Campusnesia.co.id - In 2009 a girl changed the world from her mom’s living room. Now her billion dollar startup Canva has democratised design, putting a brush in everyone’s hand. Here’s how she did it. This is the story by Aryan Kochhar twitter account @aryan_kochhar.
There was a clear gap in the design market before 2013. The ability for a layman to just get up and start designing something was almost non-existent. Canva changed that. It’s not like tools weren’t available back then, they weren’t simple to learn and use.
In the chase to give people more and more options companies often forget that humans dig simplicity. Most design software tools just adapted what was being done in the real world. They are reflective of a blank canvas and give you the freedom to create whatever’s in your mind.
The problem here is we are using a technology so advanced right now that we don’t need to recreate whatever happens in real life. We can make them more intuitive. We should. That’s exactly what Canva did.
In the book “Product Led Growth” the author talks about disruptive PLG strategy while mentioning Canva. Usually such companies target an industry with over-served customers. Over-served means a market with plenty of solutions to a problem.
If you needed to design something in 2013, there was a tool available. There wasn’t any void to fill. What disruptors like Canva do is bring an insanely simple downgraded solution at an insanely affordable price as compared to the solutions already available.
Such a product breeds in an over served market, simplifying the solution and making it easily accessible to more people. But why do customers use a downgraded solution?
Photoshop is more advanced and allows you to do much more. Then why Canva?
Because they use the classic Apple philosophy of “It just works”. It gets the job done. They don’t need to sit with a stylus, draw and make something for hours, they’ll just use something that get’s their job done quickly and brings out a beautiful result.
In product led growth strategy it’s also very important to get the user to realise the value faster. Canva focused on helping you design things in the minimum amount of clicks.
How did Canva scale so fast?
One important reason is the “severe need” and intent of the potential customers. There are two kinds of products:
⁃ ones which need to show themselves to customers to be used
⁃ and others which customers want to discover.
Canva is the latter as it has a very intent based discovery. Only when you have a problem with designing a YouTube thumbnail, will you search for it on Google. That’s where Canva positions itself and sucks you into it’s ecosystem.
All intent based solutions need to position themselves well on the search engine. Canva’s SEO strategy is super solid where in no matter what you search around design, Canva will be the top solution.
Canva is a tool so it doesn’t need to promote itself, it needs to educate people. All it’s content marketing is about educating the community around design and how to get most out of the product. But Canva has been very lucky too.
There is a lot of user generated content around Canva where people share their templates and create tutorials around it. People learn these tips and tricks and start using Canva to design. The community around Canva has become super strong because of this.
What is Canva’s MOAT?
It’s template and design library and ML based design recommendation system which makes the product extremely intuitive.
Any company might be able to create a similar tool, but it would take years for them to build this design library, and ML system. If there’s one company I’d want FinFloww’s culture to be like, it would be Canva.
Call me biased, but I think girls are naturally good and empathetic leaders. They know the importance of care and Melanie Perkins is exactly like that.
Melanie wants a fun and happy work environment. She want everyone to be happy. They have lunch together, talk a lot, exchange ideas and can bring children and dogs to office.
I think while most companies think of personal things as distractions, truly great companies understand their employees and trust them.
If you liked this thread then do ReTweet the 1st tweet and follow @aryan_kochhar for more. Also get my startup FinFloww’s early access here: http://FinFloww.com.
source thread by
Aryan Kochhar twitter account @aryan_kochhar.