Canva launched in 2013 is now at over 170 million users and across 190 countries. Since the launch of magic studio – Canva’s AI suite, 20 million users have been added. To date, there’s been 20 billion designs made and more are in progress. We have around 17 million paid subscribers and over 7 million paid team suites. Canva has 60 million students and teachers using Canva, globally. 90% of the Fortune 500 are Canva users; it’s a huge opportunity to bring Canva even further into the enterprise. Storyboard18 digs deeper to understand what made Canva reach these numbers.
Ruoshan Tao, Head of Marketing for SEA and LATAM for Canva addresses if the design platform kills creativity, talks about power Canvassadors and more.
Edited excerpts:
What are some industry challenges that Canva has observed?
There is still a really big gap in the market for workplace design tools. At Canva, we have created an almost entirely new category of visual communication. The idea is that anyone in the workplace can design and; not just the graphic designer. We are able to bring a lot of the fragmented tools that people might use for this process into one place. Customization is Canva’s forte, one can find localized elements, photos, templates in one place. Say you’re a user in India; you’re able to see elements including photos and templates that would be relevant to your culture and environment; the type of photos that feel like they’re from India.
I was talking to someone who said that they feel that Canva kind of kills their creativity….
Having something in one’s mind and being able to put it down to a computer screen are two very different things. What Canva does with things like templates is that it gives you the foundation with which you can then express your own creativity. People are able to express themselves without having a technical background. Personally, for me it definitely helped me bring a lot of stuff that I wasn’t able to get from my head down onto a computer screen. And I think for me, it only inspired, and I didn’t find it limiting at all.
How does Canva plan to gain more paid users?
Out of 170 million monthly active users, over 17 million are paid. There’s different tiers of Canva for everyone; what’s so exciting about the products is, there are many features which are great for enterprises, but at the same time, they’re also great features for free users. So I think that’s just really speaks to how versatile this product is, and how powerful it really is for many different audiences.
Can you give me an idea about Canvas acquisition and partnership strategies?
Ever since I joined Canva, everything that I do, it takes so much longer, because the minute people find out I work at Canva, they just start raving about it especially the small businesses who share that they design their menus or social media content in Canva.
In India, we see a lot of organic growth and we’ve been doubling down on the efforts. however, we are still in fairly early stages; we’re considering ways to know the user base better.
Does Canva have an in-house team? How does it work?
We have a sizable in-house team, which really knows our brand and our culture really well. And then at the same time, we also work with the wider community called Canvassadors, who are basically people that work with us, mostly because they just love the product. We’ve seen this happen organically with people going out and like teaching others about Canva, because they found it so useful for them personally, that they wanted to spread it amongst the community. Even though currently, we have a good in-house team that’s able to help us execute on this hyperlocal strategy, we continuously have that touch point with the community to make sure that whatever we do is local, it’s culturally relevant, and it’s effective.
Canva has a global team. You’re here in Asia, and then they people are there in Australia and America. How does cross country collaboration work for Canva?
There are both similarities and differences between these markets. The teams spread across the world share about what worked well for their markets and we also rely on our local teams that understand the market very well to do whatever’s right for the consumers in those markets. I think Canva itself has been really great for helping us to figure out how to do asynchronous collaboration.
With our presentations tool, you can pre record yourself in advance, and have a sort of talking head of someone talking through the presentation, if let’s say, the meeting, where we’re presenting, it’s happening in the middle of the night for someone else. And that’s really spectacular, because a lot of problems like, different time zones, are taken care of.
What does your day at Canva look like?
A lot of it is about collaboration with the team. Given that, we’re a design company, a lot of our presentations are very visual. A day in my life could look like waking up pretty early to try to catch the another team on the other side of the world. We might be discussing education events that we’re doing over there trying to see how we can make sure that the branding of the event is globally aligned, but also take in to account some of those local nuances. On other occasions, I could be hopping on a call with my colleagues globally to discuss performance marketing strategy. I do quite a lot of asynchronous type of catchups on things that the Europe team has maybe done over the middle of the night, would go and watch a recording at the presentations they have created.
Read More:Canva is building a safe, accessible and inclusive AI: Ruoshan Tao