Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and embracing AI | Cameron Adams

Guest Introduction & Opening

Lenny Rachitsky: Canva is bigger than Figma and Miro and Webflow combined. You guys are generating $2.3 billion in ARR and you’re profitable. You’re also growing 60% year over year and it’s accelerating.

Canva’s Incredible Scale

Cameron Adams: I run everyone through the culture of Canva. One of those sections is on giving away your Lego, finding joy in the other things of building a team, passing on your experience, helping other people do great writing or great product building or great engineering.

Setbacks and Darkest Moments

Lenny Rachitsky: When is this coaching concept? I’ve never heard of this.

Cameron Adams: We don’t really have managers, but everyone at Canva has a coach. They’re constantly working with you to look at your skills, but also when it might be time to move on to the next level.

Culture of Growing Internal Talent

Lenny Rachitsky: I’m curious just how you think about product management.

How Products Shape Thinking

Cameron Adams: I didn’t want to do product management like they did at Google, and that’s because of the different cultures. I have seen product managers at other companies who are very independent of teams and that seems very weird to me. For us, product managers are really connected.

”Giving Away Your Legos”

Lenny Rachitsky: It feels like Canva has just been this non-stop up into the right all win, all success. In reality, that’s never actually the case.

Cameron Adams: How many failure stories do you want? We got plenty.

How the Coaching System Works

Lenny Rachitsky: Today, my guest is Cameron Adams. Cameron is the co-founder and chief product officer at Canva, which is a truly incredible business and company. At the top of the episode, I share a bunch of stats. They’ll probably surprise you about the scale that Canva has reached these days.

In our conversation, we cover a ton of ground including how Canva stays product obsessed, their freemium strategy, lessons about building MVPs, how Cam and the product team think about AI within their product, also peek into their unique team culture, their SEO and growth strategy, and also peek into some of the stuff they just launched.

This episode is for anyone building or growing a product or company, and I guarantee by the end of this conversation, you’ll be as blown away with Canva as I am. With that, I bring you Cameron Adams. And if you enjoy this podcast, don’t forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It’s the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously.

Cameron, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.

Cameron Adams: It is so great to be here, Lenny. I’m very excited.

Philosophy of Product Management

Lenny Rachitsky: I’m even more excited. I have at least a billion questions for you. I’m hoping I get through at least half a billion. There’s so much I want to talk to you about, but I want to start with a warm and fuzzy question. Do you ever just take a moment to reflect on the insane success of this business that you’ve built? And before you answer that, I’m going to share some stats about Canva that I think are going to blow people’s minds. So think about the answer.

So I was researching Canva, all of this was just… I didn’t know any of this actually, and I think it’ll surprise a lot of people just the scale that Canva has reached at this point. Okay. So Canva is bigger than Figma and Miro and Webflow combined both in terms of valuation and in terms of revenue. You guys are generating $2.3 billion in ARR per year and you’re profitable. You’ve been profitable for about seven years at this point. You’re also growing 60% year over year and it’s accelerating, faster than last year. I think this is all quite unheard of at this scale. Do you ever just reflect back on this and, like, “Okay, I’ve done well.”?

Cameron Adams: When you say it all like that, it sounds pretty amazing. I don’t think every day you’re cognizant of that growth and that achievement, but there are particular moments where you get to really reflect, and for me, it’s most of the time when we bring the team together. Obviously now we’re in a pretty virtual world, hybrid in some best cases. But when the team all get together and we celebrate is when we finally have those moments where you get to step out of yourself, look at this huge sea of people and realize what you’ve achieved together.

Probably the most recent moment we got to do that was for our 10th birthday last year. So Canva is largely centered in Australia. We’ve got lots of offices around the world, but we had a big birthday celebration in Sydney right on the harbor there in front of the water and we had thousands of people there, and we just got to look back on everything we’ve achieved over the previous 10 years, and that was the pretty amazing moment.

Working with Married Co-Founders

Lenny Rachitsky: What about just personally, you basically went from a designer on Google Wave to a co-founder of one of the most generational successful startups in the past decade. How does that feel?

Cameron Adams: I still think I’m constantly growing, I’m constantly learning stuff. I don’t feel like I’ve achieved a ceiling or being a massive smash hit. We’re always changing how we’re doing things. We’re always doing things we’ve never done before and we feel totally like a fish out of water. So yeah, I’ve achieved a few things personally, but I still feel like there’s so much more to go.

How Good Must an MVP Be

Lenny Rachitsky: That sounds right. I want to talk about the flip side from the outside, like I described, it feels like Canva has just been this non-stop up into the right all win, all success, just killing it all the time. In reality, that’s never actually the case. It’s often really helpful for people to hear a story of, okay, there’s actually this moment of this may be all falling apart or a struggle for yourself. Is there a moment that comes to mind of just like, “Oh, man, this was really scary and hard for me.”?

Vision to First Target Market

Cameron Adams: I think there’s probably a few different stories that would resonate with your audience because there’s like business kind of stories of how the actual company’s tracking. There’s product stories of stuff we launched that didn’t go anywhere. There’s team stories where you’re dealing with people and all the different quirks that entails. I think I’ll choose a business story. There was a moment around our 100 million valuation mark where we were putting together around… We had a lot of existing investors who were really keen to invest. This is probably our third or our fourth round by this stage, and it was all looking good. There was a particular investor who was really to lead out. We were fine with that. They were doing due diligence, got to the stage where every other investor in the round had signed on. They were super excited. They’d wired the money into our bank accounts already. They’d signed all the long docs but lead investor.

And about two days before they were due to sign and get all the money into our account, they came back and said, “Look, business is going great, but essentially we think we can get a better deal, so we’re going to cut your valuation by 50%.” It was a huge surprise and totally screwed up the entire round. All the other investors were like, “What the hell are you doing?” My co-founders, Mel and Cliff, pretty much jumped on a plane that night to go to Silicon Valley, rallied around a whole bunch of other investors, found a new lead investor, took them about a week. This was the week right before Christmas. It was incredibly stressful, incredibly tumultuous.

We eventually came out of it better. We actually got better terms on the deal that we came up with. That investor has fallen to the wayside now and it was a real learning moment for us in terms of how to approach fundraising and also how to be totally independent, and that’s one of the reasons why we’ve focused on profitability for so long now. We’ve been profitable to spend the seven years and one of the reasons is that we never want to be put in the situation where we have to go to someone for money to ensure the survival of the business, and being profitable means that we never have to do that. We can always do it on our own terms and in our own time.

Lenny Rachitsky:

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Something that I’ve heard from one of your investors actually will not be named is that at your board meetings, you have one slide on the financials of the business and then the rest of the deck is product updates, the roadmap. I think this is very rare, especially for companies at your stage that become really focused on financials in the business from the CFO perspective and a lot of founders lose sight of the product. Can you just talk about this element of how you all think about the product that’s so central to the business?

The Onboarding Breakthrough

Cameron Adams: I think one key thing is that we don’t know it’s very rare. We approach a board meeting just like we do anything, we craft the experience about how we think it should be and how we think it’s going to be useful. So just like our board meetings or our product meetings or the way that we do launches, we have shaped that in the image that we want it to be and in the way that we think it’s going to be most effective. We’ve always been an incredibly product-led company. We always think first and foremost about the product. That was the whole genesis of Canva itself, having a product that we thought people would love to use and desperately needed to get out into the world and that’s the lens that we approach everything through.

In terms of board meetings, I think it’s been very helpful that our financials and our growth have been amazing for so many years that we don’t need to focus on it and we can just have that one slide with the graph going up and to the right. We’ve also attracted investors who believe in us and who understand that us driving product and getting as much product value out to our customers is probably the most important thing we can be doing. So that’s why the board meetings do focus on that because what we are launching in the product, what’s ahead is really determining the success of the company. Obviously, financials are important and you can do a bunch of lever pulling and thinking about margins and all that kind of stuff, but product is at the end of the day the most important thing to Canva and the thing that’s going to help us stand out and continue to have success.

Beyond Just Building Good Products

Lenny Rachitsky: I really like this point you made about how you didn’t know any better almost, and it reminds me of something else I heard about Canva. It took you guys a long time to hire outside execs. Almost all your leaders are homegrown and it took you a long time to even hire outside of Australia. Its even higher in the US. Can you just talk about why that’s been so important and just the impact that has come out of hiring people internally and helping people be promoted internally?

Cameron Adams: One thing really focused on is team and culture. I think you can probably bring in the world’s best person at X, Y, and Z, but if they’re not fitting into your team and understanding your culture and have the same passion and vision that you do, they’re not going to succeed. So it’s super important that we have people along with us for the ride and that might mean everyone at Canva is awesome. They mightn’t be the number one person in the world for that particular thing, but they get more done than the number one person could because they’ve built that trust and that safety with their team. They know how to communicate their ideas, they know how to bring other people along with them and lay out a vision in the way that we understand it at Canva, and that is a critical thing to building a great company, I think, is having that alignment across everyone, across your product teams, across your marketing teams, across your customer happiness.

They all need to be aligned and we all need to be rowing in the same direction. We have brought in leaders, and some of them have been incredibly successful. We have brought in leaders, and they’ve exited the company after a few months just because there wasn’t that fit and they didn’t manage to figure out or understand what Canva was and how to work within this big ecosystem. Now we’ve got 4,500 employees now and it’s not just a matter of you coming in and bringing all your ideas. You also need to work together with all the other leaders that we have and the team that’s surrounding you.

The SEO Template Strategy

Lenny Rachitsky: As a lens into what is important. Canva, when you say that they didn’t understand what Canva is, what’s something that doesn’t click for people a lot of times that forces them to be exited potentially? What is it that’s so maybe unique or important to the way you all think about stuff?

Andre and SEO Strategy Execution

Cameron Adams: I have this theory that the type of product you’re building very much influences the way that you think, and this stemmed out of a chat I was having with one of the product leaders at Spotify. And they said that at Spotify they do an incredible amount of talking about problems. They’ll have a meeting, they’ll talk about this new product feature and they’ll just hash it out through conversation. And I imagined that that was because Spotify is a very auditory product. Everyone there thinks about music, sound, podcasts, that is their mindset. At Canva, we’re all about visual communications. It’s pitch decks, it’s social media posts, it’s video, it’s t-shirts that you can make, and that’s how we think about things in a very visual manner.

So one of the things that’s very particular about Canva is really setting visions. And I’m in visions, not just in the sense of looking forward two, three years, but also visions in the very visual sense. We need to be able to see it. We need mock-ups. We need prototypes. You need to get that idea out of your head and present it to someone in a visual form that helps you talk about and communicate about it. That’s one aspect of why some people I think don’t land on their feet at Canva because they aren’t necessarily visual thinkers and they don’t end up communicating what they want to do in a visual way to the rest of people at Canva.

Another way is that the way that we’ve grown, the way that we’ve built product has been quite idiosyncratic over the years. And as I said, we’ve learned so much just through doing and established our own processes. And I think in any system, if someone comes up from the outside with preconceived notions or this idea that they’re an expert and tries to bring that in, it’s going to be rejected. So you really need to work together and I think the advice that I can give to people coming to Canva is just listen for a couple of months, figure out what is really working at Canva and why it works before you try and change it. We’re very open to change and to new ideas, but just coming in wholesale and totally changing the process, just because that’s what you’ve done somewhere else isn’t going to get you the most level of success.

Lenny Rachitsky: That makes so much sense. We’re talking about cultural elements and so I have one more question around culture. I saw a video interview you did once about how you love this concept of giving away your Legos, that’s part of your culture and the culture at Canva broadly potentially, and this was originally popularized by Molly Graham in this first round review article. That’s something you still believe in and if so, can you just describe that concept briefly because a lot of people haven’t actually heard about this?

International Expansion: Key Growth Turning Point

Cameron Adams: Yeah, Molly wrote a great article, which I actually refer everyone who joins Canva to in the cultural onboarding session, which I give them. So I run everyone through the culture at Canva and what they can expect over the next few years as they work here, and one of those sections is on giving away your Lego, and it’s really important to us because part of being in a startup is scaling, when you’re scaling from zero users to a million to a hundred million, and when you’re scaling from three founders to 10 employees to 100 employees to 4,000 employees. You’re scaling everything from the product to the internal processes you have, the finance team paying people how you deal with user feedback. Everything’s just constantly growing, growing, growing. And I think this is slightly different to a traditional job where you get good at the thing that you always do and you try and turn that into a process that just continually works all the time.

As a startup, you just have to be changing and we want people who are flexible, you can bring new ideas, you can go to that next level. You can think about not just a million people, but 10 million people, 100 million people, a billion people using the product, and to constantly ratchet up that multiplier, you need to change yourself, which means that you probably need to give away some of the stuff that you’re doing now in order to get to that next level. If you’re the first email copywriter at Canva, you can get away from writing all the emails for the first year maybe, but when you’re writing emails for 100 million people in 190 different countries, in 100 different languages, all at different stages of their journey through using Canva from beginners to intermediates to experts, that just massively multiplies the complexity of the job that you have to do. And if you’re trying to write every single one of those emails, you have no chance of scaling.

So you need to think about who you’re going to bring in to help you, what systems you’re going to introduce, what are the processes needed to get 100 different languages translated every time you send out an email and that requires you to hand off that stuff. You need to maybe stop writing every single email, give that to someone else, be comfortable with doing that because you often build up a lot of self-identity and doing that and you get a lot of joy out of it. That’s why you’re a writer in the first place. But finding joy in the other things of building a team, passing on your experience, helping other people do great writing or great product building or great engineering is really what giving away your Lego is about. And we still encourage everyone to do that, to think about those moments where they need to level up in their impact, how they can bring their team along with them, how they can pass on their experience and help everyone really have a tremendous impact with the skills that they have.

Lenny Rachitsky: I think a lot of people and a lot of companies struggle with this idea, and I’m curious if there’s something you’ve learned about how to actually implement this. Is it just like, “Hey, go read this article and then I might bring it up sometimes when things are changing and there’s a reorg.”? Or is there anything even deeper of just this is a cultural element of we are constantly giving up our Lego’s giving things that we own?

Freemium Strategy: Balancing Mission and Business

Cameron Adams: Probably the deeper thing I think is giving people opportunity so you can talk about growth than just say, “Please grow.” That’s not going to be terribly effective, but giving them the opportunity and the support to do so is super important. We have a system we call coaching at Canva where you have a coach and they’re constantly working with you to look at your skills, how you can improve each of those individual skills, but also what it is that you’re actually doing and when it might be the time to move on to the next level. Say you are just doing a product role in this particular product and now you need to be a coach of other product managers and help build products. Understanding those pivot points is really important and our coaches help everyone at Canva. Everyone at Canva has a coach that is constantly thinking about this aspect of their personal growth.

And finding those opportunities where you can push someone to do something that they haven’t done before or to expand upon an idea that they’ve had and give them ownership of that idea is super important. So when people do come to us with an amazing product idea or a feature that they want to build or an entire team that they think should be spun up, we really listen to them, and if it makes sense, we say, “Go and do that. Go and build that part of the product, grab a couple of people and start building video at Canva. Do that thing that you’re talking about.” And I think if you give them the opportunity and a little push to go beyond what they think they’re comfortable with right now, that is the best way to drive growth in your team.

The Three Pillars of AI

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. There’s two things I want to follow up on there. One is this coaching concept. I’ve never heard of this. So how does that work? Do they have a manager and they have coach, and who is this coach?

Canva Create and the Next Decade

Cameron Adams: We don’t really have managers. So your coach is the person who thinks about you in a specialty sense. So we have specialties, engineering, product design, we got tens of different specialties across Canva, and your coach really helps.. Your coach is a similar specialty leads, so if you’re a product manager, they’re a product manager, so they know the skills that you have to use. They know the trajectory that you could possibly grow into. They know the structures that are around Canva that you could slot into when you want to go to the next level. And your coach constantly checks in with you, has sessions, might help you with the strategy doc, might have a one-on-one with you. They just constantly thinking about those ways that you can grow and improve at Canva.

And then we have probably more of a, I would say, collegiate managerial circle of colleagues who help you who do 360 feedback, all that kind of stuff. So that’s the structure that we’ve arrived on and it’s worked pretty well for us and it was driven actually by a formative coaching experience that we had as founders quite a few years ago from an external coach and we decided to bring that into Canva as a whole philosophy.

Lenny Rachitsky: And these coaches, are they professional coaches or they’re people in the company that are like, “I will be a coach for this function.”?

Cameron Adams: They’re people in the company. So we’ve got probably close to 800 or 1,000 coaches now at Canva.

Lenny Rachitsky: Wow.

Cameron Adams: We do have very specific coaches who are just coaches and they can drop into any situation. They’re not product managers, they’re not designers, but they’re relatively few. I think, we’ve got probably five of those type of coaches and they just work in very special situations, but what we’re focused on is enabling the broader circle of coaches, so those 800 people to understand what it is to be a coach and have the skills of coaching. So we focus a lot on teaching them the skills of coaching, how to build a growth mindset in their coaches, all the skills that you need. So yeah, it’s a massive part of Canva.

Lenny Rachitsky: And so there’s a product management coach and this person helps all the PMs become better at the craft of product management.

Cameron Adams: Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: Wow, so interesting. Okay, and then the performance review piece, how does that work?

Cameron Adams: Yeah. So your coach feeds into that, but we also do 360 feedback from all the people that you work with and we do that on regular cycles. As with everything at Canva, the cadence of those cycles has changed over the years, but now we do that every six months.

Lenny Rachitsky: We talked about product for a little bit. I want to spend a little time on product management. I’m curious just how you think about product management. There’s this constant debate across tech companies about the value of PMs. Are we better with more PMs? Are there too many PMs? What do PMs do for you? You’re a chief product officer. Where do you find product managers bring the most value to Canva? And then do you just have thought on the future of the field of product management?

Cameron Adams: I don’t know. It’s one of those things that I don’t want to quantify. I don’t want to put it in a box and say this is product management. Because I’ve worked at a few places now. I’ve actually only had one real job, which was at Google where I got to experience product managers the Google way. And the way that they do product management is totally different to the way that we do it at Canva, and that’s partially by design because I didn’t want to do product management like they did at Google, and that’s because of the different cultures that they have. Google’s a fantastically engineering-driven culture and the way that they think about product management is mostly in the technical sense of like, “Here’s a piece of technology, what can that technology do, how do we scale it?” At Canva, we focus a lot on experience and as I said before, it’s a very visual experience, so we require a different product management process, but also a different product management mindset.

I think we probably did that more from the ground up than a lot of other startups just because Mel and Cliff were a lot less, I think, inculcated into how product management has done other places. I had a bit of experience from Google but was still fairly independent in my thinking, so we almost went back to first principles on how product management should be done, and to be honest, we didn’t want to have the term product manager for a long, long time. It wasn’t until about year ‘06 or ‘07 where we actually had product managers, we decided to cave just because it was easier to explain to people.

But it also took us four or five years before we even had another product owner who wasn’t us. Part of that was us giving up our Lego, and I think we took a little too long to give up our Lego on that one, but the other part of it was us figuring out exactly what we wanted and how we built product and how to communicate that to someone else and get them to do it in a similar way and work with the teams in the way that we did.

For us, product managers are really connectives. They connect the team, ideas, data, a whole bunch of different things, and it’s very messy. There’s no exact recipe for how to do it, but connecting these disparate areas and moving the team and the technology and our customers to a new place, a new vision is essentially what product managers do, and it’s going to involve compromise, it’s going to involve changes in the feature scope, it’s going to involve timelines of like, “Okay, we can’t ship it in May, it’s going to have to be July. Let’s figure out what we can do with marketing to make that work.” This constant movement and connection and reorienting around the constraints that have suddenly arisen in the last week, and that’s where we see great product managers operating in Canva.

Lenny Rachitsky: You mentioned Mel and Cliff. For folks that don’t know, they’re the other two co-founders of Canva and they were dating when they were starting Canva, I think it was called Fusion Books back in the day before Canva. Now, they’re married. What’s it like working with a married couple as the other two co-founders, and is there something they did well that didn’t make you feel like this third wheel person that isn’t married to them?

Cameron Adams: It is always tricky working with a couple because they’re on it 24/7. When you leave the office and they head home, they’re still talking about product, business strategy, all the things. I think they’ve done a really good job of evolving those ideas overnight through the conversations they have and over dinner and walking, but then bringing that back the next day and being transparent about that and that’s super important. If you are working in that kind of dynamic. There are definitely moments where I have missed out on a memo and stuff has rapidly proceeded, and I think I’ve just gotten used to that and gotten used to catching up really quickly, having a word with them on the side to clarify what the motivation is here and just constantly maintaining that alignment.

And I think it happens in any partnership or team. There’s moments where there’s small alignments, there’s more tectonic stuff that happens over months or years, and you need to realign at some stage. I think it happens with friendships, it happens with my wife, it happens with our product teams. There’s always these moments where you need to re-communicate things and relay the land of it. And I think we’ve been great at doing that as co-founders even for the small things and also for the more tectonic things.

Lenny Rachitsky:

I’m going to go back to the beginning of Canva. I know that it took you guys a year of building before you launched it, so it took you a year to build the MVP essentially. And I know you have some strong opinions on how long to wait, how MVPs are often way too early. Can you talk about that just why you guys waited so long before launching clearly worked out and so I’m just curious your lessons from that experience.

Cameron Adams: Yeah, so when we launched or when we were building the Lean Startup book came out, so that was all anyone talked to us about investors, other people building products, trying to give us advice. They were like, “Just get something out the door, as crappy as it is just to get in front of users.” I think, for us, the product is the experience and giving people a great experience is an intrinsic part of the product. It’s also an intrinsic part of how we’ve grown. People having a good experience of being enthusiastic about it has been how we’ve spread the word of Canva and organic word-of-mouth growth was the biggest driver of Canva’s growth for many years and probably still is, I think. People just telling someone else to jump on this amazing product, I don’t think we would’ve had that if we just put our pretty crappy product that people didn’t have joy in using. Sure, it might’ve got the job done, but if they weren’t excited about using it the next day, then that wasn’t a bar that we wanted to hit.

So we did hold off on launching the product for a long time and investors did ask us many, many times, “When are you launching? Can you just get this thing out the door?” But we had done enough research, we knew the problem space, we knew what people wanted from the product. Part of that was due to the work that Mel and Cliff did on Fusion Books in a very constrained area. They had looked at school yearbooks, they had built an experience for that, and they had observed what worked didn’t work and how they might scale that into a bigger product. It also worked for me who’d worked in a lot of creative tools and built a lot of creative tools over the previous 15 years. So I had a lot of understanding of how people interacted with these systems and the experience that we wanted to build.

So we did hold off and the product we launched launched, we obviously weren’t happy with. You have to launch something that you’re not completely happy with, all the rough edges, but you’re releasing it knowing that the rough edges are going to be outweighed by the joyful experience. We still did a ton of user testing, right? It’s not like we just launched this thing blind and said, “We hope people like it.” We did a ton of user testing. We did a ton of user research into the features that people wanted, and we built that up over time. And one year to me actually seems like short time, a lot of people think it’s a long time, but one year was just enough for us to scrape in with an experience that people did truly love when we launched, and particularly the market that we went after when we launched really loved it.

Lenny Rachitsky: I’m curious just what advice you share with founders when they’re asking you how joyous does this first version have to be? How awesome does my MVP need to be? One thread I picked up as you were describing your experiences, you all had deep experience in this space, so you knew what you wanted to build. It wasn’t like this dark forest of exploration is like we know what we want generally. Do you have advice you share with founders of how awesome their MVP should be and when it’s worth spending a year or two or three building it?

Cameron Adams: There’s a couple of points in there. First is that even today we build for ourselves, and I think this is advice that probably a lot of product people wouldn’t give you is that you shouldn’t build for yourself, you should build for your customer. But I think we’re fortunate that we are our customer and that the problems we experience are the problems that hundreds of millions, billions of people experience. I think that is maybe a fortunate part of just the problem area that we’re interested in, but it has enabled us to move really quickly on the product because we can quickly know what’s working in the product, whether this feature is useful, whether it’s reached that bar of a great experience.

So that’s one aspect of it and I think that is also about being passionate, you entering an area that you are extremely passionate about. I often hear people are like, “I want to do a tech startup. What is the best area I should focus on to build a product in?” And to me, that is totally the wrong way to go about building a company that you’re going to spend the next 10, 20 years in because if you’re in an area that you are particularly passionate about but you see the opportunity to make a bit of money or have some external measure of success, that is a terrible way to go about being a founder because you’re going to hit these rock bottom dark places and if the passion isn’t driving you through that, you’re going to have an incredibly hard time getting to the next step. So that’s probably the first area I talk about in terms of knowing when a product is amazing.

The second one is that it really needs to spark, joy, and delight in people and just pure excitement. It can’t just be like, “Oh, yeah, this is a useful tool for me.” It needs to light up their eyes. They need to be like, “How do I sign up for this thing tomorrow? How do I get it? How do I pay for it?” And they need to want to talk to other people about it because in the early days of your startup, you don’t have marketing dollars, you don’t have channels which you can go to immediately get access to a million people. You need to really foster the first people that are going to use your product and they’re going to be the ones that are going to spread it and they’re going to set the foundations for your growth.

Lenny Rachitsky: Interesting. So piece of advice number one is work on something you really want yourself that you’re excited to work on. Two is get it to a place where it lights up people’s eyes. They’re just so excited with this thing. For that second bar, what was it for Canva? Was it just that it was impossible to do this design in a browser?

Cameron Adams: It was 2012, 2013 when we launched and visual content was still in its infancy. Instagram had only been out a couple of years. Pinterest was on the rise. People were just getting used to creating visuals and it was hived off to a very select few because to create those visuals you needed to afford some expensive software, know how to use that expensive software, nowhere to go to get fonts and photos and illustrations, know how to put that together into something that looked decent and then ship that off. It was something that only 1% of the world could do and democratizing design, empowering the world to design is Canva’s entire mission, and we saw this sweet spot at the time in social media. It wasn’t what we set out to go after. We set out to democratize design to bring design to literally everyone in the world and to everything that they’re doing.

But through the user testing that we did, through the levels of excitement that we saw from different people, social media managers really came to the fore at that time. So we knew that they really fit what we could ship right now. We didn’t ship a presentation product or a T-shirt builder in our very first version. We shipped a thing that could make square landscape and portrait graphics and blog post graphics, and that got a particular segment of society excited. We added on all the things afterwards because that was part of vision and ultimately what we wanted to build. But with a team of 10 people in the space of a year, building something that really got social media managers excited was what we could pull off. And that’s something we realized in the last six months of that launch year. We didn’t quite know who our audience was going to be. We knew it was a tool that anyone could use, but in that last six months of user testing and refining is when we really identified that first target market and we just leant into it.

Lenny Rachitsky: There’s so many things you all nailed early on. One of them is the focus persona/ICP, which is you said social media managers. Just to take the lesson from that, you basically saw that segment getting the most excited about the product and that told you, let’s focus on this group. Is that right?

Cameron Adams: Exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky: And was it like an order magnitude more excited? What do people look for there that tells them, “This is the one.”? What did you see there other than just more excitement?

Cameron Adams: It was just incredibly emotive language, like sheer joy. Particularly coming into the product, we worked a lot on the onboarding process in the last couple of months of launch and that was really pivotal because the product features were there. You could add text, you could add images, you can change the color of things, you can move stuff around the page. It was a simple but powerful product, but there was this thing holding people back from actually using it and understanding what Canva could do for them. And when user tested the onboarding of Canva a ton, actually usertesting.com had just launched them, which really unlocked us because we didn’t have to do these big formal labs or anything like that. We could just go online and get results in the space of half an hour. So that was like a pivotal unlock for our product process and that’s something we still employ today.

And through that, we tailored the onboarding process to get people excited and to understand the deeper goal with Canva and the deeper impact it could let them have. It wasn’t just about letting them put a pretty picture on the page, it really unlocked their ideas and let them do things they couldn’t do before. And we shaped the onboarding to do that and it resonated the most with social media managers because they had this massive content need that they couldn’t really service. And in the first minute of Canva with the right onboarding, it just unlocked the whole realm of productivity and impact that they didn’t have before and that’s why they got super excited.

Lenny Rachitsky: We talk a lot on this podcast about the power of onboarding and the impact that can have on retention and everything down funnel. Do you remember what the unlock was in terms of and getting more people activated? Is there anything that’s something that other people can learn from?

Cameron Adams: For us, it was taking that first step, particularly with Canva and any I think creative tool. There’s a real fear of the blank page. So prior to any onboarding thought from us, we had a blank page. We had a few coach marks that said, “Here’s where you do this, here’s where you do this.” And then they’d be left on this blank page and people would freak out. So what we really focused on was just taking that first step and then the next step and then the next step. And before they knew it, they built a design. And the way that we did that was to encourage a really simple step. So the first one was click on this search box and search for a monkey. It literally said that.

Searching for a monkey is something you probably don’t do in most tools. So it was a little surprising, which was a good inroad, but it was still super easy. Anyone can type monkey. And then you type that in, it comes up with this whole sway the monkey images, which look hilarious, and just dragging one of those out onto a page is another simple step. And we just got people to walk through that keeping their interest up, keeping the bar of effort quite low, but within three or four steps, they’d built up something that they’d never been able to do before, and it surprised them. The words that we literally got out of years at testing were, I didn’t know I could be a designer. And that was what we managed to do through several rounds of refinement on the onboarding process. It is lowering the barriers to entry and also increasing the amount of delight, and I think those two things are what you should be aiming for with your onboarding.

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s an incredible insight. Is there a video of that original onboarding out there or is the current one still similar?

Cameron Adams: The current one isn’t similar. We have constantly gone back to it because it performs really well. We do actually apply the same approach of little steps building up into bigger accomplishments, and that’s actually rolled out through our last round of launches for the last couple of years through something we call learn and play. So with every launch that we do now, we think about how to teach people about that feature and how to get them really involved in it. We have a whole series of learn and plays where when we launch AI photo editing, they can try it out right then and there. They’ve got some great content that they can immediately operate on, and it’s a super simple step for them to type in a prompt and see the result of that.

Lenny Rachitsky: I think an interesting and really important takeaway here is you built a very delightful, incredible, innovative product, but it still didn’t work until you figured out the onboarding and that you needed to figure out the persona to focus on. All those things end up being incredibly important, it’s not just build something amazing and delightful.

Cameron Adams: Definitely.

Lenny Rachitsky: Staying within this realm of growth, you’ve grown in large part thanks to this incredibly SEO template strategy. You mentioned in interview there’s this guy, Andre that came on early and helped you figure this stuff out. Is that true? And if so, what was the key insight that he had that led to such a great success in terms of growth for you all?

Cameron Adams: Andre is an amazing guy. He’s actually been in and out of Canva three or four times now.

Lenny Rachitsky: Keep pulling him back.

Cameron Adams: Yeah, keep pulling him back. We originally found him, he came from a startup that was going under here in Sydney. We had thought about SEO. We knew it was this thing that you could use, and I think in a couple of our pitch decks, we had SEO as a whole growth channel that we were going to execute upon in order for investors to make a ton of money, but we pretty much knew nothing about it. And it was sitting away in our backlog of things to do in the first couple of years of Canva. And we came across Andre and he just really crystallized what SEO was and how it would actually help us grow. So we brought him on, he rolled out his strategy and it was fantastically effective. It was also incredibly cheap, and it was super easy for us to do ourselves.

He set up a whole team of people who looked at people’s motivations and the top jobs to be done that Canva could service. He then mapped that through the entire experience of going into Google, typing a search query, getting that search query, seeing that it was a great result, firstly getting to the top result, but then also the experience after they landed on Canva. So if they searched for want to make a Halloween poster, the top Google result would be Canva. They’d click on it, they’d land on the Halloween poster landing page. It would tell them how they were going to do, it show you how the product was going to do that, have a button there that immediately took them into a Halloween poster template, went through a fantastic onboarding of customizing that poster really simply, and then they would hit done, download the image, and they had a fantastic experience and he thought through that whole end-to-end flow from first landing on Google and typing into the search box through to that magic moment where they’re like, “Canva just helped me do something amazing and I want to do it again.”

Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. Okay. So a few things I’m hearing there. One is figure out the jobs to be done of potential users, figuring out where their search volume, figure out ones you can actually solve for them, like say a Halloween poster, and then think about that experience end to end from search to landing. And obviously, you have to deliver on that promise. You have to actually show them a really cool Halloween poster that they can create, right?

Cameron Adams: Yeah. Again, it’s like product led truly means product led because you can’t just SEO the hell out of something that is a terrible experience. So tying that experience at the end of the SEO journey is just as important as the technicalities of SEO itself, and Andre really harnessed the whole spectrum of that to produce the end experience, which ultimately ended up with an active user having a delightful experience.

Lenny Rachitsky: Is there anything else along those lines that was really surprising to you or really, wow, that worked a lot better than I thought because it’s probably one of the most well executed, most successful SEO strategies in history. And I’m so curious, just if there’s anything else there that’s just like, “Oh, wow, that was really effective and I didn’t expect that.”

Cameron Adams: There’s a ton in the SEO realm that Andre drove that can get quite technical. But I think one of the other pivotal growth moments for us was internationalization. I think as an Australian company, we’re fortunate in that Australia isn’t a great market to focus on. We’ve got 25 million people here. It’s okay, but it’s not sizeable. It’s not going to make you a huge success. Whereas probably a startup that starts in the US will tend to focus on the US because it’s a huge monetizable market, and you can entirely create a great company that just services the US. But from Australia, we needed to think about the world. And that meant that we very quickly got into internationalization.

We started localizing and internationalizing our products three years after launch, which is quite early compared to a lot of other companies. And we tackled it with real vigor. We had a goal of being in five different languages within the first year of localization, and we actually hit eight in that first year. And then we set ourselves a goal of being in 100 different languages the next year. And the internationalization team smashed that goal by the end of 2017. And it has drastically changed Canva’s growth trajectory because being in other languages, offering a localized experience, something that people in Brazil or Indonesia or Spain or Poland can authentically feel like they’re using a product that’s made for them has totally changed who our market is, how quickly we can grow. And the way the product’s used internationalizing into Brazilian Portuguese meant that we had to focus a ton more on the Android mobile experience, which was really different for us because we focused a lot on the desktop experience for the first four years.

People also in Brazil run entire businesses from their mobile phone and the types of content they’re creating to interact with their audience is totally different. So it’s actually shaped our product and changed our product trajectory as a result of thinking about internationalization. And it has just fueled tremendous growth. Brazil, India, Indonesia, they’re all in our top five markets and they grow way faster than the US does.

Lenny Rachitsky: I know you went international in your four, something like that, which is really early for a company. It also makes sense for SEO plus internationalization. Makes tons of sense.

Cameron Adams: Totally.

Lenny Rachitsky: It’s a lot more surface area. Okay. I’m going to have two more questions. One is around your freemium strategy. Another a thing you all nailed. There’s just this, you’re both seeing incredible growth and incredible monetization. I’m curious what your philosophy is on what to include in the free plan versus what people should pay for because it’s clearly worked out great.

Cameron Adams: Freemium for us wasn’t so much a growth strategy or a monetization strategy as much as it spoke to our core mission of empowering the world to design. We truly want to democratize design, which means we want to get design into the hands of as many people as we can because we think that the world is a better place when more people can create really rich visual content. So freemium just made sense to us because we could get the tool into billions of people’s hands and they wouldn’t necessarily have to pay for it. And much of the world can’t pay for products because they just don’t have access to that level of income.

So providing that equality was really important to us. But also you need to build a viable business because you can’t help the world design if you can’t afford to keep the lights on. So freemium just really hit this sweet spot for us between philosophy and business building, so it was always part of our plan since day one. We initially had element sales as our business models. So when we first went to pitch Canva, it was all about create a design. Anything you use in that design will cost you a dollar. So if you dragged in a monkey and you wanted to export that whole design, you’d have to pay a dollar for the money.

Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, I’ve done that many times.

Cameron Adams: Yes. It was really exciting to investors at the time. It was also really exciting to the content creators who were giving us the monkeys to put into our product. It was a totally new business model. It unlocked, I think, an area that a lot of people were unfamiliar with, which was stock photography. Most people had not paid 100, $500 for photo, and that really held them back from being visual content creators. So it was a really unique innovation for us. And for the first two years of Canva’s life, that was how we derived our revenue. It grew pretty well. It was still like, I don’t know, 30% month-on-month growth in terms of revenue. But you can do that in the early stages of a startup. It wasn’t until we introduced our first subscription product that we saw really hockey stick growth in our revenue. And that was always the plan to launch a subscription product.

But as with many things, it was a vision that we didn’t quite have meat around the bones. So we knew we wanted to put in a subscription what exactly that subscription would look like. We didn’t quite know. And through the first couple of years of Canva, we started noticing what people were asking for, what they would be more likely to pay in a subscription for. And that formed the first few features that became what was then called Canva for Work, which is now called Canva Pro. And we launched our first subscription, I think about three years after we launched the first product, and we just rapidly saw the revenue from the subscription start overtaking the $1 image payments.

So much so that three or four years later we made image element payments part of the subscription. And again, that was like a second hockey stick in gross in terms of the revenue from the subscription because all you can eat images inside the Canva Pro subscription with just amazing value add for people. And I don’t even know if we get any revenue from image element sales now. It’s all about just going into this subscription.

Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. Just hockey stick after hockey sticks. Speaking of another hockey stick, I want to talk about AI.

Cameron Adams: Oh, a whole hockey team of hockey sticks.

Lenny Rachitsky: Just need to acquire hockey teams. I want to talk about AI, something on the top of everyone’s minds these days. It’s another area you guys have nailed. You’re doing amazing work with AI. It’s providing actual value and business impact. I hear you have an amazing internal AI ops team. Is there anything that you’ve learned so far that you can share about just how to integrate AI successfully and effectively into a product?

Cameron Adams: As a technology company, you always just need to be constantly evolving and using the best technology. And when we started that was mobile phones and cloud computing. They were the innovations that came in that really unlocked Canva. AI is the next decade I think of innovation. It’s the next pivotal piece of technology that helps you build better products, but it also can’t just be the basis for your product. You can’t just be a product that’s purely built on AI on being a rapper around an LLM or something like that. You still need to think about what it is that people want to do and how you build a product that actually meets that need. It isn’t just about slapping a chatbot on something that already existed. It’s about deeply thinking about how AI can help them get to that goal even faster. And we view AI as the next way of democratizing design and empowering the world to design, helping more people design, helping more people design quicker, helping more people design quicker with better quality. And that’s how we approach every aspect of including AI in the Canva platform.

We’ve had a team of machine learning engineers for probably seven years now. I think their work has become a lot more visual now and more customer facing way back when they were just doing recommendation engines inside our emails and our homepage and suggesting templates to you. But now they get to work with some really cool technology, which lets them produce images for people and create designs and summarize text and translate to a hundred different languages like it’s really stuff that you can put directly in front of customers now, and that’s super exciting. And over the last couple of years, we’ve built up more and more visual AI experts inside Canva, and we approach AI inside the product through three pillars.

First of these is that we need to build some of our own AI tech, and we focus on building the AI tech that we have the biggest advantage in that we have the most data that we can put into it, the most insights, the most criticality to our product and our business. So we have teams building our own AI models around design and images and that stuff. Second pillar is just finding the world’s best AI people to partner with. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff that you don’t need to internalize in your company. You don’t need to create an LLM because it’s a commodity thing now. And there’s a bunch of providers who can do it way better and have way more resources to do it with than you do. So finding a great partner like OpenAI, and we partnered with RunwayML to do video generation, finding the world’s best and bringing them into your product with a great integration, the second pillar.

And for us, the third pillar is our app ecosystem. So we’re fortunate now we’ve got 170 million people using the product every single month. We have quite an audience that people want access to. And through our app developer ecosystem, they can build apps which directly integrate with the Canva product to give them access to those hundreds of millions of people when people are quite eager to do that. Now, we’ve seen huge uptake in that from AI developers who have included stuff in Canva from music generators to virtual avatars that can present your presentation to you to a whole slew of things. And those three pillars have, I think, allowed us to create a really coherent experience and one that still keeps a focus on what people want to do, how to help them reach their big goals in a way that doesn’t just push technology in the face in a way that just is part of the experience and is a natural way of getting them to where they want to go.

Lenny Rachitsky: I was also looking at the GPT story of the fifth most popular custom GPT where people can generate logos using it. So maybe that’s driving some growth too. I know you wanted to share something that you guys are launching or have launched by the time this episode comes out. Is that true?

Cameron Adams: Yeah, so we’ve got a big event in Los Angeles in a couple of months. It’s our Canva create, which is an evolution of the season openness that we used to do. So season openers are no longer just inside Canva now. We actually invite our whole community in, and we’re going to have probably about 4,000 people in the theater in LA and a couple of million online. And we’re really going to be pulling the covers off pretty much the next decade of Canva. We’ve focused for the first decade of Canva on unlocking individuals and small businesses, giving them the tools that they need to design and to express themselves and create visual content. And as Canva has grown and people have gotten used to creating this stuff, they’ve invited their teams in, they now collaborate with people on presentations, on Canva videos, on swag T-shirts that they need to make for their event next week.

And as more and more people are using Canva together, it’s picking up a lot of steam. We’ve got 95% of the Fortune 500 using Canva. We’ve got huge teams of thousands of people using Canva. And this has really opened our eyes to not only the enterprise opportunity, but also just the way to redesign the way people work. And that is what the event at the end of May is about. It’s really redesigning work for a whole number of different verticals, from marketing to sales to HR to IT to creatives that work inside large teams, large organizations, large enterprises. We’ve redesigned Canva for this collaborative enterprise age, so we’ll be pulling the covers off that alongside work kits, which are a whole verticalized experiences for people inside marketing and sales and HR that want to use Canva, as well as a bunch of improvements to our AI products and an actual enterprise skew that we’re launching as well.

So through this growth and through getting to understand the needs of CIOs and heads of security at enterprises, we’ve realized that there pretty much needs to be a new enterprise product of Canva that meets the needs of hugely scaled teams, which has been quite different for us because we have scaled from those individuals just using the product all by themselves and organically growing the teams. And now looking at it from a top-down lens and building that enterprise products is what we’ve been focused on for the last couple of years. So we’ll be pulling the covers off that as well in LA.

Lenny Rachitsky: I see another hockey stick approaching. I’m excited of all these things you’re launching. What a business you’ve built. I feel like it’s still way too under the radar, even though it’s this juggernaut. Nice work, Cameron and team. Two more questions I ask everyone, where can folks find you online and how can listeners be useful to you?

Cameron Adams: They can find me online at themaninblue.com, which is my blog that’s been around for 24 years now. What was the other question? How can you-

Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. How can listeners be useful to you?

Cameron Adams: I love their design stories, how design has helped unlock something for them, whether it’s starting their first business or helping a nonprofit that they volunteer at. I just love bumping into someone in the street and seeing the joy of design right up in their eyes. So please do that whenever you see me.

Lenny Rachitsky: Beautiful. Cam, you’re awesome. Canva is awesome. Go check out canva.com. Easy to find. Thanks for being here.

Cameron Adams: Thanks, Lenny. See you soon.

Lenny Rachitsky: All right. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

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