Melanie Perkins is the co-founder and CEO of Canva, one of Australia's fastest growing startups, currently serving more than 10 million users worldwide.

It dates back to the youth when Melanie Perkins wanted to start her own business with creative ideas. She was just 14 years old when she designed and sold handmade scarves, her first small venture.

In 2007, 19-year-old Melanie was a Commerce and Communications student at the University of Western Australia. At that time, she was complaining about how difficult it was to learn how to use many programs such as InDesign and Photoshop that were taught for design at school. Many students like her were having a hard time learning these programs.

Melanie expresses the difficulty of the programs in these words:

“It took a whole semester to learn the basics of the program. Even the simple task of saving a design as a high-quality PDF file required 22 clicks! ”

While most people do no more than complain about this issue, Melanie found a job opportunity in the face of this problem. She realized that in the future design would be very different: collaborative, online and easy to learn would be a priority. And she asked herself the question "Why can't 'everyone' easily create their own designs?"

With this in mind, Melanie and her boyfriend Cli Obrecht decided to test their idea first on a relatively small field, school yearbooks. They set up a site called Fusion Books, which allows them to design their high school yearbooks online. They turned Melanie's mother's living room into an office to create this site, an impressive prototype of the Canva system. And they borrowed money from relatives to pay the software developers who were going to install the system.

Within a few years, Fusion became Australia's largest annual publisher and later expanded to the French and New Zealand market. With her business growing rapidly, Melanie decided to drop out of university so she could focus better on her work.

Melanie and Cli believed that the technology they had developed could be applied beyond the school yearbook market and knew they had to pursue their vision.

Thus, in 2010, Melanie flew to Silicon Valley, the center of technology from Perth, Australia to bring the idea from Fusion to Canva, where she thought it would shake the design world, and present it to the famous technology investor Bill Tai. This journey, in which Melanie was both excited and nervous, was the beginning of her Canva adventure.

In an interview, Melanie says that she had previously read "ways of influencing the other person with body language" and applied this method by imitating Bill Tai's movements in the interview she went to presenting Canva. Things like Tai putting his arm on his chair, trying to impress him, and tackling Tai's phone while he speaks are a pretty funny moment for Melanie when she thinks of it right now. But this tactic worked, when Tai was dealing with his phone, he was actually influenced by the idea of Canva, introducing Melanie to his network.

However, it took 3 years for Melanie to receive investment in Canva.

In another interview, Melanie says she is experiencing a culture shock in Silicon Valley as there is a huge difference between Australia and America in terms of one's self-promotion. She explains this situation with the following words: “In Australia, people don't listen to your achievements, they just talk about their own achievements. In Silicon Valley, you have to be able to talk about your own achievements / achievements when you are trying to find investment or to be able to include an engineer in your team. "

Perhaps this cultural difference delayed Melanie's investment in Canva for 3 years. But in 2013, Canva received $ 3 million in support, and Canva started off in the industry with ex-Google executive Cameron Adams joining Melanie and her boyfriend Cli as co-founder.

At the same time, Melanie states that this 3-year wait is an important contribution to her current success:

 “It took me three years to get the investment, when I started convincing an investor to my business idea. This was a really long period of time and we received hundreds of rejections in the process. But I think this process helped us a lot, because it allowed us to fix things and really clarify our strategies before we started. Therefore, when we received this investment, we were able to exit quickly and effectively. "

Subsequent investment tours raised Canva to a total value of 82 million dollars. In Canva, where using its basic service is free, you have to pay a subscription fee to access more advanced tools.

Today, Canva, the online design and publishing platform, raised $ 1 billion in investment in the last round, making it Australia's top unicorn startup. Since 2013, it has reached more than 15 million users in 190 countries. Today, more than 1 billion designs have been created in the program, which has produced 33 designs per second.

Together with more than 500 team members, who are growing stronger day by day, they are working on their mission to allow everyone to create beautiful designs. Another success for Melanie Perkins is that she was selected in the "30 Under 30 List" (30 Successful People Under 30) in the Enterprise Tech category of Forbes Asia since 2016.

Melanie is now the company's CEO and her boyfriend Cli is the company's COO. The couple Melanie and Cli still own Fusion Books, but they have appointed some managers to run the business.

Growing with each passing day, Canva, in 2018;

• To become a truly global company, it has offered more than 100 languages, including right-to-left languages such as Arabic, Urdu, and Hebrew, allowing different nations to use Canva in their own language.
• Canva China, with a fully localized experience with local fonts, local templates and a team of locals, was unveiled in Beijing.

• Thanks to Canva Print, designers in 44 countries are now able to convert professional copies of their designs into professional prints delivered directly to their doorstep. (This service is not provided in Turkey yet. However, with the possibility to download, users can take professional-size output.)

In May 2019, it purchased Pexels and Pixabay to expand its free stock photo archive for users.

Melanie says that Canva's growth is mostly due to the use of positive words and that it is necessary to have ambitious goals for the company to continue to grow