office takeovers in our campuses to design school workshops, community meetups. And it was really the goal to train a million people in design and sort of share skills. And that all culminated with a major keynote moment in Sydney where we launched some of our latest products. and that was such an incredible experience of connecting our internal teams, the community around the world and really launching some of those big new products in a way that made a real splash but felt truly Canva and then sort of connected us around the world.

24:05So a million people were involved in...

24:06Zach Kitschke:A million people were trained in the end, yeah. It touched on a really important, I think the thing that you've got right is being really useful, right? Because obviously you're helping people to design better, aren't you, in that case? And then you're obviously going to use Canva and talk about it with more people. So it's kind of win-win, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And I think people, one of the events in Brazil, an event called Sobri, we had this big kind of workshop area for a few hundred people, but it was like packed. There was lines for like two or three hours, people trying to get in. I think some of our team were wearing Canva T-shirts and people were trying to like get swag from them.

24:43And we even had, I think there was four or five people that literally had a Canva tattoo, like a real camera tattoo that they showed us um a little rubber ducky which is sort of a bit of a mascot for us and so yeah there's such a fandom that i think um is really really special yeah

24:59Zach Kitschke:now you mentioned culminating in the keynote now one and i'm surprised you and i haven't ended up on the same stage to now but we're regularly at the same events aren't we and um you know you deliver some amazing keynotes what would be your top tips for like landing a brilliant keynote both in terms of delivery, but also some of the amazing graphics that you bring with it? For us, we've tried to throw out the playbook. You know, over the years, we've done all sorts of crazy things. A few years ago, we sort of went viral for, we did a rap, a rap battle when we launched Canva Enterprise between a kind of CIO and sort of a designer on stage.

25:34You know, we've done recently, we sort of treated it more as like a television broadcast. was almost like a variety show sort of meets late night. And so that was really, really fun. But I think the power of the unexpected and really thinking about how do we create, you know, experience that people actually want to watch and tune into has really been the underpinning. You know, and it's colourful, it's musical, it's surprising. And I think that, you know, creates content that people want to watch.