Melanie Perkins

On pitching to investors

“In our early days we often took an approach of asking for advice, rather than explicitly asking if they’d like to invest. This allowed us to leave the door open, take on feedback and go back to ask for advice again in the future. In terms of framing, after a lot of iterations, we landed on a format where we got investors to care about the importance of the problem, the size of the market, and to truly believe that that future that we are working towards is one with creating. We then dove into where we were, where we currently are, and where we want to be – and it’s the same framework we still use today.” (from Canva)

On shifting users’ self belief

“It became quickly apparent that it was not just the tools themselves that were preventing people from creating great designs, but also people’s own belief that they can’t design. In order for Canva to take off, we had to get every person who came into our product to have a great experience in a couple of minutes. We needed to change their own self-belief about their design abilities, we needed to give them design needs and we needed to make them feel happy and confident clicking around. We needed to get them to explore and play in Canva. No short order! So we spent months perfecting the onboarding experience paying particular attention to users’ emotional journey.” (from Canva)