Source: Inc. Magazine
It was 2006 when 19 year old uni student and graphic design lover, Melanie Perkins, became frustrated with the clunky, disorganised and outdated design software that she was working with, and it’s fair to say that no one would have predicted her $40 billion dollar success story that would follow many years later. This is a story of how a young Australian girl with no technical background or business experience - but a bunch of determination, persistence and passion – was able to revolutionise the graphic design industry and create every marketing student’s best friend – Canva.
Melanie had recognised that the graphic design world was not compatible with the general public, with “students taking a whole semester just learning where the buttons were and how to design something”. Her vision was to revolutionise the world of design, to allow anyone and everyone to have the access and ability to easily create designs for whatever they needed. But tackling such a huge goal, whilst competing against the likes of Microsoft, Adobe and Google seemed slightly out of reach for the 19 year old at the time.
So she started small – specifically, focusing on transforming the design and creation process of high school yearbooks. Melanie’s mum was a teacher, and would often get thrown into the daunting task of creating the yearbook for her school with no design experience. So, Melanie and her boyfriend at the time, (and now husband – ikr how cute) Cliff Obrecht, got started on a software that would allow people of all ages and experience to create beautiful designs for school yearbooks using templates given to them online.
With a $50,000 loan gathered from friends and family, Melanie and Cliff took their 80 page business plan and interviewed every software engineer they could find in Perth. Finally, they found someone who did not think they were completely crazy – Greg Mitchell, and together with his company’s software, a simple website, and a couple of printers set up in Melanie’s mother’s living room, ‘Fusion Books’ was born.
And they grew quickly. From having 16 schools design and print their yearbooks with Fusion in their first year, to 50 then 100 in the next two, they could see that this idea of making design more accessible to everyone had huge potential for something more.
In 2009, a quick chat with major tech investor Bill Tai after a conference he spoke at in Perth would change everything for Melanie. Soon after, she headed to Silicon Valley in San Francisco, the worlds so called ‘preeminent hub for technology’ and brought her pitch for Canva to Bill.
But he spent majority of the meeting sitting on his phone, and Melanie, in her own words, remembers feeling like “the biggest flop”. Little did she know, Bill had in fact been very impressed with her pitch and had been messaging many different people and introducing her idea to them. He connected her to Lars Rasmussen, the co-founder of Google Maps, and told Melanie that if she could find a tech team that Lars approved of, he would be willing to invest in starting up Canva. But after a 3 month hunt in the United States for this brilliant tech team, no one seemed to meet Lars’ standards, and Melanie’s expired visa meant to had to return to Australia, disappointed and empty handed.
But Bill had a tech venture & kitesurfing conference coming up in early 2012 where around 150 major investors would have be having tech talks, mingling and kitesurfing together for a few days. This sounded like the dream place for Melanie to retry to pitch Canva and create some investor interest – but Bill said she could only come if she knew how to kitesurf. So, Melanie got to work, and although she reckons she probably “risked her life” as an amateur kite surfer at that conference, she managed to kite surf her way into gathering interest from many investors, eventually landing her and Cliff’s Canva co-founder, Cameron Adams.
After going back to San Francisco and getting over 100 rejections, Melanie somehow managed to raise $1.6 million from investors, and together with a $1.4 million grant from the Australia government, they finally had the money to get started on Canva.
In August 2013, 7 years after working towards their dream design company, Canva was launched and quickly took over the graphic design world. Growing from 1 million users in 2014, to 6 million in 2015 and over 75 million as of last year, its fair to say that her and Cliff’s vision has been nothing short of a success. And after being valued at a whopping $40 billion in September 2021, it’s clear that Canva’s prosperity is only on the rise.
But more importantly, Melanie’s personal growth from a small 19 year old girl with no tech or business experience to now one of the richest women in the world, can serve as a huge inspiration for us all. Through her years of hard work and passion, she shows us all how a small idea and brave conversations - combined with a little belief, drive and determination - can turn a young Australian girl into a renowned business billionaire.
Written by Nicole Rozario
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