20VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva

Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO at Canva the disruptive online platform allowing anyone to create professional quality designs. They have over 10m users from 179 countries and have funding from our friends at Shasta, Felicis and upcoming guests Blackbird Ventures and Airtree in Australia. Prior to Canva, Melanie was the Fusion Yearbooks which she grew to be the largest Yearbook publisher in Australia.  In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How did Melanie come to found Canva, what was the a-ha moment for her? 2.) How has Melanie looked to  scale the team whilst maintaining the same core startup values and company ethos? What are the strategies at play here? 3.) What does it take to grow in international markets? Where were the benefits of founding Canva in the isolated tech ecosystem of Perth?? 4.) What did Melanie look for in her investors? As a newbie to the VC scene how did she approach the fundraising process and what would she like to improve on? 5.) How can products that have both a free and a paid model offer enough in the free version to entice users, whilst retain enough for the paid to justify the price? Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:  Melanie’s Fave Book: Designing The Obvious As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Melanie on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!   The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!  

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