Stories in SaaS and What you can learn from them — Part III

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SaaS marketing has been quite a challenge for some companies but some have paved their way into growing exponentially. While many traditional companies follow traditional methods for achieving consistent growth, SaaS companies follow a very different approach.

Earlier we covered in our 4 part series brands like Hubspot and Atlassian. In PART III we talk about how Canva scaled it’s business and democratized designs and made its presence in more than 190 countries in less than a decade’s time.

The Beginning

Melanie Perkins, while studying at the University of Western Australia, was teaching students how to use InDesign and Photoshop, design software that people found hard to learn. She realized that there’s a striving market for a design tool that doesn’t take an enormous amount of hours to learn and gets the job done. She along with her boyfriend Cliff Obrecht developed Fusion Books — an online design tool that made it easier for students to develop the year book.

Both of them realized that the technology that they had developed could be used in a much broader way and that led them to invite Cameron Adams to join them who later on became the tech Co-founder. Together, they all launched Canva in July 2012.

The Growth

The initial launch of the Australian based company was postponed by months because Melanie wanted the product offering to be as refined as possible. After months of continuous refinement and testing of the tools they realized that it wasn’t enough. The users had to be empowered into believing that the tool is as simple as it can be and Canva is the future of the design. This led them to streamlining their onboarding experience into a seamless user experience and making certain pre-developed design tools available, so that the user actually clicks and plays around the tool.

Keynote: Empowering the users with the belief that anyone can design, captured the initial interest at the time when social media creative needs were at a boost

In Jan 2014, Canva had 150,000 users and it opened publicly. The same year saw Guy Kawasaki joining Canva who is best known for his role as a Chief Evangelist in Apple and for his numerous books, including Rules for Revolutionaries, The Art of the Start, Wise Guy etc.

Guy learnt about the Australian based start-up from her social media architect Peg Fitzpatrick who was using Canva at that time for designing social media creatives for his Twitter account. Melanie Perkins noticed that his creatives were being designed using Canva, and it made her reach out to him, inviting him to join Canva. Two months of him joining in, the company witnessed that the number of users tripled and it touched a million users in October 2014.

Keynote: Guy Kawasaki’s belief in advocating a democratizing product offering of Canva, made him promote and reach its true potential in the global market.

Betting on Word of Mouth

Melanie conveyed that it wasn’t the engineering virality, SEM, SEO, or any other form of marketing, it was the word of mouth that helped in the early stages of its growth. The initial set of subscribers who were in the waiting list of Canva, talked first about the designing tool which attracted more users to it. Adding to it, they never did rely on social media marketing, but they did introduce a social sharing option on their platform that allowed users to directly share it on social media, which further paved the way for it to reach more people.

Other than this, Canva fueled its growth by acquiring other startups like Zeetings — an online interactive presentation tool which had a user base of 1 million people in more than 50 countries

Where does Canva stand in the market right now?

With its launch in 2012 to selected professionals, Canva was now used by 30 Million users each month, based on a freemium model. As of now, it has over 1.5 Million paying customers across 190 countries and is also said to be used by 90,000 schools and universities, and 55000 non-profits.

Currently, it is valued at $6 Billion which is nearly double its last valuation which was $3.2 Billion set in October 2019. In June 2020, they announced that they’ve raised a funding of $60 Million with new investors — Sequoia China and Blackbird, along with its earlier investors General Catalyst, Felicis, and Bond. This allows them to launch their Austin, Texas office which will serve as its U.S enterprise hub and continue expanding their collaboration tools.

We talked about Atlassian’s story in Part 2 of our stories in SaaS & What you can learn from them. You’ll be surprised to know that InVision collaborated with Atlassian and they were announced as the Atlassian SaaS partner of the year 2018: Fastest growth for their contribution and achievements during Atlassian’s fiscal year 2018. Follow us and stay tuned in our last and part IV of the article on how InVision paved its way into acquiring 4 million users since its launch in 2011 in the last part of this series.

Few Brief Pointers

• Melanie Perkins along with Cliff Obrecht launched Canva in 2012
• By January 2014, Canva had 150,000 users and opened publicly
• April 2014, Guy Kawasaki joined the team as Chief Evangelist
• The Canva team says that they haven’t invested in social media marketing which is a very commonly used method by start ups but what they did instead was introduced a social sharing option when the user finishes a design (app.virality) Already existing designs like Pinterest.