Thoughts on Canva
Here are my thoughts and reflections on the Canva success story.
Note: The thoughts and ideas expressed below are my own. The language has been polished with assistance from Claude.
Video Source
Key themes:
- Column B Thinking: Dream of a wildly ambitious future and work backwards, rather than incremental improvements from current reality
- Persistence through rejection: 100+ investor rejections, using feedback to refine pitch and vision
- Crazy big goals: Set ambitious targets that create a sense of inadequacy fueling hard work (e.g., design anything, every language, every device)
- From chaos to clarity: New ideas start vague, then progress through writing, prototypes, and refinement until tangible
- Two-step plan: Build one of the world’s most valuable companies, then do the most good possible
- Work-life balance evolution: From 7-day workweeks to healthy boundaries (no Slack/email on phone, yoga, journaling)
- Customer-centric development: Over 1 million community requests/year, 200+ community-sourced features launched
My Thoughts
Persistence Through Challenges
Melanie Perkins is a thoughtful leader. She built everything from scratch—transforming a yearbook platform into Canva, integrating multiple functionalities, maintaining an active user community, and achieving significant profitability.
Canva’s early challenges were harsh even from an outsider’s perspective. They faced over 100 investor rejections and couldn’t deliver new features for 2 years—far exceeding the planned 6 months. Any one of these setbacks alone could have ended the company. Yet they survived and grew into a highly profitable business.
Ambitious Goal-Setting
This success is closely tied to her mindset and leadership. She dreams of an extremely ambitious future and sets “crazy big goals.” She believes that goals which seem nearly impossible can motivate her to work harder and push closer to achieving them. Personally, I’m not naturally inclined this way—I tend to think that setting goals too large might make me lose confidence and ultimately fail. So this is a new perspective for me. I should try thinking bigger, even if not quite as ambitiously as she does. The key takeaway is to keep working on something even when it seems likely to fail. We may learn a lot during the journey.
Product Development Philosophy
I appreciate her approach to building new features. She starts with the general concept and then works down to implementation details. This is similar to what I learned in A Philosophy of Software Design, and I’m trying to avoid the waterfall style of planning everything ahead.
Work-Life Balance
Work-life balance matters. Working too long without breaks just lowers efficiency. I’m not sure what exactly led her to develop this mindset, but it’s something truly valuable. Our health is fundamental to ensuring we can work and produce high-quality outcomes.
Community-Driven Development
She has built a large and active user community. Users raise feature requests, and analyzing and prioritizing them is key to improving the product and truly implementing what users need. It’s also a good idea to keep users involved in testing, since they can provide valuable insights about problems that most people will encounter.
Overall Reflection
What inspires me most about her is how she started the company and grew it into such a large one. This is no easy feat since most start-up companies don’t get enough funding, or find it hard to make money with their new products. Luck must be a part, but her personal ability and leadership must play essential roles as well.