The single biggest business lesson from Melanie Perkins is that persistence paired with genuine simplicity wins out over polish and speed. She faced rejection from more than one hundred investors while building Canva, yet she kept refining the product itself rather than just the pitch, until the idea became impossible to ignore.
Melanie Perkins is the co-founder and chief executive of Canva, the Sydney based design platform used by hundreds of millions of people across the world. She started her entrepreneurial journey as a student in Perth, Australia, running a small yearbook design business called Fusion Books, before setting her sights on a far bigger problem: making design simple for people with no training at all. With her husband and co-founder Cliff Obrecht, and later Cameron Adams, she built Canva into one of the most valuable privately held technology companies globally. Her path from a student side project to a multi-billion dollar company, and the way she has led, hired and given back along the way, offers practical lessons for business owners at every stage.
Start Small to Prove the Model Before Scaling
Before Canva existed, Melanie Perkins ran Fusion Books, a company that helped schools create yearbooks online. She started this business as a student at the University of Western Australia, teaching design software to classmates and noticing how difficult and time consuming programs like Adobe InDesign were for beginners. Rather than jumping straight to a global platform, she built Fusion Books first, growing it into a business used across Australia, France and New Zealand. This gave her direct evidence that people wanted an easier way to design, and it gave her the operational experience of running a real company with real customers, before she attempted anything as ambitious as Canva.
How to apply this to your business: Test your bigger idea on a smaller, more manageable version of the problem first. Use that smaller venture to learn about customers, operations and cash flow before committing significant capital or time to the larger vision.
Solve a Problem You Have Lived Through Yourself
The idea for Canva did not come from market research or a business school exercise. It came directly from Melanie Perkins watching students struggle for hours to learn complex design software just to put together a simple yearbook page. She had felt that frustration herself while teaching those classes, and she recognised that the gap between what people wanted to create and the tools available to them was enormous. That lived, first hand frustration became the founding insight behind Canva, a platform built specifically so that people without design training could still produce professional looking work.
How to apply this to your business: Look closely at problems you or your team encounter regularly in your own work, rather than only at abstract market gaps. The businesses with the clearest sense of purpose are often built on frustrations the founder has personally experienced and understood in detail.
Treat Investor Rejection as Information, Not a Verdict
Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht were rejected by well over one hundred investors while trying to raise funding for Canva. They travelled repeatedly to Silicon Valley, pitching to venture capitalists who were sceptical that a company based in Australia, led by first time founders, could take on established design software players. Rather than giving up or assuming the idea was flawed, they used each rejection to sharpen their pitch, refine their product demonstration and better articulate the size of the opportunity. Eventually, that persistence connected them with the right backers who understood the potential of a browser based design tool used by ordinary people, not just professionals.
How to apply this to your business: When you face rejection from investors, partners or customers, treat it as feedback rather than a final judgement on your idea. Adjust your pitch and your product based on the patterns in that feedback, and keep going until you find the people who genuinely understand what you are building.
Build Relationships Long Before You Need Them
One of the most important relationships in Canva’s early history was with Bill Tai, a Silicon Valley investor known for hosting a kitesurfing event that brought together entrepreneurs and investors informally. Melanie Perkins met Tai and, through persistence and consistent follow up over several years, built a genuine relationship with him well before Canva was ready for major investment. That relationship eventually helped open doors to other investors and credibility in a market where she had no existing network. It was not a single meeting that changed her fortunes, but years of steady, patient relationship building.
How to apply this to your business: Invest time in building genuine relationships with people who might help your business later, well before you actually need their support. Show up consistently, follow up thoughtfully, and let trust build over time rather than trying to extract value from a relationship immediately.
Choose Co-founders Whose Skills Genuinely Complement Yours
Canva was not built by Melanie Perkins alone. Cliff Obrecht, her partner, co-founded the business alongside her and took on much of the commercial and operational groundwork, while Cameron Adams, a former Google engineer, joined later as the third co-founder to lead product and engineering. Each brought distinct strengths: Perkins focused on vision, design sensibility and storytelling, Obrecht on business operations and deal making, and Adams on technical execution. This balance meant the founding team could cover the commercial, creative and technical demands of building a global software company without leaning too heavily on any one person.
How to apply this to your business: When choosing co-founders or a senior leadership team, look for people whose strengths cover the gaps in your own skill set rather than people who simply mirror your own background. A well rounded founding team reduces the risk of blind spots in critical areas like operations, technology or finance.
Make the Product Radically Simple to Use
Canva’s core insight was that most people did not want more design features, they wanted fewer barriers to getting something done. Where existing professional tools required training and expensive licenses, Canva built a drag and drop interface with templates that anyone could use within minutes, accessible directly through a web browser with no downloads or installation required. This simplicity was not an accident or a limitation, it was the entire point of the product, and it is the reason Canva was able to reach small business owners, teachers, students and marketers who had never used design software before.
How to apply this to your business: Resist the temptation to keep adding features or complexity to your product or service in the name of sophistication. Ask what would make your offering usable by someone with no prior experience, and build towards that level of simplicity rather than away from it.
Use a Free Tier to Build Habit and Trust at Scale
Canva grew largely through a freemium model, offering a genuinely useful free version of the product alongside a paid Pro tier with additional features. This meant millions of people, including students, teachers, small business owners and community groups, could start using Canva with no financial commitment at all. Canva for Education and Canva for Nonprofits extended this further, giving substantial free access to schools and charitable organisations. That widespread free usage built habit, familiarity and goodwill on a scale that would have been far harder to achieve through a paid only model, and it created a large pool of users who later converted to paid plans or recommended the product to their workplaces.
How to apply this to your business: Consider whether a limited but genuinely valuable free offering could help you build trust and habitual usage before asking customers to pay. This works best when the free version solves a real problem on its own, rather than being deliberately crippled to force an upgrade.
Plan in Decades, Not Just Financial Quarters
Melanie Perkins has spoken about approaching Canva with a long time horizon in mind, thinking about where the company needs to be many years into the future rather than focusing purely on the next funding round or quarterly result. This long view has shaped decisions such as continued heavy investment in product development, international expansion into markets like the Philippines and the United States, and a willingness to grow steadily rather than chase short term metrics that might undermine the company’s mission. That patience has allowed Canva to keep building toward its stated goal of becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world while staying focused on its founding purpose.
How to apply this to your business: Set a long term vision for your business that extends well beyond the next financial year, and use that vision to guide major decisions even when short term pressures suggest a different path. Long term thinking often means accepting slower short term gains in exchange for a stronger foundation later.
Build Social Purpose Into the Business Model Itself
Canva formalised its commitment to social good through what it calls the Canva Pledge, committing to give one percent of the company’s equity, profit and employee time to social impact initiatives, a model inspired by similar commitments at other technology companies. Rather than treating philanthropy as a separate activity bolted on after profits are made, Canva built this commitment into its structure from a relatively early stage, and it continues to fund initiatives supporting education and social causes around the world. This reflects a broader belief that a company can pursue significant commercial success and meaningful social contribution at the same time, without treating the two as being in conflict.
How to apply this to your business: Decide early how your business will contribute to causes beyond its own profit, whether that is a percentage of revenue, staff volunteering time or product access for underserved groups. Building this into your business model from the outset makes it far more durable than treating it as an afterthought once the company is already large.
Protect Culture Deliberately as Headcount Grows
As Canva scaled from a small Australian start up to a company with thousands of employees across offices in Sydney, Manila, Beijing, Austin and beyond, maintaining a consistent culture became a genuine challenge. Canva has placed significant emphasis on its internal culture, referring to its staff as Canvanauts and investing in onboarding, internal communication and shared values to keep new employees connected to the company’s founding mission as it expanded rapidly. This did not happen automatically simply because the company was successful. It required ongoing, deliberate attention from leadership, including Melanie Perkins herself, to make sure growth in size did not come at the cost of cohesion.
How to apply this to your business: As your team grows, actively invest in onboarding, internal communication and shared values rather than assuming culture will simply take care of itself. Revisit how well new hires understand your company’s mission and behaviours at regular intervals, particularly during periods of fast headcount growth.
Grow Capability Through Targeted Acquisitions
Rather than building every feature from scratch, Canva has expanded its capabilities through a series of acquisitions, including stock photography platforms Pexels and Pixabay, data visualisation tool Flourish, and professional design software company Affinity. Each acquisition filled a specific gap in what Canva could offer its users, whether that was a larger content library, more advanced data visualisation, or tools aimed at more advanced professional designers. This approach allowed the company to broaden its offering more quickly than organic development alone would have allowed, while staying focused on integrating these tools into a single, coherent platform.
How to apply this to your business: Consider whether acquiring an existing product, team or customer base could fill a genuine gap in your offering more efficiently than building the capability internally. Be clear about the specific problem an acquisition needs to solve before pursuing it, rather than acquiring simply for the sake of growth.
Commit Publicly to Giving Back Wealth
Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht have signed the Giving Pledge, committing to give away the majority of their wealth to charitable causes during their lifetimes or in their wills. This public commitment reflects a broader philosophy that has run through Canva’s history, from the Canva Pledge within the business itself to their personal approach to wealth generated by the company’s success. Making this commitment publicly, rather than quietly, has also helped set an expectation within the company and its wider community about the purpose behind building a large and valuable business in the first place.
How to apply this to your business: Think about what role personal and business wealth should play beyond simply funding lifestyle or further investment, and consider making any charitable commitments clear and specific rather than vague. A defined commitment, even a modest one, is easier to act on consistently than a general intention to give back eventually.
Frequently asked questions
What is Melanie Perkins best known for?
Melanie Perkins is best known as the co-founder and chief executive of Canva, an online design platform that allows people without design training to create graphics, presentations and marketing materials easily. She built the company from an early yearbook design business in Perth, Australia, into a global technology company used by hundreds of millions of people.
How many times was Melanie Perkins rejected by investors?
Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht have spoken about being turned down by more than one hundred investors while trying to raise early funding for Canva. They used repeated trips to Silicon Valley and consistent relationship building, including their connection with investor Bill Tai, to eventually secure the backing needed to grow the company.
What was Melanie Perkins’s business before Canva?
Before Canva, Melanie Perkins ran a company called Fusion Books, which she started as a university student in Perth. Fusion Books helped schools create yearbooks using simpler online design tools, and it operated in Australia, France and New Zealand before she moved on to build Canva as a much larger version of the same core idea.
What is the Canva Pledge?
The Canva Pledge is the company’s commitment to give one percent of its equity, profit and employee time toward social impact initiatives. It reflects an approach to building social purpose directly into the structure of the business, rather than treating charitable giving as separate from the core operations of the company.
Why is Melanie Perkins considered a useful example for entrepreneurs?
Melanie Perkins is considered a useful example because her career shows how a founder can move from a small, locally focused business to a globally significant company through patience, persistence and a clear focus on solving a real, personally understood problem. Her approach to co-founder selection, product simplicity, culture and giving back offers practical lessons that apply well beyond the technology sector.
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