Good Business Works

Part One: Melanie Perkins, CEO of Canva

Last month’s report about the lacking numbers of Indian women in the workforce made me wonder about the many success stories of what other unique individuals have contributed to business.

We begin, fittingly, with Canva CEO Melanie Perkins. Canva has become ubiquitous in offices and businesses for nearly every practical use- from resume-building and the creation of charts, graphs and presentations to graphic design, media production, and numerous creative uses- from book covers to Instagram posts. There’s a simple reason for its incredible popularity: Canva is very simple to use.

It’s user-friendly, truly user-friendly, which is a rare quality in design software. Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, who founded Canva together in Australia, on January 1, 2013. Now, just about ten years later, it’s worth $26 billion and has made design accessible in a fundamentally media-oriented world.

Perkins, Obrecht, and third co-founder Cameron Adams sought to fill a gap. Design software like Adobe and others required specialized training to use. At the same time, the dawn of the social-media era and the increasingly digital working world seemed to be placing pressure on everyone to become savvy with digital design. It was an opportunity Perkins and her co-founders spotted and seized. Canva won a range of customers in its very first year, with 750,000 users. In another two years, 2.5 million users were creating designs with Canva.

The business model Perkins developed was a “freemium” plan- where anyone can create free designs with Canva and can pay for a premium subscription to access certain additional features. Another thing that makes Canva successful is that all features work well. The Background Remover feature is excellent and very smooth- any image can have a background removed cleanly. Photos can be touched up very easily with features like image-editing tools. Each tool that’s added works well, and I genuinely believe new feedback is incorporated to make tools work better. Soon after a few critical tools like the elements tool (endless stickers available for use) and uploads (your own photos can be dragged and dropped easily), Canva added options to draw directly on the screen, add video and audio to a design, to print designs directly from the site, and AI tools to use prompts to design images that are desired. Moreover, Perkins and Obrecht have a desire to do good. In an interview with TIME magazine, she said, “There’s always been forks in the road [where we could] do what every other company is doing, or just do what feels natural. Every time we do what feels natural, it always ends up being the thing that we build on.”