Canva: Melanie Perkins

But weren't any of the investors saying you don't have a a tech team, you don't have a a chief technology officer. Like I'm I don't know if I'm gonna put my That just yeah. That was literally what everyone was saying. Yeah, it m it makes perfect sense, but how are we gonna get this thing rolling? How many people do you think you pitched over that? I guess two month period in San Francisco. I don't know.

Over a hundred people more. I was going through my rejections the other day, I was looking at some of the emails and there there was quite a quite a damn view. From NPR, it's how I built this. show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements. There you go.

Guy Raz and on today's show How a college student named Melanie Perkins turned her passion for making better yearbooks into the design platform Canva. Now valued at over a billion dollars. So there's a story that I think a lot of people have, and the details might be different, but it's basically a version of this. There was this one time

You had a very clever business idea. Maybe it was an idea for a super useful product or a service that would make your life way easier. Mine was actually the one cup coffee maker. I swear that was my idea, but like most people, I didn't do it. And if you're like me. You didn't have the time to work on it or the money, or maybe it just seemed too overwhelming to get started. But the way the story always ends is that a couple of months later, maybe a couple of years later,

You're shopping at a store or you're surfing the web, and there it is. I can remember the very day I saw the one cup coffee maker at Target. Someone took my exact idea and made it happen. Now does this story sound familiar? Because every business starts out as an idea. But to turn an idea into a reality?

You have to get started, even if it means starting out small. You have to plant the seeds for a business to grow before someone else does. And Melanie Perkins, as you will hear, she did have a big idea. She wanted to transform the entire desktop publishing industry when she was just 19 years old. But instead of feeling overwhelmed by the scale of her idea, Melanie. Got to work.

She started out small by focusing first on a one little piece of the idea that she thought she could make work. which happened to be an online tool to design and publish school yearbooks. Melanie grew up in Perth in Western Australia. Her mom was a teacher and her dad was an engineer. And when Melanie went to university to study communications, this was in the mid-2000s, she started using graphic design and publishing software, programs like Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Publisher, and she was frustrated that the programs were so clunky and so difficult to learn.

And it seemed completely silly that it would take there's so many instruction manuals and so many steps to do the most basic of things. Students would take a whole semester just learning where the buttons were, they'll learn how to design something. It seemed very apparent that this whole desktop based thing would be completely archaic and outdated in the future. And so I had this very oversized vision for taking on all of these different industries from you know, Microsoft Office and lots and lots of other industries as well. We thought rather than people using things like clipart, they should be able to have access to beautiful templates like designers do. But at that point in time I was nineteen and I had no business experience and so Rather than try and take on the entire world of design, all these really big companies who decided to take on school year books in Australia. You keep saying we who when you say we, who are you talking about? Um my boyfriend and co founder, Cliff. And you're still together twelve, eleven, twelve years later. So

You decided to start Like a web based business that would help people design. Yearbooks. Um How how did you come upon the idea of of yearbooks.

Well we had the this vision for all for taking on the entire world of design. But yearbooks seem to be like a really pressing need because school teachers would get thrown in to do this thing, they had no design experience. Um I'd seen my mum put together school yearbooks for her um school. And it's a grind. It's a huge grind and all of a sudden these people with no design experience were expected to create something to look professional. And so we realised that it would be a really easy thing to do, um, because there's such a strong market need for these people to create yearbooks. So how do you go from having that idea To actually like what's what was your next step?'Cause it was you and Cliff and he was also nineteen? Twenty. Twenty. By the way, what was it called? Fusion book. Fusion book. So

Were either of you guys like coders or software engineers? I mean you were not at all. We just went and interviewed every software development company in Perth. Um and most people told us that we were completely mad. But how did you even have the money To pay them. got a fifty grand loan from friends and family, which was awesome. And then we got five grand back from GST, which is like our tax thing. So that was our marketing budget. You went around to friends and family and said, We have this amazing idea. We want to develop A a web based software solution for people designing your books, which is a great idea. That's exactly right.

So You and Cliff have a little bit of cash. And you go around to Software developers in Perth. Who did you eventually find?

Um, there was this amazing company called In Depth and I I went in with like a m eighty page description of exactly what we wanted to build. Like I had wireframes built up even though I didn't know what that was. Like you sketched out pictures of what the pages would look like? Yeah. to the detail what every single button was going to do, how it's gonna work. Um like this project w ended up being like five times bigger than I anticipated, but they were very kind and like we've had a fixed price contract. And what was gonna make this better than anything else uh available at the time. Well I think that there was just nothing much available other than these desktop based programs. So rather than have everyone having to send emails back and forth and collect all those files, I wanted it just to be collaborative and online and really simple. Cause at that time if you wanted to make a yearbook page, you would just Go on Microsoft.

Word or or like Yeah, Microsoft Word or Publisher. Um and then also it wasn't just that part. You'd then have to go get your your um stock photos or stock illustrations to actually make it look really good. And so there'd be so many different things that you're having to piece together to create something really, really hacky. And then you would like email that page to somebody and say, Hey what do you think? And they'd say, Oh no, and then but but you wanted something more like Google Docs where everybody could kinda jump in and make changes. Yeah. So you go to the software company in Perth and how long did it take for them to to build out the software for you? I think it was about six months before we had our first iteration and then immediately started our second iteration. And and do you remember what year this was? That was two thousand eight. Two thousand eight. So you just put it up there. On the one hand, yearbooks seem like a really niche market, right? Because it's you know one time a year when someone's using it, but but on the other hand, every school does a yearbook, right? So

It actually it's surprising that there was nothing really Out there. To make it easy. Yeah, absolutely. And the uh on the plus side as well, um, because the yearbook actually has to get printed, that was how we're able to monetize. So we're able to give the software away for free and then actually sell the physical yearbook. So the idea would be that somebody would go on there, design their yearbook, hit

submit and then you guys would take that. And then print it. And you would make money off of the actual printing costs. Yeah. So what happened? Um, well we've got sixteen schools in our first year, which we're very excited about. Um, and then we ended up getting printing presses in my mum's living room. How did you how did you

Put how did you get printing presses? Um so Fuji Zerox had this really cool deal where they said that they'd give us the printer for free if we paid for the ink and cartridges and they kind of believed that we had like an a newspaper um article in Perth and they obviously saw that. Oh there was an article about you guys. Yeah. And they saw it and they thought Oh we'll help out. And they thought that that'd help out and we'd become a big printing press. company one day. And so they gave us a printer. We ended up with a a couple of them actually. And so we would have a printing press um going for twenty four hours for three months a year. And it would just be printing out these yearbooks and then we'd go to a binding place and that actually do the f the finishing and the binding. Did any of these schools know that you guys were like nineteen, twenty years old? I don't imagine so.

So I uh Within your first year do you remember Like what kind of revenue you you did? Um the first year revenue would have been very modest, but it was enough to be able to afford to do more marketing the next year. So we just reinvest our profits every year um into the next year. And very fortunately I guess we had to become r profitable quite quickly, because otherwise we'd have no company Immediately. So the first year we had sixteen schools, the second year we had fifty schools, the next year we had a hundred schools, and then it was like I think it was three hundred. So it was growing like quite rapidly. Um How d when did you start to think about building this into something bigger? Because by 2010

You know, you're two years in and it I I can imagine you can start to see this thing has legs. Yeah, so Actually the original idea of taking on the whole world of design and making it easy for everyone was actually planted right from the start. And then we narrowed it down to yearbooks. but we kept looking around and people would be like, oh can we use this to design our canteen menus and our newsletters and our school flyers. And like surely there must be more technology available now that does that. And there certainly wasn't. But then in two thousand and ten, um

I met Bill Ty, who is a Silicon Valley investor over from here. Um, and he was just talking about all these companies and startups and Like when I first heard him speak, it sounded like a window to a whole new world. You met him in Perth. What was he doing there? Um he was speaking at a conference. This is in two thousand ten. Yeah. So like even though like we'd sort of had a company with that would been growing, but the only thing that we knew at that point in time was that we were a small business that really struggled to get a loan from the banks, they didn't have a credit history. Um and there was this whole world of startups that were taking on big industries. So I went up to him after a speech and uh uh um someone there kindly introduced me and said, Hey, she's got a cool company Um and he said yeah, if I went to San Francisco he'd be happy to meet.

And you said, Oh, okay, great. And you just like took his number? Yeah. And and email and stuff. That's exactly right. And so As soon as I met him I realized that that was the next level and that if I could do anything we possibly could to get there. It was this um So you j so you just emailed him and said Can we talk?

Well, yeah, I kind of was like, Hey, I'm gonna be in Silicon Valley, uh just gonna be in the area, wanna catch up. Did you did you really have plans at that point, or you just thought, let's see what he says. And so could not have been more over the moon that he actually even responded to my message. Sure, oh sure, come see me. Yeah. I was just completely dumbfounded. Wow. So you

Presumably you go go and book your ticket to San Francisco. Yeah. And how long was Were you planning on going out f coming out for? I planned on coming out for two weeks. My brother was living here and I thought I'd come and visit him and I'd go and have this meeting that I was absolutely afraid of is an understatement. And so in between the time that he said that he'd meet with me and coming here, I put together um My

Business plan. The future of publishing was what I titled it. And it had a picture of us beating Microsoft Office. And Ajoby and Google Docs and a whole bunch of other companies. So we met on University Ave and Palo Alto. In Palo Alto at a cafe and he said we'd go for lunch. So I brought my I I physically printed my pitch deck, which I also didn't realise was so uncool. So you're supposed to put on like a a A computer, right? I totally didn't know this at the time. He brought a stack of like stapled. I was sitting there, like I had my paper pitch deck and he was like Do you have an iPad and like No And then I was like trying to flip the pages in my deck and explain about the future of publishing and how we're gonna take on all these big companies um and trying to eat my lunch and he was there wrapped, like engaged. No, he was on his phone the whole time. It was so awkward. I felt like the biggest flop. Um and but very fortunately when I went home here I had an email from him and he said if I could find a tech team he'd be happy to invest.

Yeah, so he had actually been um messaging a lot of different people um and introducing m me to them. While during the meeting, so he was actually on the phone messaging other people. Yeah, so uh the next meeting I had was with Laz Rosmason, who co-founded Google Maps. And meeting him completely blew my mind because I really didn't know. It sounds so s bizarre, but I had no idea that people that made big world changing companies were just regular and nice and hard working normal people. Um and meeting laws completely change my And and did he

When he met you, he said, Hey, there's something here. Yeah, we ended up having an incredible conversation for hours. Um, we both had a really similar view of what the future of communication and publishing should be like. What was he saying? Um So there was a few philosophies. One of them was that over time industries would converge. So rather than having the print industry being over here, having to use different software to create a website and different c software to create a presentation and different software to create marketing materials and some of those things being online and some of them being desktop based that all these industries would come together and be in one page and then be accessible to the world. Um it seemed crazy that you'd have to use so many different tools and um go and learn a different thing for everything you wanted to create.

So you meet this guy Lars and you say to him, Hey Bill says he's gonna back me. If I find a tech team Can you help me? what you said to Lars. Yeah, that's exactly right. And Lars said he'd be happy to be an advisor. Um but what that ended up entailing was him rejecting everyone for a full year. We why did Lars have to approve of the tech team? Was that Bill's condition or Yeah, that was Bill's condition. He said, Oh I trust Lars

If Lars gives a thumbs up to your tech team, I'll fund you. That's exactly right. So you are in San Francisco. For the next three months. Until my Vs are expired. Okay, to visa great, because three month visa, tourist visa. And where are you like working out of? What are you So I was sleeping on my brother's flo like so he had a one bedroom apartment, I was sleeping in his living room floor. Um and I was working in um at Nordstrom the shopping centre. Yeah, the Westfield shopping centre, yeah. It's an amazing co-working space. I don't know why more people don't take this up. It's free. There's Wi Fi. That's exactly right. So the Nordstroms in the the Westfield shopping center in San Francisco, okay? And so I would go in there and I'd work and between that I'd be going to every single conference that I could, like anything, any meeting, anyway chatting with people who ever would listen.

Like literally, even on the bus I'd be pitching people trying to get them to join my tech team. And Are you just naturally kind of gregarious and outgoing? Was it easy for you to just show up like you would just go up to people and say, Hi, I'm Melanie, can I tell you about my company? Is that what you would do? So I'm actually naturally really introverted. But when I have a goal I do everything I can to get there. Um and so yeah, I would be getting up and like if people would let me do a one minute pitch at a conference, I would get up and I'd be doing that one minute pitch and probably beating and racing. Absolutely. Um completely terrified, but I'd just keep on pushing myself'cause I wanted this to happen. Your um y your partner and and boyfriend Cliff, he he was still at work, right? Because presumably for those three months, he was working on on Fusion, the yearbook company.

Yeah. And and how was it doing? It was doing well. It was growing. It had like he moved out from my mom's house to into our first office. Yeah, it was it was interesting time because we knew that there was this big m amazing opportunity over here, but it was really hard to make progress with. And then on the other side was fusion and that was a sure thing growing every month, every year. It felt like I had been over in Silicon Valley achieving nothing while like I'd left him with all the hard work. Pretty much summed it up. So

Three months th you're here for three months. Was it exciting, were you encouraged? Did you feel like This is moving forward. I think every day I felt like I'd make a little progress, um, but By the end of the three months I didn't have a tech team and I left feeling like the biggest failure. Why?

Because I had not landed a tech team, which meant that I hadn't landed investors, which meant that all I'd done in my view at that point in time was like nothing. Um I learned a lot, but I hadn't actually achieved anything. And so I went mm when I was going back to Perth um on the flight, I w I wrote a list of the things that I'd achieved and one of them was like staying alive. Which is a little groom. But it w yeah, it was a thing. It's a thing. Um but then yeah then moved the company from Perth to Sydney um and came back for round two. Coming up in just a moment.

By Melanie's next step in her search for investors? With learning. How to kite surf. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. from NPR.

Welcome back to how I built this from NPR. So, something you should know before we get back into Melanie's story is that Bill Ty, the VC investor Melanie met with at the Palo Alto coffee shop, He's a huge kitesurfing fan. And Bill's taken these two things, venture capitalism and kitesurfing. and kind of combine them into a conference he puts on called Mai Thai.

And back when Bill met with Melanie Basically told her, hey, if you like kitesurfing, I can invite you to this event. And you can talk to some other investors there about your idea. 'Cause I made it seem like I was really interested in kitesurfing and so he said that if I could kitesurf I could go to this conference and that was where a lot of ECs and um investors would be. So I learned to kitesurf and felt like I was gonna risk my life quite significantly. It's really frightening. And and what is and what's this conference like what do you what do you do? They have tech talks like during the morning and then everyone kitesurfs in the afternoon. And how how many people are there?

A hundred and fifty or and it's at a hotel in Maui. In Maui, okay. And kite surfing by day. And then mingling at night, you went or both you and Clifford. We we both went. And you guys are must be thinking This is a way for us to get in front of. Potential.

Funders. Yeah. Investors. That's exactly right. So what did you So we weren't scheduled to talk or anything, but one in one of the th um events we just said, like, Can we talk tomorrow? Can we do a pitch? Um and it w this was like at ten o'clock at night and eventually he said yes. So we ended up like just staying up until six A. Like preparing a pitch for The pitch of our lives. And eventually got up and was so incredibly nervous in front of everyone, but Um, apparently it didn't do so bad because uh this ex C of Shutterfly came up and said he would be keen to invest. Um, and a number of other people said that either give us intro or um would be keen to invest as well.

What does that mean? Does that mean like I'm in sh I'm ready to write you a check now, or does that mean I'm interested in further talk and talking more about this? Further talking more about this and waiting to see who else was going to invest before we invest is was the general feeling. So you had to get enough people who were interested to invest before I knew how to invest. So you did not leave Maui with like a stack of checks? No, nothing. You left Maui with how many checks? Zero checks. So from Maui you went back to San Francisco. Still on a tourist visa. Exactly. This is round two. Yeah. Now it's UN Cliff. And what did you do over the next Six or eight weeks. Did you start to pitch potential investors? Yeah, pitching everyone, includ we're still pitching uh for other engineers at this stage because we still didn't have an engineer. We're pitching um any venture capitalist or angel investor that would take a meeting.

Hey, this is a really cool idea, and you know fusion seems cool, but You don't have a a tech team, you don't have a a chief technology officer. Like I'm I don't know if I'm gonna put my m That just yeah. That was literally what everyone was saying. Yeah, it it may it makes perfect sense, but how are we gonna get this thing rolling? How many people do you think you pitched over that? I guess two month period in San Francisco.

Um, three months it w was I don't know. Between the f like the first year And I don't that year period it would

Over a hundred people, more. I didn't count, but I've I was going through my rejections the other day, I was looking at some of the emails and there there was quite a quite a damn few. So what was it that that kept you going, like when you were just getting rejection after rejection? I think you just know the game you're playing. Um and you know we wanted to build the future of publishing and we knew that this well like in my head this is just absolutely the future. There's no way that things were gonna be desktop based anymore. Everything was very evidently moving online. There's no way that things were gonna be fragmented across all these industries, it was gonna be easier for people. And so it I really wanted to create that.

Even though it was frustrating, it was also I knew it was a pretty important p thing to do to get people to see the same feature that I did. Yeah. But I think it was really beneficial because we got so many different questions and m um comments and people not liking what we were doing at all. It meant that we really had to know what we were doing and really refine our strategy. So every single day we'd go back and revise our pitch deck. Um W every time we got a really hard question, that would go right to the front of the pitch deck. So the hardest questions were answered at the right at the front. So rather than people sitting and going through the entire pitch and then being like, Oh, but you're the same as some random company that actually had nothing to do with us. We then put aside in our pitch deck, which showed the gap in the market and all the other companies and where w we believe the huge gap was. Um a lot of people would say they know nothing about design. Um they don't know anything about our industry and so that was a reason to not invest. So we made the one of the first pages about pitch deck explaining the industry and where we believe this huge gap was. This was in two thousand twelve. Right. Okay, so let's say I'm one of these investors you're meeting with in in

I would say. So yeah, this looks cool, but I have a lot of questions for you, Melanie. First of all Tech team. You would say what? So we've already built a company with fusion books. We've demonstrated that we can make a profitable company that's been able to grow. We've launched internationally and we're just gonna take it onto the bigger stage. I can totally understand why nobody wanted to invest in us. And then I would say and I would say, but I you know what, like why look, Microsoft or

Google the minute they see what you guys do, they'll crush you because they'll just put something else out. way bigger and and I mean, you're just gonna get crushed right away. You sound totally like one of those investors. And what would you say? We'd say um

There is this huge gap in the market because to cannibal to actually create this huge industry, the future of publishing, you would have to completely cannibalize your industry. And if you look at the areas of publishing over the years, we started off with metal plates and then we moved into the tight setting and pay stop. So this actually became the second slide in that page deck. Then we then moved into um the desktop And then we move we're now moving into this new era, which we believe's gonna be online. Dear investor. Is that no industry player has actually ever been able to go from one industry to the next and actually still maintain being the market leader. And so we every single time there was a new in uh era, a new market leader emerged. And so we believe that market leader can be us. And then I would say, Okay, but I you know, it looks interesting, but you guys are way in Australia. I'm like why not would you guys consider relocating here, making it moving your team here? So it depends where you when you ask this question. So at a certain point in time we ended up finding an amazing co-founder, Cameron Adams, who had been um at Google. And so he was going to be based in Australia. Um and we also met another amazing guy from Google um who Lars said was one of the best people we'd ever worked with, uh Dave Herndon. Um so Lars actually introduced us to both.

Cam and Dave. Um, Dave had worked in the US, but he was Australian. He was gonna be in Australia. And so it sort of started to swing the pendulum towards Australia. And then the government in Australia had this matching funding thing where they would match it uh um every dollar that we got from investors. To stay. To stay in Australia. So So Dave Hermann you just mentioned, he w he ends up becoming your You're chief technology officer, right? That's correct. And and and I'm just curious, like he he was a really talented engineer working at Google, I'm I'm sure he was very well paid at the time. How did how did you convince him to to join your tiny startup instead?

Um, well, if you search the term on Google The Czar Pitch Deck. I can proudly claim the number one. Um, so I went on to so firstly we'd pitched Dave and Dave um was like Interesting what we're doing, he

So he was a little bit concerned about joining. So what I did was I went to his Facebook page and I took lots of the photos from his Facebook page and I put together a pitch deck and said why it would be such an amazing adventure to come and join and recreate the future of publishing and change the face of the internet using a storyline from the photos that I had taken from his Facebook page. And the connection. I think that that definitely moved it in the right direction. I think that he realised that we had a lot of passion and we were gonna do whatever it took to make this thing happen. Okay, so now you've convinced a few high profile people to join you. You're finally putting together this tech team to actually build the the this thing. Uh but you're still pitching investors and getting rejections, right? W when w when did that change?

We had enough people that were somewhat interested that hadn't rejected us. So we had a bit of a strategy where rather than asking, um, if people wanted to invest, we'd ask people for for their advice. And you can go back and you can Say, hey, do you want to give me some advice? I'd love to show you my pitch deck. And then they'd give us some advice. And so that means they didn't say no to us at this point in time. They would just give you feedback. Give us feedback and they'd be like, Okay, that's great feedback. We'll take that on board. They're like, Hey, do you want to meet up again in another month? Um and look, we've done the things that we'd said we were gonna do. And once you had done that enough times they realised that you actually do the things that you say you're gonna do. Yeah. Um we kind of had enough people at that point where they're kind of interested, we'd kind of been demonstrating that we could do what that we said we were going to do. Yeah. And then uh the tide turned because we hadn't we were all of a sudden oversubscribed. How much did you want to raise in that first seed round?

We want to raise one point five. I think we left San Francisco and we'd raise seven fifty. Um but then over the coming months we ended up filling out that round of about uh one point six I think it got to. We were s totally oversubscribed. Um and then the Australian government gave us one point four. A matching amount. Yeah, exactly. So you got three million bucks. This is what Early two thousand thirteen. Yeah, two thousand and twelve. So it was a full year of development between landing investment and actually launching the product. And in that time our investment's like

Well, like what the hell has she done with her money? Um like it's a long time. So like the lean startup was a big deal back then, um, and you launch and iterate and you know do something in a weekend and see if people like it. But the whole point was that we took all these really complex things and made it simple and then great for everyone and accessible. Um and so that took a lot more time than a weekend. Um and so you spent that year developing this thing um and then spent a lot of time like on user testing, making sure that people actually understood it. People were scared of designing because people are conditioned for their whole lives thinking they're not creative or can't design things. So the f we ended up with these things called starter challenges where they'd come and they'd change the colour of a circle and put a hat on a monkey and all these little silly challenges that built up people's confidence with their design abilities. Um so that would took a while. And and while you were sort of building building out this

technology. Um Presumably you have to hire people too, right? How many people did you have to hire in that first year before you even launched? Think we had about fifteen people. So you had My team. I mean. We had a team. Yeah, we had a team. It was kind of exciting. And it it sounds exciting, but let me I just the flip side of this, which is all of a sudden you've got three million dollars of other people's money. Mm-hmm. You've You've convinced these really talented engineers to join you.

You got Other people who've like given up their jobs to come and work for you. That's scary. That's a lot of Responsibility on your shoulders.

Yeah, definitely. Actually when I'm at Lars and started to think about this whole world venture capital and taking people's money I realized that I had to make a decision at that point in time that if I was gonna pursue this path I would have to be At least partially okay with the idea of it not working out. And why that was something that was important is I'm I'm really not someone that

likes to give up ever on anything. Yeah. But yeah, it certainly was a lot of pressure. But I was also inc felt incredibly happy to for it to have gone from something where everything was external, so trying to convince people to join my team to something that was internal. Like I could can work really hard to make sure that this was an amazing product. And I I like that switch. That's mine. My preferred place. So you guys launch, I guess, in in August of twenty thirteen and and you're ready with this online graphic design and and like publishing tool and You hang the shingle out and the website goes live and what happens? Like d do people come to it right away?

Well, we're fortunate that because we had some high profile investors in that first round, um, when we landed that first round of investment, we mate we announced it. Um we got some TechCrunch coverage and we were pretty stoked about that. And we ended up with a waiting list of fifty thousand people before we launched. Oh so it was like by invitation only initially. And we said we weren't we're this stealth startup that wasn't saying what we were doing. Right. Um and then yeah, we we launched in August twenty thirteen. Um we'd spent a lot of time prior to that. that engineering it so people would have an amazing experience and to clap and to share it with others. And that certainly happened and so within the first you know, every month just was the biggest and best ever. Wow. And what explain what the business model was and is. Like y you it's free to use, right? Like you can just go and design anything.

So subscription model, how does it work? So one of our philosophies right from the start was that we wanted design to be accessible to everyone. We wanted to be free. Um and so Canover is completely free to use, and then you can purchase images for a dollar. And so it would mean that Like if you're you know putting together your school assignment or you're you know just a really small business trying to create get your social media off the ground, you can afford to create something to look great. Um and then we also have uh a paid offering. So if you're using it for work, um if you would like to save your brand colours and fonts and logos, um then you can Um go on out. Premium offering. And it's like a subscription, like a monthly amount. And and so let's say I want to design like a yearbook page, right? And I can go and design it, but if I wanna actually download it, I have to pay for that. No, that's free as well.

That's free, okay. Yeah. We wanted we wanted to ensure that our free product was a complete value loop. Like you could go in, get your thing completely free. It doesn't it doesn't say Canva like printed on it or anything? Do you guys have ads at all? No ads. So how So You need a Pretty significant percentage of your

Users to buy images Because Building this technology is expensive. Yeah, so the concept was that we'd give away the software for free, but then you could purchase images, you could purchase fonts, you could purchase potentially layouts, but we're currently giving them away for free. But the idea is that you would always be able to have that base product for free for everyone. um and we're actually profitable. So actually that business model's been working out alright for us.

Um I can't. And you can also print your design. So you can click print and in in forty countries you can have it delivered to your door. How many people do you have working for you? Um three hundred and fourteen at last count, but we're growing really rapidly. They're all in Sydney. Um so two hundred and Fifty or in City. Um and then we have a team in the Philippines as well. I mean what one of the things that I'm I'm really surprised about and I'm a little disappointed about actually is that it sounds like you just didn't make any mistakes after you launched it. It just sounds like you put this great product out there and there were no bugs and everybody was happy with it is that Is it true? I mean I I'm I'm like waiting for the disaster story where, you know, you launched it and then like

It crashed for four days or something. Oh uh I'll give you I'll give you a tidbit. So it it's I I certainly hasn't been smooth sailing, but I guess I'm always just focused on the next mountain to climb. So for example, when we launched, so we had I I've just told you the entire backstory of all the of the effort that had gone into getting it to launch. So I was back in San Francisco sleeping in my br brother's apartment and he was actually away. Um so I'm just there by myself before I so I'm about to go to sleep and someone broke the embargo. Um break the embargo that you're about to launch? About to launch, yeah. An article came out and they met the their article said that um we had a a not very good product and that we had cheesy photography and that it wasn't very easy to use. And

I felt at that point in time like The last. I don't know, six years of my life was crushed. Yeah. Very fortunately that was a bit of a Fortunately a false start. Everyone else seemed to like it and

And g and get what we're doing. So As you scale and grow and hire more people, now three hundred plus people You are the CEO, you're the boss of the company. Um you're self described

Introvert. You're sitting here, you seem like just a Kind of. And really Delightful person.

Um And Sometimes you have to be tough as a CEO. Like you have to make tough decisions. You have to fire people. You have to review people, you have to have difficult conversations with people. Have you

Had to learn how to do that or Does that come naturally to you or do you just Avoid doing that. think everything every single day right from the start has been a learning curve. You know, there's been people that haven't worked out over the years We try to just have the nicest conversation, try to actually

Help them to understand that why it wasn't working out, try to coach them to actually make them better. I don't know, there's just every at every single stage there's been things to learn. And I don't think that Yeah, some things never get easier. But you just have to figure out like What is the best thing that you possibly can do and learn as you go? I think that that's one thing that I'm pretty good at is just in time learning. And over the years there's certainly been a lot of things to learn. Got a valuation of a billion dollars.

Um and is it Australian or US dollars? US. Th that's that's this year. Yeah. Um you know, given that you are like one of the first Australian unicorns, right? I don't know, does that increase the pressure on you or or does it are you just super proud of it and You know, just Carry on. I mean d do you feel any of that weight?

I think the ironic thing is like since I was doing my assignments in year two, I've always put a lot of pressure on myself and so that same pressure just applies today. Like of course it's different it's a different magnitude, but I think I've just always put a lot of pressure on myself. I've always wanted to do the best I possibly can. Um and now yes I feel a lot of responsibility for the livelihoods of a lot of our team members. Um but I think that You know, that same pressure of just like trying to do my absolute best every single day. I'm just curious, like at the hundreds of thousands of designs that that have been created You know.

Uh up until this point with this tool that you brought into the world, like do you Do you have any favourites? To me the stories that really touch me are like so we've got twenty thousand non profits using Canva and this is everything from people trying to end poverty to cure cancer. Like seeing the stories They're pretty damn cool. Like we had a lady who found her birth mother, who she created a poster on Canva, um, posted on Facebook, found her birth mother. That was pretty cool. We've seen so many people who post their resume that landed them a job, or um there's just like so many stories. Every single day I like s look through Twitter and I see so many touching stories of you know

That one philosophy of that design should be accessible to everyone is actually being put into practice and having real world implications. How much of of all of this This amazing story due tribute to Your skill, your intelligence, your hard work, and how much to luck. I think it's a really interesting question because I think that

If you zoom out of luck. And you say, Where were you born? Who your parents. Who what was the education that you got? Um, you know, having good health.

There there's so many layers of luck. So if you look at all of those things, I couldn't be luckier. Um But then on the other side of it, I feel like we've planted enough seeds that eventually one of those f grows. And so that's kind of another version of luck, is like we planted maybe a thousand seeds and one of those seeds grew. And so you could kind of attribute that to either luck or hard work for planting a thousand seeds. So I'd say a little column A, a little column B. Hm. How how old are you now? thirty one.

So thirty one and Amazingly, I mean you're so young, but You're a veteran. I mean you've been in the startup world since you were nineteen, like you started your first real company. So you you have a lot of experience. I mean you've got

twelve years of experience. doing this, raising money, starting a business, creating a brand, marketing What do you know now that you wish you knew when you were Twenty three, twenty four. twenty five.

I think one of the wonderful things about this whole experience is that I didn't know a lot going into it. And I think that learning Every single day as you go. has actually been one of the most critical parts because I think if I knew all of the lessons that I've had to learn over the last twelve years, I would have been incredibly intimidated and potentially not even wanted to start. Had I listened to statistics, for example, and thought that that was something that I should be afraid of or frightened of, that probably would have dissuaded me. Every single day getting thrown in the deep end. But at the same time, like I love challenges and taking on the what seems to the the impossible from the outside.

I don't know, when you don't know what you don't know, um then you can't really be afraid of it. That's Melanie Perkins, co-founder of Canva. According to company statistics from mid-2018, the online design and publishing tool is now used by over 10 million people across the world. and new designs are created on the site.

at a rate of twenty per second. And by the way, Melanie says she does not kitesurf anymore. So I did it for five years and I can now officially kite surf. Great. But I felt for five years like I was kind of risking my life. I'm kind of I I take risks in things that are kind of calculated and so my risk loss ratio was a little out with that. I felt like I could just die anyway. Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today's story comes to us from Tristan Korvo of Portland, Maine.

And about two years ago, Tristan was staying at a hotel in Boston when he did what many of us do at hotels, he went to the bathroom and opened up the box of soap. And I'm washing my hands. And he's looking at this bar of soap that he's about to toss aside, and he starts to think, This must happen a lot every day in hotels. I was really curious about it, so I decided to just look it up. And he discovered that most hotels just throw away their used soap. So after a bit more research, Tristan found a nonprofit that does take old bars of soap. and recycles them.

But Tristan thought, okay, that's great, but What if we could turn that soap into liquid soap? And make it available in bulk and then Cut down on plastic waste. You buy a soap dispenser that's plastic.

You put it next to your sink, you have it for a few weeks, maybe a month, and then you go get another one. And you multiply that by, you know, three hundred million people washing their hands every day and all of a sudden there's a lot of plastic bottles out in the world. So Tristan starts calling hotels in Portland, Maine, and a lot of them were sending their soap to the nonprofit. But they had to pay a membership fee and the cost of shipping. And some of the smaller hotels couldn't afford that, so their soap just went into the trash.

And one of those places, the Press Hotel, really hated doing this. So Tristan got in touch with the manager. And he said, hey, I can help recycle your soap. For free. She was just like, this is amazing. Like we've been trying to figure out something to do with our soap for so long.

We would love to work with you, we'd love to give it to you, like Let's do this, let's go. Yes, yes, let's go! Except uh uh what do I do now? Tristan hadn't thought his idea all the way through. A week later, the Press Hotel happily gave him nearly 50 pounds of old soap, and it was

Kinda gross. There's dirt on it. It can end up on the floor. It picks up little pieces of like paper and dirt and So step one? Clean it up. That's just a really tedious job. You sit over a bin of soap and scrape everything off of it into another bin. Fifty pounds and five hours of scraping later, he was on to step two. which was to liquefy the soap.

Tristan found a DIY community online that's really into making their own liquid soap from new bars of soap. they grind it up and boil it down and turn it into liquid hand soap for their their use at home. So I thought this is really easy. But Selling it? Old recycled soap?

That was hard. And Trista knew that some people would worry about germs. So he turned to step three. The experts. He consulted with the biolement at the University of Southern Maine and they suggested using an autoclave. It's like a steam sterilization.

process and it's very common in dentist office, in tattoo studios. This is a way for them to um sterilize their tools. But an autoclave costs$4,000. Money Tristan did not have. What he did have was the used soap supply from the press hotel. and proof that the autoclave process worked. And that was enough to secure a local business grant to buy an autoclave.

And so armed with a new autoclave. Tristan move to step four. Actual production. I put together that first batch and I was like, oh this is great. I made perfect soap, I'll go sell it. And so we started by contacting a friend who owned several Portland restaurants.

And the friend let Tristan hang a few wall dispensers in the bathrooms. Everything was looking great. And then three or four weeks later I get an email that's like hey the the soap is separating Pretty much all that's coming out is water.

This, to put it mildly, was a minor disaster. And so for a year, Tristan searched for an ingredient that would stabilize the soap, but one that was also eco-friendly. And he tried everything cornstarch, flour, even recycled wood pulp. But the key ingredient turned out to be

Baking soda. It's so basic, I was like, how did I miss that? Finally, by the fall of 2018, after two years of troubleshooting, Tristan had a marketable recycled liquid soap. He sells it by the gallon and in large refillable glass bottles, sticking to his mission of cutting back on single-use plastics. And the press hotel? They're using his soap in their lobby bathrooms.

And they're also still supplying him with pounds and pounds of used bar soap. There's been times where I felt really overwhelmed by the amount of soap that I'm getting. And I've asked them, hey, can we put collection on pause? And they always refuse me. Nope, you gotta keep collecting. Let's keep going. It's Tristan Corvo of Portland, Maine. His business is called the One Gallon Soap Company.

He's got five people on his team, and in the next few weeks, Tristan will become the first full time employee. He's decided to leave his current job in sales? to focus on growing his own company. If you want to find out more about Tristan or the One Gallon Soap Company, or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, how IbuiltThis.npr.org, and of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and while you're there, please do give us a review.

You can also write to us at hibtnpr.org and if you want to send a tweet, it's at how I built this. Our show is produced this week by Casey Herman, with music composed by Ramteen Arablui. Thanks also to Mia Bencat, JC Howard, Noor Kudsi, Niva Grant, Melissa Gray, Sanaz Meshkinpur, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Candice Lynn. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to how I built this from NPR.

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