Latest / Startup Stories with Fexingo: Conversations About Founders, Funding, and Building Companies from Zero / How Canva Democratised Design by Targeting Non-Designers
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- Lucas: If you're not a designer, opening Adobe Illustrator is a genuinely unpleasant experience. You're staring at a blank canvas with fifty toolbar icons you don't recognise, and the thing you want to do — make a nice-looking flyer — feels like it requires a four-year degree. Luna: Right. And that's exactly the gap Canva spotted. Not 'how do we make a better Photoshop,' but 'what if someone never opens Photoshop at all?' Lucas: Exactly. Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht started Canva in 2013 with a very specific thesis: most people who need visual content are not designers, and they will never become designers. So give them templates. Give them drag and drop. Give them a tool that works in a browser and costs nothing to start. Luna: And the numbers back that up. Canva now claims over 100 million monthly active users. To put that in perspective, that's roughly ten times Adobe's Creative Cloud subscriber base, and most of those users are exactly the non-designers Perkins bet on. Lucas: Let's rewind a bit. Perkins and Obrecht — who are also married — had a previous venture called Fusion Books, which was basically a web-based yearbook design tool for schools. That taught them something crucial: if you remove the friction of software installation and provide pre-built layouts, people who think they're 'not creative' will actually create things. Luna: So the yearbook business was the proof of concept. They saw that teachers could make decent-looking yearbooks because the templates did the heavy lifting. Lucas: Exactly. And that insight became Canva's core strategy: a library of templates so vast that even someone with zero design training can produce something that looks professional. But the really interesting part is how they built that library. They didn't just hire designers in-house. They created a two-sided marketplace where freelance designers upload templates and earn royalties every time someone uses them. Luna: That's a smart move. It keeps the content fresh and scales faster than any internal team could. Lucas: And it creates a network effect. More templates attract more users, which attracts more designers, which produces more templates. By 2024, Canva had over a million templates in its library. That's the kind of moat that's hard to replicate. Luna: But templates alone don't explain the 40-billion-dollar valuation. What else did they do right? Lucas: Freemium. They made the basic version free, with no time limit. That removed the biggest barrier to entry. You don't need a credit card, you don't need to download anything. You just go to the website and start designing. Then, once you're hooked — once you've invested time creating presentations, social media graphics, whatever — they upsell you on Canva Pro, which gives you AI features, brand kits, background removal, and more storage. Luna: And that conversion funnel is incredibly powerful because the user has already built something. They're not paying for a promise; they're paying for more of something they already value. Lucas: Right. And then Canva added another layer: enterprise features. Brand Kits let companies enforce their colours, fonts, and logos across every design. That made Canva a legitimate tool for marketing teams at mid-size and large companies. They now have over 85 million monthly active users on paid plans, and enterprise revenue surpassed half a billion dollars in 2025. Luna: So they basically went from 'a tool for making birthday invitations' to 'a serious competitor to Adobe in the enterprise space' without ever trying to be a professional design tool. They just kept expanding the top of the funnel. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the lesson. Adobe spent decades perfecting tools for professionals. Canva didn't try to beat Adobe at that game. They created a new category: design for everyone else. And it turns out 'everyone else' is a much bigger market. Luna: Speaking of which — if today's episode moved your work forward in some small way, there's a simple way to keep these conversations ad-free. It's listener support at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah, that's what keeps this show independent. No sponsors, no ads — just the content we think is useful. So if that matters to you, the link is there. Luna: Now back to Canva. One area I find fascinating is their expansion into print. You can design a flyer and have it printed and shipped without leaving the app. That's a completely different business model. Lucas: It is. And it's a deliberate move to increase stickiness. If you design in Canva and then order prints through Canva, you're less likely to switch to another tool. Plus, print has higher margins than software subscriptions. Print-on-demand is a massive revenue stream that Adobe doesn't touch. Luna: So they're basically layering multiple revenue models on top of the same user base: freemium subscriptions, enterprise seats, and now physical goods. Lucas: And AI. In 2023, they launched Canva Magic Studio, which includes generative AI features like text to image and text to video. That's a natural extension of their mission: if you don't need design skills, you also shouldn't need writing or illustration skills. Just type what you want and the tool builds it. Luna: But doesn't that risk alienating the freelance designers who fuel the template marketplace? If AI can generate a template, why would anyone pay a designer? Lucas: It's a real tension. Canva's official line is that AI handles the 'mundane' tasks, freeing designers to focus on high-value work. But when you look at the marketplace data, some designers have seen royalty drops. I think Canva is still figuring out the balance. The key is that ai generated templates are good enough for quick social posts but not for brand-level design. So there's still a premium on human-created content. Luna: That makes sense. And it's similar to what we saw with other platforms like Shopify or Etsy — AI handles the basics, but unique, quality work still commands a premium. Lucas: Exactly. And that's where Canva's next challenge lies. They've conquered the non-designer market. Now they're trying to go upmarket — to enterprise design teams that need advanced features like design systems, version control, and collaboration at scale. That's where they start to directly compete with Figma and Adobe XD. Luna: Do you think they can win that battle? Figma has a huge head start in the professional collaboration space. Lucas: It's an uphill fight. Figma's user base is designers who live in the browser and love its real-time collaboration. Canva's strength is its simplicity, but professional designers may see that as a limitation. However, Canva has an advantage: they already have the enterprise distribution. A marketing team that uses Canva for social graphics can push for Canva's design system features rather than introducing a completely new tool. So it's not impossible, but it'll be a long game. Luna: So what's the big takeaway from the Canva story for founders listening? Lucas: I think it's this: don't just look for a better solution to an existing problem. Look for a problem that nobody is addressing because the existing solutions are too complex for most people. Canva didn't make design easier for designers; they made it possible for non-designers. That's a much bigger opportunity. Luna: And the freemium model is a powerful way to validate that market. If you can get millions of users to try your product for free, you learn fast what they'll pay for. Lucas: Exactly. And Canva's path from a yearbook startup to a 40-billion-dollar company shows that sometimes the simplest idea — 'let people design without learning design' — can be the most disruptive of all.