Canva: Melanie Perkins

When she was just 19 years old, Melanie Perkins dreamt of transforming the graphic design and publishing industries. But she started small, launching a site to make yearbook design simpler and more collaborative. Her success with that first venture — and an unexpected meeting with a VC investor — eventually landed her the backing to pursue her original idea, and the chance to take on software industry titans like Adobe and Microsoft. Today, Melanie's online design platform Canva is valued at over $1 billion, joining the list of Australia's "unicorn" companies. PLUS for our postscript "How You Built That," how Tristan Corriveau collected used bars of soap from a hotel and recycled them into liquid soap with The One Gallon Soap Company. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Guy Raz?

  Weren't any of the investors saying, "You don't have a tech team. You don't have a chief technology officer." Like, I don't know if I'm going to put my...

• 0:09Speaker 01

  That was literally what everyone was saying.

• 0:11Guy Raz?

  Which makes sense, right?

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it makes perfect sense. But how are we going to get this thing rolling?

• 0:16Guy Raz?

  How many people do you think you pitched over that, I guess, two-month period in San Francisco?

• 0:21Speaker 01

  I don't know, over 100 people, more. I was going through my rejections the other day. I was looking at some of the emails. And there was quite a dump here.

• 0:35Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 0:49Guy Raz?

  I'm 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 $1 billion.

• 1:08Guy Raz?

  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

• 1:53Guy Raz?

  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 one little piece of the idea that she

• 2:38Guy Raz?

  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.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  And it seemed completely silly that you'd take 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 to 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 Microsoft Office and lots and lots of other industries as well. We thought rather than people using things like clip art, they should be able to have access to beautiful templates like designers do. But at that point in time, I was 19 and I had no business experience. And so rather than trying to take on the entire world of design, all these really big companies, we decided to take on school yearbooks in Australia.

• 3:50Guy Raz?

  You keep saying "we." When you say "we," who are you talking about?

• 3:53Speaker 01

  My boyfriend turned co-founder Cliff.

• 3:55Guy Raz?

  And you're still together?

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:57Guy Raz?

  12, 11, 12 years later. So you decided to start a web-based business that would help people design yearbooks. How did you come upon the idea of yearbooks?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Well, we had this vision for all, for taking on the entire world of design. But yearbooks seemed to be like a really pressing need because school teachers would get thrown in to do this thing that had no design experience. I'd seen my mum put together school yearbooks for her school.

• 4:25Guy Raz?

  And it's a grind.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  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 because there's such a strong market need for these people to create yearbooks.

• 4:39Guy Raz?

  So how do you go from having that idea to actually, like, what was your next step? Because it was you and Cliff and he was also 19?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  I was 20.

• 4:47Guy Raz?

  20. By the way, what was it called?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Fusion Books.

• 4:50Guy Raz?

  Fusion Books. So were either of you guys like coders or software engineers?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Not at all. We just went and interviewed every software development company in Perth and most people told us that we were completely mad.

• 5:01Guy Raz?

  But how did you even have the money to pay them?

• 5:04Speaker 01

  We got a 50 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.

• 5:13Guy Raz?

  You went around to friends and family and said, "We have this amazing idea. We want to develop a web-based software solution for people designing yearbooks, which is a great idea."

• 5:23Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 5:25Guy Raz?

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

• 5:35Speaker 01

  There was this amazing company called In Depth and I went in with like an 80-page description of exactly what we wanted to build. Like I had wireframes built up even though I didn't know what that.

• 5:45Guy Raz?

  Like you sketched out pictures of what the pages would look like?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, to the detail, what every single button was going to do, how it's going to work. Like this project ended up being like five times bigger than they anticipated, but they were very kind and like we'd had a fixed price contract.

• 6:01Guy Raz?

  And what was going to make this better than anything else available at the time?

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Well, I think that there was just nothing much available other than these desktop-based programs. So rather than having 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.

• 6:19Guy Raz?

  Because at that time, if you wanted to make a yearbook page, you would just go on Microsoft Word or like?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, Microsoft Word or Publisher. And then also, it wasn't just that part. You'd then have to go get your stock photos or stock illustrations to actually make it look really good. And so there'd be so many different things that you'd have to piece together to create something really, really hacky.

• 6:41Guy Raz?

  And then you would like email that page to somebody and say, hey, what do you think? And they'd say, oh, nah. And then, but you wanted something more like Google Docs, where everybody could kind of jump in and make changes?

• 6:49Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 6:53Guy Raz?

  So you go to the software company in Perth. And how long did it take for them to build out the software for you?

• 6:59Speaker 01

  I think it was about six months before we had our first iteration and then immediately started on our second iteration.

• 7:04Guy Raz?

  And do you remember what year this was?

• 7:06Speaker 01

  That was 2008.

• 7:07Guy Raz?

  2008, 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 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.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And on the plus side as well, because a yearbook actually has to get printed, that was how we were able to monetize. So we were able to give the software away for free and then actually sell the physical yearbooks.

• 7:36Guy Raz?

  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.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:48Guy Raz?

  So what happened?

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Well, we got 16 schools in our first year, which we were very excited about. And then we ended up getting printing presses in my mom's living room.

• 7:59Guy Raz?

  How did you, how did you put, how did you get printing presses?

• 8:04Speaker 01

  So Fuji Xerox 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 a newspaper article in Perth and they obviously saw that.

• 8:16Guy Raz?

  Oh, there was an article about you guys?

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:18Guy Raz?

  And they saw it and they thought, oh, we'll help out.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  And they thought that they'd help out and we'd become a big printing press company one day.

• 8:24Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  And so they gave us a printer. We ended up with a couple of them, actually. And so we would have a printing press going for 24 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 they'd actually do the finishing and the binding.

• 8:40Guy Raz?

  Did any of these schools know that you guys were like 19, 20 years old?

• 8:45Speaker 01

  I don't imagine so.

• 8:50Guy Raz?

  So within your first year, do you remember like what kind of revenue you did?

• 8:57Speaker 01

  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 into the next year. And very fortunately, I guess, we had to become profitable quite quickly because otherwise we'd have no company immediately. So the first year we had 16 schools, the second year we had 50 schools, the next year we had 100 schools and then it was like, I think it was 300. So it was growing quite rapidly.

• 9:22Guy Raz?

  How, when did you start to think about building this into something bigger? Because by 2010, you know, you're two years in and I can imagine you can start to see this thing has legs.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  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? I'm like, surely there must be more technology available now that does that.

• 9:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  And there certainly wasn't. But then in 2010, I met Bill Tai, who is a Silicon Valley investor over from here. 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.

• 10:12Guy Raz?

  You met him in Perth? What was he doing there?

• 10:15Speaker 01

  He was speaking at a conference.

• 10:17Guy Raz?

  This is in 2010?

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so like even though like we'd sort of Had a company that we'd been growing, but the only thing that we knew at that point in time was there were a small business that really struggled to get a loan from the banks. We didn't have a credit history. And there was this whole world of startups that were taking on big industries. So I went up to him after a speech and someone there kindly introduced me and said, hey, she's got a cool company. And he said, yeah, if I went to San Francisco, he'd be happy to meet.

• 10:47Guy Raz?

  And you said, oh, okay, great. And you just like took his number?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:51Guy Raz?

  And email and stuff?

• 10:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:02Guy Raz?

  So you just emailed him and said, can we talk?

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I kind of was like, hey, I'm going to be in Silicon Valley, just going to be in the area. Want to catch up?

• 11:12Guy Raz?

  Did you, did you really have plans at that point? Or you just thought, let's see what he says?

• 11:15Speaker 01

  I was like, if I just say that I'm going to be there and he says that he'll meet up, well, then I'll go.

• 11:21Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  And so could not have been more over the moon that he actually even responded to my message.

• 11:26Guy Raz?

  He said, sure, sure, come see me.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. I was just completely dumbfounded.

• 11:30Guy Raz?

  Wow. So you presumably could go and book your ticket to San Francisco?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:36Guy Raz?

  And how long was, were you planning on going out, coming out for?

• 11:40Speaker 01

  I planned on coming out for two weeks.

• 11:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  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 as an understatement. And so in between the time that he said that he'd meet with me and coming here, I put together my business plan. The future of publishing was what I titled it. And it had a picture of us beating Microsoft Office and Adobe and Google Docs and a whole bunch of other companies. So we met on University Ave.

• 12:11Guy Raz?

  In Palo Alto.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  In Palo Alto, at a cafe. And he said we'd go for lunch. So I brought my, I physically printed my pitch deck, which I also didn't realize was so uncool.

• 12:23Guy Raz?

  So you're supposed to put it on like a, a, a computer, right?

• 12:25Speaker 01

  That, that's right.

• 12:27Guy Raz?

  Probably a Mac, like a sleek Mac.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  I totally didn't know this at the time.

• 12:30Guy Raz?

  You brought a stack of like? Like stapled.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  I was sitting there, like I had my paper pitch deck and he was like, do you have an iPad? And I'm 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 going to take on all these big companies. And trying to eat my lunch and.

• 12:46Guy Raz?

  And he was there wrapped, like engaged?

• 12:49Speaker 01

  No, he was on his phone the whole time. It was so awkward. I felt like the biggest flop. And but very fortunately, when I went home, I had an email from him and he said if I could find a tech team, he'd be happy to invest.

• 13:02Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he'd actually been messaging a lot of different people and introducing me to them.

• 13:09Guy Raz?

  While during the meeting? So he was actually on the phone messaging other people?

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the next meeting I had was with Lars Rusmasen, who co-founded Google Maps. And meeting him completely blew my mind because I really didn't know, it sounds so bizarre, but I had no idea that people that made big world-changing companies were just regular and nice and hardworking, normal people. And meeting Lars completely changed my perception of what was possible.

• 13:35Guy Raz?

  And and did he, when he met you, he said, hey, there's something here?

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, we ended up having an incredible conversation for hours. We both had a really similar view of what the future of communication and publishing should be like.

• 13:47Guy Raz?

  What was he saying?

• 13:49Speaker 01

  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 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. It seemed crazy that you'd have to use so many different tools and go and learn a different thing for everything you wanted to create.

• 14:18Guy Raz?

  So you meet this guy Lars and you say to him, hey, Bill says he's going to back me if I find a tech team, can you help me? Is that what you said to Lars?

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And Lars said he'd be happy to be an advisor. But what that ended up entailing was him rejecting everyone for a full year.

• 14:39Guy Raz?

  Why did Lars have to approve of the tech team? Was that Bill's condition?

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was Bill's condition.

• 14:44Guy Raz?

  He said, oh, I trust Lars. If Lars gives a thumbs up to your tech team, I'll fund you.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 14:50Guy Raz?

  So you are in San Francisco for the next three months.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Until my visa expired.

• 14:56Guy Raz?

  Okay, visa, great, because three-month visa, tourist visa. And where are you, like, working out of? What are you?

• 15:02Speaker 01

  So I was sleeping on my brother's, like, so he had a one-bedroom apartment. I was sleeping in his living room floor. And I was working in, at Nordstrom, the shopping center.

• 15:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah, the Westfield Shopping Center, yeah.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  It's an amazing co-working space. I don't know why more people don't take this up.

• 15:16Guy Raz?

  It's free?

• 15:17Speaker 01

  It's free.

• 15:18Guy Raz?

  There's Wi-Fi?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 15:19Guy Raz?

  So the Nordstrom's in the Westfield Shopping Center in San Francisco, okay.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  And so I would go in there and I would work. And between that, I'd be going to every single conference that I could, like, anything, any meeting, anyone would take.

• 15:33Guy Raz?

  Just like chatting with people, whoever would listen?

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Like, literally, even on the bus, I'd be pitching people, trying to get them to join my tech team.

• 15:39Guy Raz?

  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?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  So I'm actually naturally really introverted. But when I have a goal, I do everything I can to get there. 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-

• 16:03Guy Raz?

  Heart beating and racing?

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Completely terrified, but I'd just keep on pushing myself because I wanted this to happen.

• 16:10Guy Raz?

  Your partner and boyfriend, Cliff, he was still at work, right? Because presumably, for those three months, he was working on Fusion, the yearbook company.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:18Guy Raz?

  And how was it doing?

• 16:20Speaker 01

  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 an interesting time because we knew that there was this big, 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.

• 16:46Guy Raz?

  So three months, you're here for three months. Was it exciting or were you encouraged? Did you feel like this is moving forward?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  I think every day I felt like I'd make a little progress. But by the end of the three months, I didn't have a tech team and I left feeling like the biggest failure.

• 17:04Guy Raz?

  Why?

• 17:05Speaker 01

  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. I'd learnt a lot, but I hadn't actually achieved anything. And so when I was going back to Perth on the flight, I wrote a list of the things that I'd achieved, and one of them was like, staying alive, which is a little grim. But it was a thing.

• 17:29Guy Raz?

  It's a thing, yeah.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  But then, yeah, then moved the company from Perth to Sydney and came back for round two.

• 17:39Guy Raz?

  Coming up in just a moment. Why Melanie's next step in her search for investors was learning how to kite surf. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 18:12Guy Raz?

  Hey, 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 Tai, the VC investor Melanie met with at the Palo Alto coffee shop, he's a huge kite surfing fan. And Bill's taken these two things, venture capitalism and kite surfing, and kind of combined them into a conference he puts on called Mai Tai. And back when Bill met with Melanie, basically told her, hey, if you like kite surfing, I can invite you to this event and you can talk to some other investors there about your idea.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Because I made it seem like I was really interested in kite surfing. And so he said that if I could kite surf, I could go to this conference. And that was where a lot of VCs and investors would be. So I learnt to kite surf and felt like I was going to risk my life quite significantly. It's really frightening.

• 19:02Guy Raz?

  And what is, what's this conference likely, what do you, what do you do?

• 19:06Speaker 01

  They have tech talks like during the morning and then everyone kite surfs in the afternoon.

• 19:10Guy Raz?

  And how many people are there?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Oh, 150 or something.

• 19:13Guy Raz?

  Okay, so it's pretty big.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:15Guy Raz?

  Relatively big. And it's at a hotel in?

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Maui.

• 19:17Guy Raz?

  In Maui, okay. And kite surfing by day and then mingling at night. You went or both you and Cliff went?

• 19:24Speaker 01

  We both went.

• 19:25Guy Raz?

  And you guys are, must be thinking, this is a way for us to get in front of potential funders?

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:32Guy Raz?

  Investors?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 19:34Guy Raz?

  So what did you, were you?

• 19:35Speaker 01

  So we weren't scheduled to talk or anything, but one, in one of the events, we just said like, can we talk tomorrow? Can we do a pitch? And this was like at 10 o'clock at night. And eventually he said yes. So we ended up like just staying up until 6 a.m. like preparing our pitch for the pitch of our lives. And eventually got up and was so incredibly nervous in front of everyone. But apparently it didn't do so bad because like this ex CEO of Shutterfly came up and said he would be keen to invest. And a number of other people said that either give us intros or would be keen to invest as well.

• 20:11Guy Raz?

  What does that mean? Does that mean like I'm ready to write you a check now? Or does that mean I'm interested in further talking, in talking more about this?

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Further talking more about this and waiting to see who else is going to invest before we invest is, was the general feeling. So you had to get enough people who were interested to invest before anyone would invest.

• 20:30Guy Raz?

  So you did not leave Maui with like a stack of checks?

• 20:33Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 20:34Guy Raz?

  You left Maui with how many checks?

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Zero checks.

• 20:36Guy Raz?

  Zero, okay. So the next, so from Maui, you went back to San Francisco, still on tourist visa.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 20:41Guy Raz?

  This is round two.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:42Guy Raz?

  Now it's you and Cliff.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:44Guy Raz?

  And what did you do over the next six or eight weeks? Like, did you, was it, did you start to pitch potential investors? Is that, is that what you were doing?

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, pitching everyone, including, we're still pitching for.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Other engineers at this stage, because we still didn't have an engineer. We were pitching any venture capitalist or angel investor that would take a meeting.

• 21:06Guy Raz?

  Weren't any of the investors saying, hey, this is a really cool idea. And, you know, fusion seems cool, but you don't have a tech team. You don't have a chief technology officer. Like, I don't know if I'm gonna put my...

• 21:18Speaker 01

  That was literally what everyone was saying.

• 21:20Guy Raz?

  Which makes sense, right?

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it makes perfect sense, but how are we gonna get this thing rolling?

• 21:25Guy Raz?

  How many people do you think you pitched over that, I guess, two-month period in San Francisco?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Three months. It was, I don't know, between the first year and, I don't know, that year period, it would, over a hundred people, more. I didn't count, but I was going through my rejections the other day. I was looking at some of the emails and there was quite a damp year.

• 21:52Guy Raz?

  So what was it that kept you going, like when you were just getting rejection after rejection?

• 21:58Speaker 01

  I think you just know the game you're playing. 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 I really wanted to create that. Even though it was frustrating, it was also, I knew it was a pretty important thing to do, to get people to see the same future that I did.

• 22:26Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  But I think it was really beneficial because we got so many different questions and 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.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  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 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 a slide in our pitch deck which showed the gap in the market and all of the other companies and where we believe the huge gap was. A lot of people would say they know nothing about design. They don't know anything about our industry. And so that's... That was a reason to not invest. So we made the one of the first pages of our pitch deck, explaining the industry and where we believe this huge gap was.

• 23:13Guy Raz?

  This was in 2012, right? Okay, so let's say I'm one of these investors you're meeting with in the Bay Area, I would say. So yeah, this looks cool, but I have a lot of questions for you, Melanie. First of all, tech team, where's your tech team? You would say what?

• 23:27Speaker 01

  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 going to take it on to the bigger stage. I can totally understand why no one wanted to invest in us.

• 23:40Guy Raz?

  And then I would say, and I'd say, but you know, 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 going to get crushed right away.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  You sound totally like one of those investors.

• 23:56Guy Raz?

  And what would you say?

• 23:58Speaker 01

  We'd say 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 eras of publishing over the years, we started off with metal plates and then we moved into the tight setting and paste up. So this actually became the second slide in our pitch deck. And we then moved into the desktop era. And then we were now moving into this new era, which we believe is going to be online. And what you'll see, 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 every single time there was a new era, a new market leader emerged. And so we believe that market leader can be us.

• 24:39Guy Raz?

  And then I would say, okay, but you know, it looks interesting, but you guys are way in Australia. Like, would you guys consider relocating here? Making it, moving your team here?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  So it depends 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 at Google. And so he was going to be based in Australia. And we also met another amazing guy from Google, who Lars said was one of the best people we'd ever worked with, Dave Herndon. So Lars actually introduced us to both Cam and Dave. Dave had worked in the US, but he was Australian, he was going to 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 every dollar that we got from investors.

• 25:26Guy Raz?

  They wanted to incentivize you

• 25:27Speaker 01

  To stay.

• 25:28Guy Raz?

  To stay in Australia. So So Dave Harnett, who you just mentioned, he ends up becoming your chief technology officer, right?

• 25:36Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 25:37Guy Raz?

  And I'm just curious, like, he was a really talented engineer working at Google. I'm sure he was very well paid at the time. How did you convince him to join your tiny startup instead?

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Well, if you search the term on Google bizarre pitch deck, I can proudly claim the number one spot.

• 25:56Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  So I went on to... So firstly, we pitched Dave, and Dave was like interested in what we're doing. 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 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.

• 26:27Guy Raz?

  And that convinced him?

• 26:28Speaker 01

  I think that that definitely moved it in the right direction. I think that he realized that we had a lot of passion and we were gonna do whatever it took to make this thing happen.

• 26:37Guy Raz?

  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 this thing. But you're still pitching investors and getting rejections, right? When did that change?

• 26:50Speaker 01

  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 if people wanted to invest, we'd ask people 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.

• 27:10Guy Raz?

  They would just give you feedback?

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Give us feedback, and they'd go, okay, that's great feedback. We'll take that on board. And we're like, hey, do you want to meet up again in another month? And look, we've done the things that we'd said we were gonna do. And once you had done that enough times, they realized that you actually do the things that you say you're gonna do.

• 27:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  We kind of had enough people at that point that were kind of interested, that we'd kind of been demonstrating that we could do what we said we were going to do.

• 27:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  And then the tide turned because we were all of a sudden oversubscribed.

• 27:38Guy Raz?

  How much did you want to raise in that first seed round?

• 27:40Speaker 01

  So we wanted to raise 1.5. I think we left San Francisco and we'd raised 750. But then, over the coming months, we ended up filling out that round of about 1.6, I think it got to. We were totally oversubscribed. And then the Australian government gave us 1.4.

• 27:59Guy Raz?

  A matching amount?

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 28:01Guy Raz?

  So you've got 3 million bucks. This is what, early 2013?

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, 2012. So it was a full year of development between landing investment and actually launching the product. And in that time, our investors were like, well, what the hell has she done with our money? Like, it's a long time. So like, the lean startup was a big deal back then. And you launch and iterate and you do something in a weekend and see if people like it.

• 28:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  But the whole point was that we took all these really complex things and made it simple. And then, great for everyone and accessible. And so that took a lot more time than a weekend.

• 28:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  And so you spent that year developing this thing. 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 we ended up with these things, got starter challenges where they'd come and they'd change the color 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. So that took a while.

• 29:05Guy Raz?

  And while you were sort of building out this technology, presumably you had to hire people too, right? How many people did you have to hire in that first year before you even launched?

• 29:17Speaker 01

  I think we had about 15 people.

• 29:20Guy Raz?

  So you had a team.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  We had a team, yeah, we had a team. It was totally exciting.

• 29:25Guy Raz?

  And it sounds exciting, but let me, just the flip side of this, which is, all of a sudden, you've got $3 million of other people's money. You've convinced these really talented engineers to join you. You've 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.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. Actually, when I'm at Lars and started to think about this whole world venture capital and taking people's money, I realised that I had to make a decision at that point in time that if I was going to 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 really not someone that likes to give up ever on anything.

• 30:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  But yeah, certainly it was a lot of pressure, but I was also felt incredibly happy 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 liked that switch. That's my preferred place.

• 30:32Guy Raz?

  So you guys launch, I guess, in August of 2013, and you're ready with this online graphic design and like publishing tool, and you hang the shingle out and the website goes live. And what happens? Like, do people come to it right away?

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Well, we're fortunate that because we had some high-profile investors in that first round, when we landed that first round of investment, we announced it. We got some TechCrunch coverage, and we were pretty stoked about that. And we ended up with a waiting list of 50,000 people before we launched.

• 31:04Guy Raz?

  Oh, so it was like by invitation only initially?

• 31:06Speaker 01

  And we said we weren't, we're this stealth startup that wasn't saying what we were doing.

• 31:10Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  And then, yeah, we launched in August 2013. We'd spent a lot of time prior to that engineering it so people would have an amazing experience and to share it with others. And that certainly happened. And so within the first, you know, every month was the biggest and best ever.

• 31:29Guy Raz?

  Wow. And what, explain what the business model was and is. Like, you, it's free to use, right? Like, you can just go and design anything. So a subscription model, how does it work?

• 31:39Speaker 01

  So one of our philosophies right from the start was that we wanted design to be accessible to everyone. We wanted to be free. And so Canva 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 get your social media off the ground, you could afford to create signings that look great. And then we also have a paid offering. So if you're using it for work, if you would like to save your brand colors and fonts and logos, then you can go on our premium offering.

• 32:10Guy Raz?

  And it's like a subscription, like a monthly amount? And so let's say I want to design like a yearbook page, right? And I can go and design it, but if I want to actually download it, I have to pay for that.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  No, that's free as well.

• 32:22Guy Raz?

  That's free, okay.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, we wanted to ensure that our free product was a complete value loop. Like you could go in, get your thing completely free.

• 32:29Guy Raz?

  It doesn't say Canva, like printed on it or anything? Do you guys have ads at all?

• 32:34Speaker 01

  No ads.

• 32:34Guy Raz?

  No ads? So how, so you need a pretty significant percentage of your users to buy images? Because building this technology is expensive.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  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. And we're actually profitable. So actually that business model's been working out all right for us. And you can also print your design. So you can click print and in 40 countries, you can have it delivered to your door.

• 33:12Guy Raz?

  How many people do you have working for you?

• 33:14Speaker 01

  314 at last count, but we're growing really rapidly.

• 33:17Guy Raz?

  And they're all in Sydney?

• 33:19Speaker 01

  So 250 are in Sydney. And then we have a team in the Philippines as well.

• 33:26Guy Raz?

  I mean, one of the things that 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 I 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'm like waiting for the disaster story where, you know, you launched it and then like it crashed for four days or something.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  All right, I'll give you, I'll give you a tidbit. So it's, I, it 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'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 brother's apartment, and he was actually away. Um, so I'm just there by myself before, so I'm about to go to sleep and someone broke the embargo.

• 34:17Guy Raz?

  And break the embargo that you're about to launch?

• 34:19Speaker 01

  About to launch, yeah. An article came out and they, 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.

• 34:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Very fortunately, that was a bit of a, fortunately a false start. Everyone else seemed to like it and, and get what we're doing.

• 34:49Guy Raz?

  So as you scale and grow and hire more people, now 300 plus people, you are the CEO, you're the boss of the company, um, you're a self-described introvert, you're sitting here, you seem like just a kind and really delightful person.

• 35:09Guy Raz?

  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?

• 35:28Speaker 01

  I 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, you know, 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.

• 36:02Guy Raz?

  You, you guys got a valuation of a billion dollars. And is it Australian or US dollars?

• 36:09Speaker 01

  US.

• 36:10Guy Raz?

  That, that's this year?

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:12Guy Raz?

  You know, given that you are like one of the first Australian unicorns, right? I don't know, does that? Increase of pressure on you? Or are you just super proud of it and, you know, just carry on? I mean, do you feel any of that weight?

• 36:27Speaker 01

  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 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. And now, yes, I feel a lot of responsibility for the livelihoods of a lot of our team members. But I think that, you know, that same pressure of just like trying to do my absolute best every single day, that's kind of been continuous.

• 36:58Guy Raz?

  I'm just curious, like, out of the hundreds of thousands of designs that have been created, you know, up until this point with this tool that you brought into the world, like, do you, do you have any favorites?

• 37:11Speaker 01

  To me, the stories that really touch me are like, so we've got 20,000 nonprofits 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, 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 there's just like so many stories every single day. I like 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.

• 37:53Guy Raz?

  How much of all of this, this amazing story, do you attribute to your skill, your intelligence, your hard work, and how much to luck?

• 38:03Speaker 01

  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 were your parents? Who, what was the education that you got, you know, having good health? There's so many layers of luck. So if you look at all of those things, I couldn't be luckier. But then on the other side of it, I feel like we've planted enough seeds that eventually one of those grows. And so that's kind of another version of luck is like we planted maybe 1,000 seeds and one of those seeds grew. And so you could kind of attribute that to either luck or hard work for planting 1,000 seeds. So I'd say a little column A, a little column B.

• 38:42Guy Raz?

  How old are you now?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Thirty-one.

• 38:45Guy Raz?

  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 have a lot of experience. I mean, you've got 12 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 23, 24, 25?

• 39:11Speaker 01

  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 12 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. Because every single day, you're getting thrown in the deep end. But at the same time, I love challenges and taking on what seems to be the impossible from the outside. I don't know. When you don't know what you don't know, then you can't really be afraid of it.

• 39:58Guy Raz?

  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 20 per second. And by the way, Melanie says she does not kite surf anymore.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  So I did it for five years, and I can now officially kite surf.

• 40:25Guy Raz?

  Great.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  But I felt for five years like I was kind of risking my life. I'm kind of, 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 any moment.

• 40:42Guy Raz?

  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 Corovo 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.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  And I'm washing my hands.

• 41:02Guy Raz?

  And he's looking at this bar of soap that he's about to toss aside, and he starts to think.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  This must happen a lot every day in hotels. I was really curious about it, so I decided to just look it up.

• 41:13Guy Raz?

  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, OK, 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?

• 41:34Speaker 02

  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 300 million people washing their hands every day, and all of a sudden there's a lot of plastic bottles out in the world.

• 41:50Guy Raz?

  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.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  She was just like, this is amazing. 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. Let's do this. Let's go.

• 42:28Guy Raz?

  Yes, yes, let's go. Except...

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Uh-oh. What do I do now?

• 42:33Guy Raz?

  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 kind of gross.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  There's dirt on it. It can end up on the floor. It picks up little pieces of paper. And dirt and hair.

• 42:52Guy Raz?

  So step one, clean it up.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  That's just a really tedious job. You'd sit over a bin of soap and scrape everything off of it into another bin.

• 43:01Guy Raz?

  50 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.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  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.

• 43:23Guy Raz?

  But selling it, old recycled soap? That was hard. And Tristan knew that some people would worry about germs. So he turned to step three, the experts. He consulted with the biology department at the University of Southern Maine, and they suggested using an autoclave.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  It's like a steam sterilization process. And it's very common in dentist's office, in tattoo studios. It's a way for them to sterilize their tools.

• 43:53Guy Raz?

  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 moved to step four, actual production.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  I put together that first batch and I was like, oh, this is great. I made perfect soap. I'll go sell it.

• 44:21Guy Raz?

  And so he 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?

• 44:33Speaker 02

  Three or four weeks later, I get an email that's like, hey, the soap is separating pretty much all that's coming out is water.

• 44:41Guy Raz?

  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.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Cornstarch, flour.

• 44:55Guy Raz?

  Even recycled wood pulp. But the key ingredient turned out to be?

• 44:59Speaker 02

  Baking soda. It's so basic. I was like, how did I miss that?

• 45:04Guy Raz?

  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.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  There's been times where I've 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. Nope, you gotta keep collecting. Let's keep going.

• 45:43Guy Raz?

  That'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, howivuiltthis.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 [email protected].

• 46:27Guy Raz?

  And if you want to send a tweet, it's at howivuiltthis. Our show was produced this week by Casey Herman, with music composed by Runtin Arablui. Thanks also to Mia Venkat, J.C. Howard, Noor Kudsi, Neva Grant, Melissa Gray, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Candace Lim. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.