Who is Melanie Perkins?
Melanie Perkins co-founded Canva in 2012, a platform that makes graphic design accessible to everyone. I would be surprised if anyone today doesn’t know about Canva.
Her journey from startup to running a multi-billion-dollar company is a story of persistence, innovation, and converting nos to yeses.
Early Life and Education
Melanie Perkins was born and raised in Perth, Australia. She studied communications, psychology, and commerce at the University of Western Australia. She also used to teach students design.
While tutoring students in design, she realized that traditional design software was overly complex and intimidating, especially for beginners. That was when a light bulb went off for her. It gave her an idea to create a user-friendly platform to simplify the design process.
How Did Melanie Perkin Start Canva?
Starting Fusion Book
Before Canva, Perkins and her co-founder (and future husband) Cliff Obrecht launched Fusion Books in 2007, an online tool to help students and schools design yearbooks. Fusion Books allowed users to create custom yearbooks without the need for professional design skills, laying the groundwork for Canva.
Fusion Books was successful, but Perkins realized that there is a potential to scale this thing from just for students to everyone and from yearbook to all kinds of marketing designs. Now they had an idea, but they needed the money to make this idea a reality.
Securing Funding For Canva
Melanie and Cliff faced several rejections from investors. In 2012, they finally gained seed funding from investors, including Bill Tai, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. With this funding, they launched Canva in 2013.
The platform’s intuitive drag-and-drop design model quickly gained followers.
Company Growth and First Million
Canva’s user-friendly approach led to rapid adoption, especially among small businesses, educators, and freelancers.
Within the first year, Canva reached its first million users and, soon after, generating significant revenue. Canva’s unique, user friendly platform attracted both users and investors
Unique Networking Approach
A fun fact about Perkins is that she learned to kite surf to network with Silicon Valley investors.
She attended kite surfing meetups organized by Bill Tai, an early supporter, who introduced her to other potential investors. This unique networking approach helped her make valuable connections, eventually securing the backing needed to launch Canva.
Canva Today
Today, Canva, with Melanie as CEO, is a multi-billion-dollar company valued at over $40 billion as of 2021 with over 60 million users globally.
Melanie Perkins Net Worth
As of October 2024, Forbes estimates Melanie’s net worth to be $4.4B. You can check her current net worth here.
Leave a Reply