Growing up, Melanie had several ideas about what she wanted to spend her life doing. In high school, she interned at a PR agency, radio station, and an athletic store. She even had a stint spraying temporary tattoos at carnivals. With that diverse set of experiences, she decided to study communications and commerce in college to ensure she would have a variety of career options. Due to her persistence and dedication, Melanie is the CEO and Co-founder of Canva, an online platform that makes graphic design simple for everyone. Canva’s valuation stands at 3.2 billion, a testament to her work ethic and tenacity.
When was a time you wanted to give up, and what made you persevere through it?
There are so many highlights and challenges when starting and building a business. I don’t think it ever gets less challenging, the challenges just change as you grow. But I love it - it’s my dream job. I’m a big believer in just-in-time learning and the power of sheer determination because you can make everything happen with enough perseverance, and believing in yourself and your goal.
What was a key decision you made that helped you get to where you are today?
With a vision as big as making graphic design accessible to everyone on the internet, we knew we’d need to raise capital to fund Canva. A chance meeting in Perth, the capital of Western Australia, with Silicon Valley investor Bill Tai, led me to San Francisco where I was going to stay a few weeks. But, I ended up staying for 3 months! I remember the meeting so vividly; I was trying to pitch Canva with a paper print-out of our slide deck as I didn’t have an iPad, and eat lunch at the same time. I wanted to seem more confident and less stressed. Bill was on his phone the whole time, and I thought he was uninterested. However, I got back to where I was staying and realized he’d been introducing me via email to his network the whole time. Because of his support, we were able to make our vision a reality.
What is your personal recipe for confidence?
Having little business experience when I started meant that I didn’t know what was impossible, so I viewed everything with fresh eyes. I also embraced the concept of ‘locus of control’: a person's belief about how much they can control the events around them. This has really shaped the way I look at the world. I spend all of my time improving the things that I can change, and I don’t spend time worrying about the things that I can’t control.
What advice do you have for others who aspire to be entrepreneurs?
Solve a real problem. If you find a problem that people care about, then it will make every other aspect of running a business much easier. You want to make sure that the solution you create, solves a problem that people care about. With Canva, the problem was that creating engaging, professional-looking graphic design was incredibly difficult; unless, you had expensive software and studied graphic design. I wanted the future of design to be completely different.
When was the time you failed and what did you learn from the experience?
Getting Canva off the ground has been difficult and taken a long time. It was difficult starting our first company, Fusion Books, and bootstrapping it to profitability. It was difficult getting investors to invest, it was difficult building a team, and difficult to build our product. In fact, every stage has been incredibly challenging, but it has been an amazing adventure. When we were raising investment, every time I left a pitch I would go through all of the factors that made the pitch successful or why I was rejected. When I was rejected, I would always see ways I could improve my pitch. I would go home and revise my pitch, explain the market better, articulate the problem we were solving in more detail, spend more time explaining an aspect of our vision. I revised my pitch deck over one hundred times. Eventually, we landed an investment.
Rejection always hurts. A lot. However, we never considered failure to be an option. For better or worse, when I set my mind on something I don’t give up very easily at all. It would be normal to give up after the 10th, 20th or 100th rejection. But we didn’t. Being rejected in our initial stages just meant that I had to try harder and refine my strategy.
What inspired you to create Canva?
There were a few things -- it seemed strange that design programs were so difficult to learn and desktop based, whereas things like Facebook were taking off - they were online and had no learning curve. I thought that it seemed ridiculous that it took so many clicks to do the simplest of things, like getting a design ready for print - or even adding a triangle in a design took a long learning process. I wanted the design process to be simple for everyone and not require a lengthy instruction manual.
Midway through university, it seemed obvious that the future of design was going to be so much simpler. My co-founder, Cliff Obrecht, and I decided to test the idea by launching Fusion Books — an online design tool to help schools pull together their own designs for yearbooks.
Over five years, Cliff and I grew Fusion Books into the largest yearbook company in Australia. We knew that the technology we had built could be applied much more broadly, which is why we launched Canva in 2013.
Since then, our team have been incredibly motivated to hear stories from our community, such as one lady who was able to locate their birth mother using a Canva design, a sheriff in the US creating Wanted posters to help catch criminals on the run, and plenty of small business who have boosted their sales through beautiful marketing graphics, and non-profits around the world who are using Canva to fundraise - that’s what makes all of the work worth it.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Enjoy the journey, the challenges. The experiences that you will value most in life are often the most challenging. They’ll push you out of your comfort zone and help you grow.
When I was in San Francisco in 2011, 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, and I’m impressed that I was able to give myself some good advice:
