How Canva drives growth for their paid subscription product

00:00The number one principle I always try and go back to is how can we grow through adding value and demonstrating value? And so really, you know, that actually starts with product. When you're a subscription business or a SaaS business, it starts with the quality of your product. Like I think SaaS is beautiful because it's a really pure value exchange between customer and company. As long as a customer is receiving what they deem to be enough value, they'll continue to pay for your product. And so it creates this really great incentivization structure for businesses to solve real problems for users and continue to improve the product over time and demonstrate that value.

00:38And so both sides are win-win. I think it's a really great business model from that point of view. And so one of the ways we look at continuing growing is how can we solve more customer problems? And that really starts with diving into customer research. even our churn feedback for example like one one tactical thing we do is we have an exit survey when somebody cancels canvro and we just you know ask them um uh what are cancelling and is there anything we could uh be doing better to you know change their mind in future and that becomes a really rich uh qualitative source of uh feedback and you know you can categorize that and group it

01:15and start to see some trend trends there i think one thing one piece of advice i think for anybody trying to do SaaS growth is that the number one piece of churn feedback you will always get is price. But that just means to a lot of people, I am not getting enough value or I don't deem myself to be getting enough value in return for what I'm paying. And so that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, depending on socioeconomic status, et cetera. But from that churn feedback, you get a lot of really, really great ideas. And so So a really great example of one this year that we got from our churn feedback was Canva used to have free content, premium content, and then paid content.

01:57And so we had two tiers of product, but three tiers of content. And so what that meant was if you upgraded Canva Pro, there was still some content that you paid for. And that was due to some sort of some legacy contributor royalty kind of like photography type model world that we initially built Canva into where people who submitted content into Canva got paid royalties. And we realized people are, it's actually a pain in the ass for a lot of people that are up here in Canva Pro. They expect to, you know, get the Netflix treatment, pay one price, get unlimited content.

02:30And they're not getting that. And this seems to be a large enough pain point that it's worth solving. You're listening to the Growth Manifesto podcast, a Zoom video series brought to you by Web Profits, a digital growth consultancy that helps global and national businesses attract, acquire, and retain customers through digital marketing. This episode is a discussion with Dave Burson, Head of Product, Growth, and Monetization at Canva, where we get into the weeds on how Canva drives growth for their paid subscription product, Canva Pro. So let's get into it.

03:05So today we're talking with the head of growth and monetization at Canva, which is a pretty big title. His name is Dave Burson and you've been with Canva for about three years. Yeah, is that right? Yeah, that's right. Just a little bit over three years now. Yeah, that's a pretty big title to have. Yeah, it's product growth and monetization at Canva. So what is it that you actually let do there? Yeah, I guess I wear a fair few hats and yeah, that title probably represents that. But I suppose I initially come from more of a product

03:40background and we can probably chat about that a bit later. That's what I was originally hired at Canva to do. But these days I look after the Canva Pro group at Canva. And so Canva is structured into groups, product groups, I guess, you know, to, they sort of map to business units at other companies. And the group lead role at Canva sort of each group has a group lead. And I guess that also maps to maybe more of a sort of GM set of responsibilities in external language. My role is, you know, ultimately, to put it really simply, is to grow the number of happy

04:15paying Canva Pro customers we have. And so we do that through, you know, firstly, building a really valuable product that people and it solves problems for people and that they're happy to pay for. And then obviously distributing that and making people aware of all the value that we have on offering the Canva Pro product through good marketing. And then also, you know, we run on top of a freemium business model. And so building in sustainable growth loops within our products to try and move as many of our users from the free tier to the paid tier as possible over time. And so, yeah, I guess that encompasses product growth, marketing, operations, and then, you know, sort of, I guess, everything in between people and hiring.

04:55So anything it really takes to make the group successful. And I guess the frame of the group is about 60 people now. and we've been growing a lot at Canva recently. So 60 people inside of the growth team or 60 people inside of the Canva Pro team? 60 people inside of the Canva Pro group, yeah. We work very collaboratively with so many other people from around the business. We have a centralized marketing group and we work with a bunch of the other product groups who contribute to the free product, the pro product.

05:28And yeah, it's generally a very collaborative effort to improve the Canva products week to week and to grow it. Yeah, right. That's cool. And so, and I want to jump into actually how the teams are structured a little bit and then how the teams actually communicate with each other, because it sounds like it's a pretty big operation in terms of something that on the front end just looks so simple. Right. And so we'll get to that too. But I mean, of course, how did you get into Canva? Of course, basically, like you started in product.

05:59Is that right? Uh, yeah, so I was originally hired at Canva to be a product manager. I think I might've been the first person that was actually hired to be a product manager at Canva. Of course, we had, we were doing the role of product managers at Canva. I think we had just never actually gone out and tried to hire one before. People had organically grown into that role. You know, pretty successful, already a pretty successful place when I joined. So it was people already doing a very good job of that. Um, but I came in as a product manager originally hired to, uh,

06:30essentially look after the Canva for Work product as we, as it used to be known, we've since rebranded to Canva Pro. So you can use those interchangeably. Yeah, sure. So that's how I initially landed at Canva. Yeah. So to be the growth product manager for the Canva for Work products. Yeah. Yeah, cool. And so then you've spent the last three years now. So now that you head up the team, is that right? For Canva Pro. Yeah. Yeah. So I joined at a really interesting time in sort of Canva's story. when I interviewed Canva was or when I joined Canva was sort of in the middle of rewriting the

07:05entire front end of the product and this was actually something that motivated me to join Canva because I think anybody who has ever worked at a sort of tech company knows the horrors of old legacy code that you need to rip apart and rewrite and very few companies ever have the balls to do but it was a real, I think, statement of intent from Canva at that point in our development to say, do you know what? We're going to put down all our tools, stop shipping new features,

07:36and we're just going to put all our engineering resources on rewriting this, rewriting the front end of our product as quickly as we can because that is really setting the platform for the next 10, 20 years, hopefully, of scaling. And previously, you know, we were just layering on top of a code base that was built, I think, from the early prototype of Canva just kept becoming more and more things. And it just got to a point where it was becoming actually very slow to build new features. And we couldn't actually move fast and we couldn't hire more engineers. So I joined in the middle of that project and I actually helped out on that for the first few months, just sort of trying to do whatever I could be and could to be useful.

08:14because I think we had realized after we kicked that off that it was a lot bigger than we thought it was going to be. Isn't that everything in tech? Yeah, exactly. I think it's a similar. I've never met anyone who's gone through a rewrite project and it's been exactly the same size as they originally estimated. So in between, actually, I think in between me interviewing and starting, I think Mel and Cliff went away and said, actually, you know what? we're actually going to even stop working on Canva for work.

08:44We're just going to put everybody on to making this rewrite happen as quickly as possible. And so I came in and helped out on that for a few months. But a couple of months later, as that sort of started to see the light of day and things were looking pretty good and we're coming out the other side of it, I remember having a conversation with Cliff and he said, right, we've put all this time and energy and investment into rewriting the product. Our users haven't seen new features for quite a long time. We now need to start turning all this work into value for our users. and the company. So I want you to go and do what you originally hired to do, which is start growing

09:17Canva for work. So I said, cool, give me a designer and an engineer and we'll start figuring some stuff out. And yeah, I went away and we just started, you know, doing all the really obvious stuff. There was a lot of so much low hanging fruit. I guess for those who may not be familiar with the freemium business model, you know, you have a free tier and always free tier and how you grow revenue is that you try to convert some of those free users into paying subscribed users in our case. So some of that low hanging fruit looked like just things like, you know, some of our

09:51premium features, our users didn't know about them because they weren't revealed anywhere in the product. And that's a, you know, a really kind of one-on-one growth loop you've built into a freemium subscription product as you, I guess, display the premium feature that you have somewhere in the product, you know, usually in the user flow where the user will interact with it and where the user can see the potential value of that feature. And you say, hey, upgrade to Canva Pro, get a free 30-day trial, and you get to use this feature, and here's all the great stuff it does for you. It was just a bunch of that missing. So we just started to kind of, you know, layer them in,

10:22get these incremental growth wins. And yeah, we built up from there. We added a few more engineers, crewed a team, blah, blah, blah. Three years later, here we are with 60 people and kind of doing the full range of stuff across the Canva Pro product now, including product and a bunch of other things yeah right so obviously you know what you're talking about and obviously you're pretty good at the performance side of things um because just correct me if i'm wrong but you started off with just the three of you and now it's 60 is that right yeah yeah me ian and an

10:54engineer called rowdy were there to kick it off for a couple of months and um yeah we just built up from there as soon as we could kind of you know demonstrate some wins we added a few more people And it was really just at the time, it was super exciting because there was opportunity everywhere. It was super under-optimized. In many ways, it still is very under-optimized. I think, you know, there's always more to be done. One of the things we quickly realized, though, as well is that, you know, when you're trying to grow a subscription business, the back end is just as important as a front end.

11:25And by that, I mean payments and subscription infrastructure. So we had a little old billing team of just three engineers at the time who were sort of looking after. everything to do with making money at Canva. And we were, you know, we were at that point, we already had, I think about 200,000 paying customers. So it was no small feat, but we quickly realized that to do the type of sort of high velocity, high impact growth work, we really needed to beef out that billing team as well and be able to do things like, you know, an example of stuff we like to experiment with and did experiment with back

11:58then was just even the length of the trial. What's the optimal trial length for driving conversion getting people in to try the pro product but not being too long such that you know their intent drops off uh things like that and that a lot of that happens on the back end as well so you need to build sort of that growth muscle um into the engineering culture in the back end as well as as the front end as well how did you do that because obviously it's like a muscle right it has to be built over time and consistency and so what was kind of some of the

12:31things which you did you know to change the team's thinking in terms of growth it's really interesting i've actually been thinking a lot about this recently as we sort of you know grow canva it's over a thousand people now and we're trying to create sort of i guess repeatable scalable growth processes right across the business and ensure that all of the sort of 14 or 15 product groups are doing high quality growth work at canva one thing that i think is often overlooked is that engineering growth culture because growth engineering is actually

13:01quite different to product engineering. Product engineering is a lot of greenfield projects, you know, going away and writing a design doc for maybe, you know, weeks or months and going away and building the thing for weeks or months. And it's super important and valuable work, but, you know, growth is the complete other end of the spectrum. A lot of the things you try won't work. A lot of the work you do will be thrown away, thrown in the bin. It'll be scrapped. experiments, you know, by their nature are experimental and they fail. And so that actually shifts engineering culture completely on its head. You have to, you know, get comfortable with doing

13:34just enough engineering and moving fast. Like what's the smallest piece of code we can ship to validate this direction? And then if that has some success signals out of it, we can then go away and figure out how to productize it. And it's not just about sort of getting individuals comfortable with that. It's actually about getting your organization comfortable with that as well. I think, you know, when you have a CTO and an engineering culture and a way of doing things, especially a really high bar for how you do things like Canva does, that can often kind of cause some friction that you're getting in and you're

14:05actually shipping some pretty hacky code to production. And so it just requires sort of slowly bringing everyone on that journey together, which is like, what we're trying to do is find ways of growing the product. And the minute we do that, we, you know, we have this mutual agreement and a shared understanding that we will then go away and you know productize things um exactly the way they should be um so that's that's just yeah one little hurdle we had to overcome with growth engineering but i guess the other thing is just moving fast um is just how can we ship you know a few more experiments every week or

14:38every month because that growth compounds those learnings compounds even if you don't get a winning experiment the learnings that usually you know for every experiment you run you usually get about four or five more ideas that fall out the bottom of it based on the data and the learnings you've gotten as well so speed is really really key and um yeah we really place an emphasis on in those early days of just trying to move fast trying to ship as many quick wins as we could build momentum build learnings build a really strong backlog of hypotheses uh for our next sets of experiments and um yeah so i think that that speed was really important then yeah sure

15:12I mean, I've just taken so many notes and so many places that I want to take this conversation. And I'm trying to make sure that there's like a structured conversation for the listeners, right? And so I am getting a little bit excited with all the things that I just heard from you. But let's stick with the team first because there's so many kind of tactical things which I want to speak about in terms of, say, for example, the churn rates and the testing kind of approach and like kind of experiments and processes and

15:45all that type of jazz um but first like in terms of like scaling a team that quickly from three to sixteen three uh yeah from three to sixteen three years what were some of the things that you did to ensure that the team was kind of as effective and efficient as possible It's a really good question. I think one thing that Canva has always done well, and I suppose I've sort of learned and inherited through that,

16:16is just having really tight lean squads. And so even on the product side, as well as the growth side, we tend to have quite small lean growth squads that have a clear vision and mission and direction and purpose. And so we've sort of started out by just having one team, this Canva Pro or Canva for Work growth team. And the mission in those early days was just, how can we grow the number of pro trials? We were lean. And so the metric that's always easiest to move and quickest to move when you're lean is trials

16:47because it's a lot of sort of top of funnel, front end only type stuff. You know, as you get further down the subscription funnel to churn and stuff like that, the things that tend to move the needle on voluntary churn and delinquent churn tend to be like bigger, more involved projects like huge new feature launches or massive payment infrastructure upgrades that increase the quality of your payments. And so when you just have a front end or a designer and me with my spreadsheets, you tend to just focus on, right, well, how can we

17:17maybe, as I mentioned earlier, like add a new path within the product that's pretty quick. As we scaled up, yeah, just making sure that the teams we were creating had a real purpose and a really clear, I think, North Star. So the second team we added on to the group was this billing team. And so that team had a number of existing, like, pretty heavy responsibilities, keep Canva's billing infrastructure up and make sure all our payments go true. And that in its own is a very noble role.

17:51But we also wanted to add on a growth component. And so we had to obviously look at that team and the amount of streams of work and, you know, just do some basic sort of capacity planning. And we quickly realized this team needs to be, you know, without splitting the atom, this team needs to be like three times the size as quickly as we can get there. Or just let's just quickly just talk about like the growth squads. I liked lean squads, right? How large is the ideal size of a lean squad, lean growth squad?

18:23Oh, God. Have you figured that out yet or is it still an internal pull and push and pull? You know, I think in the old world, pre-COVID, it's the amount of people that can get in a small meeting room and have a productive chat, right? There's sort of five or six plus or minus a few maybe. But really, if a team is, I guess, juggling more than two or three streams of work, you probably need to divide that team. because if there's more than two or three streams of important work,

18:53those streams of important work are the exact basis around which you form teams because there's something important worth doing and owning and pushing forward. And yeah, that billing team, I think, was an example of that. You know, it became like keep the lights on, then it became keep the lights on plus do growth. Keep the lights on plus do growth plus expand internationally with new payment methods. Then keep the lights on plus do growth plus new payment methods plus deal with like chargebacks and refunds and disputes. And so that is now like zooming forward to today, for example,

19:25just to sort of illustrate that growth journey, that set of teams is now a subgroup within Canva Pro of five teams and about 25 people alone. And so looking after sort of five or six really key pillars of billing-related work at Canva. Okay. So then in terms of your team then of 60, is that like 10 squads or seven to 10 squads is that kind of like how the team is structured yeah it's uh it's actually three subgroups uh and then within the subgroups collectively i think

19:59there's 14 teams interesting interesting um and how is the communication actually kind of managed because that's a lot of teams that's a lot of comms yeah like what are kind of some of the things which you like happened there to kind of just ensure that you know what's going on and that everybody like is going in the right kind of direction it's a great question um and it's something i think about all the time i can imagine i guess to go back to your question

20:30how do we um communicate canva's always placed a really really high value on like its culture of sort of open communication and just even just like fun little culture building um ceremonies going back to when we were all just on one floor the whole company was 150 people we used to get together for friday show and tells where pretty much everybody working on product and growth could just get up at the end of the week on a friday at 4 p.m with a beer and just show what they've been working on for the week so that was just a great way of really keeping that context flowing

21:02around the business like oh you know we're getting a bit bigger and i don't necessarily know what's happening over in that team you know friday come for a beer chat with somebody see what's actually happening that way and so it builds culture and it ensures context is swirling around as well um we also have a big uh sort of well it's a thousand people now though so how do you do it now because before it was 150 now it's like seven times the size yeah how do you do it now we do it within the group so we've kept the culture and the tradition going so now every every second friday

21:33within the canber pro group we have a we have a show and tell where everybody's encouraged to kind of just get up and, you know, demo what they've been working on for the last couple of weeks to share any interesting context. Somebody from the data team might share a piece of interesting research that they've done recently, or one of our user researchers might share a piece of interesting research that they've done recently. So that's sort of like informal kind of communication, but we obviously have the more formal sort of updates. We tried to put together Canva plans in seasons. So it's kind of like quarters, but just, you know, on the seasons

22:04effectively uh it's just something quirky i think that stayed with the company that we we did for a bit of fun uh in the early days and actually everybody really enjoyed it and we used to have like sort of themed seasonal parties where we have an all hands day everybody would present their progress from the last three months their progress for the next three months and then have a bit of a party afterwards so it was great so we've stuck with that um so on a seasonal basis um our groups now will present at the end of the season the progress they've made that season and what they plan to do for the next season and follow that up with some written communications

22:37as well so that means that around a thousand person organization there's you know really good robust updates going around every every three months or so um yeah and then within the week within the group i'd like to just encourage over communication especially from the sort of the leads as well who tend to be hubs of context and be at the center of everything where um to make sure that they're especially in this new asynchronous world just anything interesting or that they think other people could benefit from, just sending out little updates on our Slack channel, writing a Confluence page and sharing it around,

23:09and really constantly encouraging that over-communication to just ensure stuff is swirling around. And I think it's never been more important to asynchronously communicate updates, nuggets of gold, where everybody is sort of benefiting from those learnings. So you use Slack and Atlassian. Yeah, that's basically the tools internally to kind of ensure the communication. A lot of stuff. Yeah, we use Canva a lot.

23:39Like Canva is obviously a brilliant communications tool and it's one of the strongest use cases our customers use. Internally? Yeah, Canva presentations. We've actually got a great new feature now called video presentations. Okay. And so you could always create amazing looking presentations inside of Canva, but now you can actually record yourself narrating them as well. So it's really great for asynchronous communication. I think. Oh, like Loom? Is that kind of like that style thing? Yeah, okay, cool. People are using talking presentations now to, you know,

24:12communicate an idea or a direction or a pitch deck sort of asynchronous thing now that we're, you know, with the borders closed and we've sort of hired a lot of our staff that come from overseas, you know, with the nature of the tech talent pool in Australia. I think a lot of people are coming from overseas. And so we've hired a lot of people in the last six months since the pandemic began who have began overseas. And for us, it's been a bit of a shift because Canva has always been a really in the office type of company.

24:46And we've created a lot of really effective systems and sort of rhythms around that. But we've had to adjust pretty quickly. And so we've got people in the Canva Pro team. We've got somebody in San Fran. We've got somebody in South Africa. We've got somebody in Vietnam now. And so trying to, you know, just be mindful and inclusive of them with all of the updates we're sending around. So we're finding asynchronous Canva decks, recorded presentations. And then on top of that, Slack and Atlassian and a bit of Google Docs as well. And yeah, that's great.

25:18That's great. Cool. Thanks so much for sharing about the team stuff, because I know that's super interesting, especially for people who manage teams, because I know that, you know, like the Canva, its valuation compared to three years ago's, like has it tripled or has it just doubled? I think it's tripled. It was 3.2 billion in 2017. And now it's 6 billion like US or something as of the last raise. Is that right?

25:48Or the 8 billion? There's so many billions now. I don't even know which ones to go with. um yeah i think i when i when i joined um i think it was just before our one billion round and yeah the last round was about 6 billion u.s yeah so that kind of growth comes with a lot of pressure right and so your um role is pretty much well it's one of the most important roles because it's the revenue producer right and so

26:23the things that we're about to speak about you guys are kind of extremely quick and extremely um i guess agile in terms of the speed of the growth because i'm sure the pressure is very very high to maintain a certain trajectory right that's what the investors want so that comes to you and so the pressure is extremely high to win a lot more than to lose on the test which you run right like and so having like an above average success rate is part of the role right

26:57so how do you ensure that that above average success rate in terms of the features or the tests or the hypotheses that are being kind of tested out there um i think the number one principle i always try and go back to is how can we grow through adding value and demonstrating value. And so really, you know, that actually starts with product. When you're a subscription business or a SaaS business, it starts with the quality of your product. Like I think SaaS is

27:30beautiful because it's a really pure value exchange between customer and company. As long as a customer is receiving what they deem to be enough value, they'll continue to pay for your product. And so it creates this really great incentivization structure for businesses to solve real problems for users and continue to improve the product over time and demonstrate that value. And so both sides are win-win. I think it's a really great business model from that point of view. And so one of the ways we look at continuing growing is how can we solve more customer problems? And that really starts with diving into customer research, even our churn

28:05feedback, for example, like one tactical thing we do is we have an exit survey when somebody cancels Canva Pro and we just, you know, ask them what are cancelling and is there anything we could be doing better to change their mind in future. And that becomes a really rich, qualitative source of feedback. And you can categorize that and group it and start to see some trends there. I think one thing, one piece of advice, I think, for anybody trying to do SaaS growth is that the number one piece of churn feedback you will always get is price.

28:37But that just means to a lot of people, I am not getting enough value or I don't deem myself to be getting enough value in return for what I'm paying. And so that can mean a lot of different things for a lot of different people, depending on socioeconomic status, et cetera. But from that churn feedback, you get a lot of really, really great ideas. And so like a really great example of one this year that we got from our churn feedback was Canva used to have free content, premium content, and then paid content. And so we had two tiers of

29:12product but three tiers of content and so what that meant was if you upgraded to Canva Pro there was still some content that you paid for and that was due to some sort of some legacy contributor royalty kind of like photography type model world that we initially built Canva into where people who submitted content into Canva got paid royalties and we realized people are it's actually a pain in the ass for a lot of people that are upgrading Canva Pro they expect to you know, get the Netflix treatment, pay one price, get unlimited content. And they're not getting that.

29:44And this seems to be a large enough pain point that it's worth solving. So we went away and sort of blah, blah, blah, solved a few problems, figured out how we could get a ton of content in and just solve this royalty problem once and for all. And so we solved that. We put a new model in behind the scenes, but we went and we brought this change to market with a big go-to-market campaign. We called it Pro Unlimited internally. It's still Canva Pro. But essentially, all your content, 75 million images, videos, illustrations,

30:19every piece of content imaginable available in Canva Pro for one relatively cheap price at $13 a month. And it was such a step change in growth for us. Once people seen that amount of value, like I think to give a relative comparison and for similar stock photography subscriptions from other stock providers, you might be paying $100 plus USD per month. And they often come with limits around the amount of downloads you can make each month.

30:50And so you're just getting a 75 million collection of content for this, you know, no price change for the same great price for Camp Pro. So that was just a really, really huge, huge growth campaign for us. we acquired a ton of trials. We started to notice our churn, you know, measurably improve as well. We're really, really seeing this value step change. And I think it was probably the biggest value improvement for Canva Pro we had made in quite some time. So that's just an example of, you know, I think the biggest growth step changes you will ever make

31:22are the ones where you add more value and demonstrate more value to your users rather than like, you know, shaving around the margins and like, you know, constricting value or taking it away or putting usage limits. And ultimately, if you're playing a long game, I think that's what will win you really, really loyal, loving customers. Can people just subscribe just to get the photo library? Yeah, people can come and if people just want to sort of use the content in Canva, that's a very valid way of using Canva. You know, you can create a design, add images onto it and use it that way.

31:55But I think once people start sort of using Canva and playing around with the product and experiencing, you know, what they can actually achieve with it, they realize it's so much more and there's so much more they can do. And it can really be a super valuable tool for them, whether they're marketers or internal communicators or whatever. They'll experience that sort of value pretty quickly and they'll stay for all the rest. Yeah, sure. That's fantastic. And just coming back to the value part, in the beginning, you needed to add a lot more value to people without having all of the data yet, right?

32:32And so how did you kind of identify the features which you should be adding that would add the most amount of value? Yeah, well, the churn feedback that I just mentioned is a big one. I mean, the minute you have launched a subscription product, you can start gathering that churn feedback. So even if you've only got 10 customers, you know, not all of them are going to stick around. That's just the nature of SaaS. And so you're going to get some feedback pretty quickly. And so the best thing you can do is start listening to that feedback super quickly. But it's important to balance talking to your happy customers as much as your unhappy customers as well.

33:03Because you tend to, you know, you want to optimize for those who are seeing value as well. And how can you give even more value? Because they're already showing signs of being really engaged, passionate, loyal users who will go and shout your name from the rooftops. So how can you make them even more sticky, even more passionate as well? Build out to them. And to do that, you really just, you know, surveys, in-person interviews, and we do a mixture of both. Obviously, in-person qualitative interviews are not super scalable, but it is super important, especially if you're a product-driven growth company.

33:40you know one of the most important things you can do when you work on product is actually just spend time talking to your users understanding like and observing you know what they're actually trying to do because a lot of times when you send out surveys you know you'll get these sort of stochastic bullet point answers that don't really give you much of a nuance between the lines like who they are what's their actual motivation and job to be done and so but surveys are obviously really effective and efficient as well you know you can get 2,000 responses back overnight and have a slightly more significant body of data.

34:11And so, yeah, I think those three qualitative sets of inputs as well as, in terms of feature development, I think those three qualitative sets of inputs are the most important you can be diving into really regularly. And you'll start to see trends emerge in that as you categorize them. Similar requests will come back again and again and again. At the very least, they give you hypotheses with which to go and maybe talk to users and sort of tease out ideas as well. You know, I think you'll rarely jump straight from, ah, user said they want this feature, let's just go and build it.

34:43That can often be a recipe for disaster and a great way of sinking a lot of time, energy and resources into something that maybe was something that's not representative of all of your users. So it's good to spend, obviously, a lot of time validating after you get these inputs, but start with the inputs. yeah sure and so in the beginning you had this the pro option paid option the canva for work and you needed to show people that they could upgrade that there was this extra features right how did you identify those places to test to say

35:18oh this is an area or that's an area yeah it's a great question I think you start with those features and build you start with building those features for for the pro user. And so you sort of start with what is the right user experience here? What's the right UX in the product? Where does this feature actually make sense? Where is it appropriately positioned in the user's sort of natural workflow? And for Canva, if it's, say, an editing feature, it'll be obviously in that editing workflow.

35:49If it's a sort of more like download, export, publish feature, it'll be in that sort of publish workflow. So you start with where it makes the best product experience. And so when you then step back to the free tier, you leave it in the same place, really. In most cases, you don't put it somewhere else. And so you have it in a sort of like, we would can't that how we signal these is that we put a crown on them.

36:20So the Canva Pro sort of iconography is associated with a crown. And so we put a crown on a lot of our paid features before out in the free state. And so users can kind of see the crown and go, oh, what's this? Click on it. And we sort of tell them a little bit about the benefit of that feature and how they can be doing more. Hey, why don't you take a 30-day free trial? No obligation to check it out and see if this feature in Canva Pro can help you do more. That's sort of how we approach it. That's fantastic. In terms of like all of the potential ideas, because I'm sure you have a lot.

36:54Like a second ago, you just said you could run a survey and then overnight you'd get 2000 answers. I think that's kind of a benefit of having the traffic that Canva does. I don't think every company can do that. First of all, like I would get hooked on just doing a survey every single day to figure stuff out, right? And so how do you kind of balance all of the potential ideas? Yeah, I mean, I don't think we, I think some of the frameworks out there are pretty well known, especially amongst your listenership, Alex, like the framework or the rice framework.

37:25And ice is something that we go back to again and again, really when we do a lot of, we do seasonal brainstorming sessions, we'll get the whole team together at least once a season and often more than once a season with the sort of tighter like product team. And we'll just sort of reassess what have we learned in the last few months? What are the new opportunities? What are the new company priorities? What are the new product bets that we've launched in the last few months that we need to maybe demonstrate some value of to our users to help Canva Pro grow and we'll take all

37:55those sort of inputs and we'll do some brainstorming sessions and come up with a list of ideas and really from there yeah we just use a standard framework like like ice for example yeah yeah that's the same as us but you have a lot more traffic and a lot more opportunity to run surveys um well how often like are you like surveying kind of happy customers like at what point like like in the journey is that happening because i know personally people are happy to give you feedback when they're unhappy really really happy right you know well they're happy to give you

38:28feedback when they're unhappy that's a strange sentence but but but like it's harder to get the happy people to give you the right feedback because they're happy they don't have anything they're busy and they're happy and it's working and so how do you actually you know kind of get that information yeah there's a number of research techniques I think you can incentivize users to talk to you as well like people often respond well to hey talk to us for a $50 Amazon gift card now so that's something we do from time to time but not always and we've definitely tried both approaches just

39:01reaching out to people you'd be surprised I think I am that you know if you have a critical mass of happy engaged users some are really happy to chats and we're really happy to tell you why they love the product there's a lot of goodwill there um and then others um are a bit harder to attract and you might have to incentivize them we do try to like from time to time just rotate around and make sure we're getting a kind of accurate cross-section of our users and so that means you know getting the full spectrum of happy sort of um and uh and the unhappy as well and making sure that we're talking to lots of different

39:36users and because canvas is a truly international product as well we're trying now to also So obviously it's so easy to just fall back to like reaching out to local English speaking Australians in and around Sydney. But obviously we have over 35 million monthly active users now all around the world. And over 50% of our monthly active users are in non-English speaking countries. So more efforts now to reach out and do localized research in key markets for us like Brazil, for example, would be one of them.

40:08Yeah, sure, sure. I would just be hooked on surveys if I had that many people on the site I would just be like dude relax on the surveys we're going up data right now you know so we know what we're going to start working on you know in terms of the next sprint right so but yeah like I would be hooked and I would just have to be held back somehow you know we went through a phase of that I think when I first kicked off that came of a work team of just I need to learn everything and I think we were using a tool called get feedback and these are when we were a bit smaller and we probably could get away with a bit more in terms of just lashing out you know surveys

40:42unsolicited these days obviously with GDPR and our bigger profile we have to follow a bit more rigor and make sure that we're going through a process where we you know don't email somebody who might have previously unsubscribed to our marketing yeah so you have to follow a bit more of a process these days so it keeps the trigger finger at bay but yeah definitely used to go wild on the surveys. You spoke before about the growth loops. Could you just explain what that is, like, and provide an example of one that is effective? Yeah, absolutely. I think a really

41:18great example of one for Canva Pro and that sort of free-to-paid growth loop is our premium content. So every time a free user uses Canva, there's obviously a bunch of really great free content in Canva and we always try and make sure that the free product is adequately valuable and useful for everyone and so that people can design regardless of how much money they have in their pocket. But one really strong benefit of Canva Pro is that big library of content I mentioned

41:49earlier. So if you're a free user and you jump into a Canva product, you want to design a social media post for your bakery, you go online, you search bakery or cake or something like that, we'll have a bunch of really great premium content. And so you can design your post, put that content on there. And when you go to download it, we'll say, you know, this image costs $1 or you can get it for unlimited use plus 75 million other items as part of a Canva Pro subscription.

42:22And so that growth loop there is every time somebody designs and uses a piece of content, they see that they can potentially get unlimited access to this piece of content plus all the rest of the content for one single Canva Pro monthly subscription price of $12.95. And so that every time a free user comes into the product, they're presented with this decision of like, hey, you know, how much am I using Canva? How much am I spending on premium content? Wow, isn't Canva Pro, they do that maths in their head. And I think for so many of our users, the maths adds up that Canva Pro is just incredibly,

42:54incredibly valuable. And so that is something that's proven to be a really effective growth loop with my product. So having a product that has like unlimited like downloads was critical as part of the growth loop, right? Like that was a core part of it. So what did you have just before that? You know, it was unlimited. Yeah, because there was Canva and then there was Canva Pro, but that actually had like some parts that were unlimited and some parts that went unlimited. but what kind of loops were happening then?

43:29Yeah, I think one thing that maybe Canva's a little bit unusual for is the freemium tier is a really strong way for us to achieve our mission of making design affordable and accessible. So as part of that, we don't restrict the free tier. And I think a lot of freemium businesses will have, you know, a usage limit or some really, you know,

44:00heavy friction at some point. Like I think you've said Spotify, for example, you know, you get an ad between every song, which, you know, if you use a product enough, you just want to get rid of that friction. And I think in SaaS growth or freemium growth, that's sort of referred to as tactical friction. So it's always tactical friction there. In Canva, we've actively decided never to employ practical friction. I guess some of that might be that we cap your monthly downloads at 100 designs or something like that, but we never wanted to go that route. And so we had to create a pro product that adds value rather than just unlocks constricted value.

44:39So with that little bit of context being said, one of the first ways we did that when we first launched Canva Pro was people really, really care about when they're designing assets for their business. they care about their brand and they care about the brand being consistent and high quality at all times so we realized this early on through user research and we launched a feature called brand kit which allows users to save their logos fonts colors and always have them on hand really prominent in the product so that they can quickly access them quickly apply them to their designs

45:11and always you know keep things on brand and not kind of worry what shade of blue it was that they that we previously used for the brand. And so that was a really highly valued feature that we had previously. We also had our animator feature, which was our early attempt at allowing users to create GIFs and animated designs in Canva. And so a few years ago, that was pretty crude, but these days it's actually, it's a really awesome product. We've actually since launched our video product, allowing people to create videos inside of Canva as well.

45:42And so along with that, the animations have hit a new level And we've actually dropped a lot of functionality down to a three tier because we want people to be able to do the same with video creation as static design creation. Other features we had before the content was our magic resize feature as well. So that was a really, really valuable feature for social media marketers. Anybody who's ever tried to do social media marketing knows the pain of resizing dimensions for LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. And with the resize feature you can design once. choose the endpoints or the channels that you're going to distribute onto and click resize and

46:16abracadabra it's done and that was another sort of really big flagship feature that drove a lot of people to canva pro yeah i think um i think our design team internally that is going to just want this now um because i know how much time they do spend just resizing the same thing linkedin facebook and all of the google display banners and then everything like that you know yeah yeah Are you guys Canva users? Not on the Pro. Not on the Pro.

46:47But now through this conversation, we will be, that's for sure. But I also know that there's basically enterprise as well, right? And so you've got Pro and then you have enterprise. What's the difference between the two? Yes, enterprise really is our offering for larger businesses and larger teams who really care about empowering the workforce to design and giving them sort of all of the things that Canva's famous for, you know, making design democratized across an organization

47:18while still giving them an element of being able to keep everything on brand and review and control what gets created. And so we launched that around about 12 months ago now. I think it's coming up on the one-year anniversary launch. It's growing really well, yeah. I think what we're seeing, where we're seeing people, companies really, really get the most out of it is, say, for example, like a franchise where they might have one head office that works on the brand identity and the marketing material.

47:50But they want to push that out to all their franchisees so that they can create sort of local posts. So think of a gym, for example, who might have that centralized gym branding, but might want to create their own timetables, for example, or these days their own posts for Zoom workouts or whatever. That HQ can give everybody on the team a Canva Enterprise account and they can push out pre-designed templates that have a bunch of the content locked down.

48:23so logo, font, et cetera, all the stuff that you want to stay the same, but then give them creative license to customize some of the content within, so that timetable being a perfect example. And so, yeah, we originally seen that opportunity. People were coming to us. Again, it was just sort of listening to feedback. These big customers were calling to us and saying, hey, we love Canva for Work, but hey, it's just if we give this to 1,000 people, we need to be able to see what's going on, and we need to be able to maybe just help people to create good content. And so it was a huge opportunity there to build a product exactly for these users.

48:56So that's what we went off and did. Yeah, right. And so you have a lot of segments, which you're now trying to go after, right? Like you got enterprise and then you've got pro, which has, I don't know how many umpteenth kind of the segments. How do you experiment between the segments? You know, cause obviously, you know, there's going to be a certain kind of feature that's going to be better for a design professional. and there's a separate one that is going to be better for the social media marketer, which is how kind of, that was the first time I had found Canva,

49:29which is like years ago now, was like, oh, there's a way that I can just make all my things across all the social. I mean, how do you kind of experiment between segments to improve features and so on? Yeah, no, it's a really great question. And it's something that I think there's no right answer for or no one cookie cutter answer really depends on your business, your audience, who you're optimizing for. With Canva, we have, like we're not getting too into the weeds, we obviously have sort of personas and a sort of average customer profile

50:00for each of our products. And so when we're thinking about our feature roadmap or our product roadmap, when we see these obvious sort of premium feature improvements that we could add, we look at that and go, well, you know, is this something that can really add value to the solo professional, which is sort of, you know, often a Canva Pro customer, or is it something that can add value to a large enterprise where 1,000 people are using the product? And if it's both, then it'll be a pro and enterprise feature. If it's something that's more of a, say, a brand control feature in enterprise,

50:32that is the one I just mentioned where the brand admin can build a bunch of templates for the business and propagate them out to 1,000 people and allow them to make some changes within the boundaries that they set. That's useless for a solo person because they decide what they want to create, right? And they're operating by themselves. So that would just be an enterprise feature. Something like our social media scheduler, for example, which we just shipped, our content planner, that's something that can add value to the individual,

51:03like the sort of solopreneur, side hustler, marketer, or people who are doing marketing inside of a larger organization. And so that's a feature that we've rolled out to both tiers. And so that's kind of how we make it. really case by case, seeing what problems are we solving and, you know, does the sort of average persona for that product have that problem? Because we also, one of the things that Canva really has done well is simplifying, simplifying, you know, the tools that went before it and really boiling down complexity and trying to democratize and make it easy and accessible

51:36and not scary to jump in and create design. And so the easiest thing to do is to just keep adding features like add a feature here and feature here and feature here but then like you know some other products that have four layers of ribbon bars and you know just scare your mother away and looks at it and so that's sort of one of the ongoing products like healthy tensions we have is like how do we solve more use cases while keeping the product as simple as it's known for being yeah right just quickly on the persona side of things how long are the persona

52:10documents but are they a couple of pages are they you know 15 pages for how long are they just like you know just so we get some context oh uh we tend to keep them pretty concise and brief um you know there's always a short version and a long version i think as we get bigger and build a bigger product or one of the things we realize is that documentation needs to be concise and as punchy as possible to cut through because with a thousand people you know there's lots of people sending around things that are useful for lots of people to know. And there's sort of 25 to 30 product managers

52:42at Canva now and many, many product teams. And so for these insights and research to cut through, it has to be concise. We try and keep those persona docs to be sort of one pagers where possible, but then there's always deeper reading. You can actually dive into the research that went into creating that persona and actually read the verbatim sort of text of interviews and stuff like that. And that's obviously the job of a product manager to find time to do as well, to really build an intuition for who they're building for. That's great. That's great. Yeah, I just wanted just to check that because it could be like,

53:14it's a 50-page document or it's like a one-page document. But I like that it's kind of like a simplified version so everyone can just get to it and get the information they need and then they've got the context, you know? I think it's horses for courses as well in terms of your organization and how deep your resources are. Like obviously you always want to go deep on, you know, almost everything you do. but research is one of those things that I've found anyway in my career that it's almost one of the last roles that gets hired for as an organization scales. You know, you really have to have sort of deep pockets in your product and design or before you start to hire dedicated

53:50researchers. So what tends to happen up until then is everybody kind of wears that hat and they might spend half a day, a fortnight doing a bit of research. So it's always scrappy. It's always just enough but to be honest like often that's kind of all you need um in a lot of cases to get the signal to make a decision or to push ahead um and then you know when the time comes when you you're you know luxurious enough position to hire dedicated research that depth of research is obviously uh super valuable then um but yeah it tends to be do as much as you can uh with the time

54:23you have available yeah like i like um i talk about it often um um like customer research is like eating your vegetables right it's like it's good for you it's healthy it's gonna make you just run longer and run faster no one wants to do it but if you do it then everything else is easier right and i kind of like to give that as the example right like it's like the fun stuff is like you know let's basically you know basically kind of experiment on a feature that's fun right the vegetables is kind of understanding what the hell the person wants

54:57well do you know what i i get it um i really i really enjoy research i think the bit that nobody likes doing is like oh how do we the operational side of it how do we find users to talk to how do we email 100 people and get like five responses and then book in calendar times and then some people don't show up and then type up all the notes afterwards in the room chatting to a customer that bit I absolutely love the other bits are just so time-consuming that it becomes prohibitively scary to even think about doing and so um I've found that people just shy away from it

55:29but you know as a product person or a growth person when you get in the room and just like spend 30 minutes with a customer you just come out with your head bursting of ideas and just like oh my god I can't wait to get back to the to the to the ideas backlog and start dumping some of this stuff into it and thinking about how we can apply some of that um I think a really great example um of that is one of the biggest growth wins we had last year in terms of trial conversion was just a simple copy update to our upgrade dialogues in the Canva Pro product. And the inspiration for

56:01that came from user research. Our content designer, Amelia did with a few users. We just came away realizing that like what users are telling us they're signing up to Canva Pro to achieve is maybe not reflected in the copy that we're using to sell the product to them. So just by, you know, sort of really understanding the way users are thinking and articulating their desires and repeating that back to them in the upgrade paths, they resonate so much more. They see themselves in it and it lands so much more effectively. And we've seen like a pretty considerably large percentage increase in trial conversion

56:37off the back of that one copy experiment that just came from 30 minute conversation with a user. So super, super valuable. And it's funny, sometimes you spend all the time on kind of the product and the features and all that. And you forget sometimes it's like, wait, let's just explain this feature in a bit of a different way that talks to what they're thinking, not in terms of what the feature does. You know what I mean? And I think that part is super undervalued. Yeah. Yeah. As product people, we're just feature thinkers, right? By the time a feature hits the world, we, you know, we're so intimately familiar with it.

57:08We, you know, we call it by its feature name. when a user comes to your site, they barely know, in Canva's case, a lot barely know what Canva is. And so an example I think of this is we used to sort of say, upgrade to Canva Pro for Magic Resize, but like, what the hell is Magic Resize? Magic Resize sounds cool. What is it? And we kind of change that to magically resize your design to all formats. They get it. Well, that's the benefit.

57:39that's the that's what i can achieve with your product great got it and so yeah trying to get into that like way of thinking about the benefits you provide rather than the features you're shipping a couple more questions like then we're done right um and the first one is the volume of people that are on the site and the difference in 0.00 percent of this improvement right or basically adding a dollar to the pro price or taking a couple of dollars off or adding six cents on can

58:09have a massive impact in your success right like in terms of the revenue numbers how do you figure that stuff out you know because you've got the requirement for growth right because of the valuations but then you've also got kind of the value adding part of it but then you've also got retention and churn and price does seem to be the kind of harshest example of that right like point so how do you figure that stuff out i would price is probably always the last lemon you want

58:42to be squeezing i think um just because it's one of the it's one of the things that challenges customer trust and faith in you the most and it's also very cumbersome to orchestrate a price change to communicate that, roll it out. And so if you're in your early stages and you're scaling up, in reality, there's so much more you can be doing anyway to improve the quality of your product and improve all of the various growth levers at each aspect of the funnel and throughout anyway, before you ever need to

59:13start playing around with price. Really, I think if you're changing price early on in your journey, probably your cart is about five miles ahead of the horse. For Canva, for example, we've got a pretty standard Freedom SaaS funnel. We try and get people in the top of the funnel. That's our trial conversion to trial. Then we try and convert them from trial to page through that 30-day trial. And then we focus on actively retaining them over time. And then we try to actively reduce churn.

59:44And churn, the sort of two big pillars of churn are voluntary churn and delinquent churn. And so by setting up teams and roadmaps around each of those metrics, and there's a whole bunch of like other dimensions across them like web versus mobile and international markets versus like u.s markets etc but you know at a high level those so if you set up teams and roadmaps around those four metrics uh and have a team just go to work on trying to like maniacally improve those metrics for three to six months you'll make such you know such progress

01:00:17and again the beauty of SaaS if you make a tiny like a small relative improvement on each of them as the product of those compounded together is actually huge as you said and as you mentioned like at canvas scale now we see that even more and more like a 0.1% reduction in churn is obviously worth you know quite a lot and similar up at a funnel like a 0.5% increase in trials is worth quite a lot. And so by the beauty of when you get over that inflection point of scale is that

01:00:47the ROI on putting, you know, two or three people just dedicated to that one metric is highly positive. And so you can easily justify sort of building out the team and having multiple growth teams. But for a while, obviously, we were super lean. And it's only maybe really recently that in the past 12 months or so that we've started to sort of get over that inflection point where we're willing to have multiple teams across each of those growth metrics. But So I think for most startups that are maybe only a few hundred people or less, it's perfectly

01:01:18fine and normal to have a single growth team and just prioritize and sort of move from metric to metric as the opportunities sort of guide you. And that's what we did at Canva for a long time before we sort of got to where we are now. Yeah, right. I'm going to ask that question in a bit of a different way, just for the smaller companies out there, the smaller SaaS companies listening. If you had to choose a price to start with and you didn't have the market yet, how would you figure it out? You know, like,

01:01:49cause this is the hardest one, right? Like they're saying, should I try to say $15 a month or 50 bucks a month? Is there a special kind of like range, which you like to play within to say, look at this point, it's not too expensive that it's going to be kind of like always a consideration, it's not too cheap that we can't actually make money like if we scale it like is there like a range which you like to work with outside of the canva conversation you know yeah it's so different from kind of company to company and uh industry to industry and audience to audience um i think

01:02:25you can build a range true talking to your users of what you think might be an acceptable range um there's a lot of literature out here and a lot of ways to do pricing research and we've employed some of them in the past depending on how rigorous you want to be if you just want to be super scrappy like a way to do it is you probably have some intuition you might have some competitors you might have some um feedback already from users you've kind of got that range say it's in your head it's 30 to 50 a month um by surveying all of your existing users they'll probably land in at

01:03:02the bottom of that range somewhere like say $35. I believe an industry standard multiplier on top of what people say they'll pay and what they'll actually pay when a push comes to shove is that you multiply it by 1.3 or add 30% because people will always say they want it cheaper than what they'll actually. So with that $35 times at all 30%, that's probably where you could start. But if you're early on, you know, I think it makes sense to index towards adding as much value as possible and giving away as much value as possible. So if you can live on the lower end of that range,

01:03:35build a sustainable business, depending on if you're venture funded and you're happy to run at a loss or if you need to be profitable, you know, that's obviously very subjective depending on the business. But that's, yeah, roughly how I would scrappily approach it. And then there's obviously more rigorous methodology to go into like Van Westendorp price sensitivity and all of that sort of stuff that, you know, you can pay pricing consultancy half a million a year to do, where you can maybe do your homework yourself and try and, you know, try and do a ghetto version yourself. Yeah, cool.

01:04:07How I would do it. That's a good answer. That's a good answer. And the final question, just before we go to the quick fire questions that I like to ask at the end, what does the reporting look like there? Because you have so much data. You have so many kind of inputs. You have so many teams, you know, like specifically, you know, for your role. Yeah. Like, how does that look, you know? We use a few different tools. We've obviously invested heavily in our data warehouse,

01:04:38and I think most companies, when they get beyond a certain scale, realize the need to do that. I think, you know, you've probably seen it from your time, even at Web Profit, Alex. Like, if you don't have data, it's really hard to do growth and marketing. We've invested heavily in our data warehouse. And then on top of that, we use a few tools like Amplitude, mode and looker which is great for like sort of you know product user analytics like getting in and sort of seeing what users are doing at various touch points looker and mode are sort of better for building out dashboards on top of sequel

01:05:11queries that metrics that you care about and you want to check in on every day so they're the main tools we look at for me personally I have a bunch of health metrics that I care a lot about and also to check in on them a few times a week you know I was on a Monday I'll check in and just see how they're all doing see how things are trending. And they're sort of just regular health checks and other members of my team will do that as well. We have a growth manager. So one of his responsibilities is to just, you know, make sure those metrics are always in a healthy place. And then we have a data team within Canva Pro as well of a couple of data analysts to look after those metrics as well. So we then try to

01:05:45sort of report on them, analyze anything interesting. And going back to your early point, like how do you make sure context and communication is swirling at those fortnightly show and tells, for example, the data team will present like what's interesting in our data the last fortnight, which is a great way to raise that data literacy across the group. Because one thing you'll find is that in a growth minded group like ours, not everybody is working on growth. Some of the engineers are just working on the infrastructure, some are working on product features, they're not necessarily caring about how to grow the product. But data literacy benefits everyone and the best

01:06:17growth ideas come from a range of contributors and having everybody sort of literate in data has been something that we've put a strong emphasis on and has definitely been really valuable for us. And yeah, and then I guess on a company-wide basis, we'll have a bunch of company-wide metrics that we care about that are actively sort of monitored and reported on across a certain group of people who care about them, like how we're going on our MAU growth, how we're going on our revenue growth, how's our churn looking, and then some key spotlight areas as well.

01:06:48And the real-time, I'm assuming? uh some of it is some of it is you know a few hours delayed based on warehouse run jobs and stuff like that it's never more than um you know a day um behind you sounds fun man it sounds really fun it sounds like a fun place to be it sounds like a fun experience to have it sounds like the data i mean like i was just thinking the second ago like the show and tell with the data people would be cool i just want to know what cool stuff

01:07:19they've found you know because like i love that stuff it's pretty geeky but like it's really interesting what you can find in data you know what i mean so sounds really fun massively so and i think the interesting the thing that's really fun about canva is we have users in you know over 190 countries really really broad spread of users from sort of consumer type users all the way up to business type users in every country in every economic bracket on every device and so um you You could get lost in that data for weeks and months mining for opportunities.

01:07:52But we try to stay focused on some key growth goals each season and really stay laser focused on moving the needle on them, as well as sort of like looking a bit further afield as to what are the emerging opportunities and what is the data telling us around, you know, how can we get more subscribers in Brazil, for example, or how can we fix our payment challenges in Mexico and those types of things. So, yeah, it's definitely interesting. and a lot of different ways we can go. But I think focus and priorities is how we sort of rein that in

01:08:22and make sure that we're just executing on a season-to-season basis. Love it. Now some quickfire questions. If you had to choose just one channel or tactic for growth, what would it be? Oh, it's got to be SEO, I think. SEO has sort of been the original growth channel that Canva pick off on. Yeah, I remember. Yeah, and I think it's obviously incredibly efficient. It's super cheap. It allows you to invest your money and resources elsewhere. So if you're a product company like Canva,

01:08:53you want to build a great product while amplifying it through SEO. You can reinvest. Instead of spending all that money on Google Ads, you can put it back into product development, which keeps that loop growing. So SEO for me. Another growth loop. That's great. Of course, what book has had the biggest impact on your success? Oh, that's a good one. I think one I've read recently that I've really enjoyed is Range by David Epson. Really good, I think, teardown of the 10,000-hour rule fallacy and how that basically is useless in the modern world.

01:09:24The people who succeed in by just narrowing in on one field of expertise, it only tends to work in things like golf. And in the modern world, when you're trying to build a business and pretty much everything you solve on a daily basis has no precedent, you're actually better off having a wide breadth of experiences and really trying to challenge yourself to constantly solve a breadth of problems. And there's loads of, it's really well written and there's loads of really great anecdotes in there as well about people who've sort of gone through, you know, relevant challenges and how to have success based on their breadth of

01:09:56experience. So that's one that stuck with me recently. That's a good one. Cause I, yeah, I mean, the 10,000 hour rule thing that I do remember, but that sounds like a super interesting book, which I'm definitely going to get. what's your number one piece of advice for hiring awesome people which you've had to do over this in the last three years yeah I think first and foremost trying to find people who have a proven track record of just like being high achievers and achieving good results and getting shit done I think definitely

01:10:27want people who just are motivated by solving problems because that's all building a business and building a startup is it's solving one problem and challenge after another and moving on to the next one and then yeah you want to find people who are good at doing that and are motivated by doing that. And I think finally, like just good humans as well. You're going to spend 40 hours a week with someone for the next few years. You want to make sure that they're a nice person and that everybody in your team will enjoy spending time with them. So they're probably my three areas I look for. Yeah, great. Cool.

01:10:57How do you relax after a crazy day in the office? The home office now. I usually tend to do a bit of exercise after work just as a sort of, you know, and that's one hour where my head is just on something else and it gives you time to sort of, you know, cool down, as you said. And so usually the gym after work or sometimes a run. And then, yeah, get home, have dinner with my partner, catch up with her, hear how her day was and spend a bit of time with her. And then she's a bit of an early bird. So usually she goes to bed and I'll read a book for an hour or so.

01:11:29Yeah, that's the... Yeah, cool. That's good. Your best time management or productivity tip? lists, lists, lists, just making lots of to-do lists and sort of constantly revisiting them and documenting everything. I think one thing I absolutely crumble without is just starting the day with five or 10 minutes of reviewing priorities, triaging the backlog. And so I was like, what am I going to try and achieve today? What do I have to do? And what goes to the later list? And then just coming back to that at the end of the day, like what's come onto my radar

01:11:59today? What have I got done? And just keeping that up to date and organized and revisiting every day. and yeah, lists. Love it. A couple more questions left. The second last one, the best piece of business advice that you've ever received? Ooh, I think just try to give away as much value as you possibly can to users. I think a lot of businesses get so hung up on short-term, like yak shaving, the loose stuff to that bigger picture.

01:12:31This is one thing I think I've learned a lot from Melanie and Cliff at Canva is, you know, you're building a business for five to 10 years, not the next quarterly results. And so you squeeze that extra bit of revenue added on a user, you don't give them the best experience, they don't come back. Whereas if you know, you can just give away a little bit more value than you think you can, you know, you're going to build, you're going to be doing a little bit more than your competitor. And you're going to be building a loyal set of users who are going to come back, they're going to tell their friends, they're going to be your greatest evangelist. So yeah, just over index on giving away a little bit more value and maybe feels comfortable to.

01:13:02That's awesome. And that's probably the theme of this whole podcast, actually, which is great. And the last one is, what do you do for fun? Just fun, you know, just to enjoy yourself, you know? That's not world-related. I've recently been trying to learn to surf. I'm so bad at it, but I'm really enjoying it. Sorry, what to what? Surf? Yeah, yeah. So I've always been, you know, a fan of the water. I've always loved snorkeling and scuba diving and stuff like that and, like, splashing around. But yeah, at 31, I've just found surfing and it's, I'm hilariously bad at it.

01:13:35But, you know, even if you go out and you don't catch a wave, you still just splash around in the water for an hour and nobody ever regrets to swim. So you're still having a good time. Yeah. I tried to learn to surf some time ago after I kind of had learned how to snowboard. I was like, I can snowboard, I can surf. No, because the ocean's very, very different. And I had the wrong board and all this stuff. And I tried every day for a month, almost died twice. And I was like, at the end of it, I stopped. then about 10 years later i just got like a lesson and in about 20 minutes i stood up and i was like gotta pay experts they just show you the way in i was like why didn't i think of that before

01:14:10um super meditative it's like you're in the water and you've got to focus on not not drowning and so you can't really think of much else and so yeah it's a great way to unwind too um for the people that are listening especially for um the companies out there and the people that lead teams um like what's a way in for canva pro you know what's like a way that they can start to think about hey you know like i should be using it you know just for this part or for that part like is it that like just to sign up for the trial and see how it goes is it to pass it to

01:14:43their team just what would you like them to do like like if there was you know a specific action that you'd like them to take? Well, thanks for asking, Alex. Check out, it's a free, no obligation, 30-day trial of the product. I mean, if you're a business that does any form of digital marketing, you need to create visual assets, even for internal communications. If you need to create videos, presentations, logos, business cards, we have a print product now. So if you need to print business cards, if you need to print t-shirts, you need to do any of those things.

01:15:16Canva can probably help you out a lot. And the Canva Pro product has a range of those features I've mentioned throughout the interview that can help you do even more. And it is a relatively affordable product, I think, for any professional out there as well. It's $12.99 a month US. And so, you know, it's a couple of coffees. And if it can, you know, take a few hours, give you a few hours back each month, it's probably worth checking out. yeah and i know that there's going to be quite a lot of people on this podcast that are a bit older um that have heard of canva from 2014-15 which is the time i'd heard about it and i hadn't heard

01:15:49about all of the features until kind of this podcast really and so now that i've heard everything i'm definitely signing up and i'm going to get the um the design team on it as well and so i think that this has been like a good kind of update to the people that had known of kind of like older canva and kind of all the feature updates which i just wasn't even across but now super exciting and sounds super cheap as well compared to all the other software subscriptions that we have for stock photos and other things so that's a fantastic um look i'm excited about it anyway

01:16:22and it's something i'm absolutely going to be doing straight after let me hang up on this podcast right um thank you so much for your time um this has been such a good chat and it's been so nice um to see some of, or to hear about some of the inner workings of Canva. Thanks so much for being so open today, Dave. It's been a fantastic chat, mate. No problem, Alex. And thanks for having me. Really enjoyed chatting to you, sir. I'll speak to you soon, man. See you, mate. Bye-bye. See you later. Bye. Thanks for listening to the Growth Manifesto podcast.

01:16:53If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five-star rating on iTunes. For more episodes, please visit growthmanifesto.com forward slash podcast. And if you need help driving growth for your company, please get in touch with us at webprofits.io.