Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Bengaluru

Creativity and Design Thinking

MBA(BA) 2022 -24

Term Paper

TOPIC- Creativity in Business

Submitted To: Dr. Neelima Watve

Submitted By: Anisha Koul
PRN: 22020845005
INDEX

1. What is Canva?

2. Design thinking and innovative strategic execution.

3. Creative use of data to Scale its business.

4. Reverse engineering to personalize marketing messages to 55M+ users.

5. Business Journey of Canva.

6. What makes Canva popular?

7. How is Canva different from competitors?

8. Key takeaway.
What is Canva?

Since its launch in 2012, Canva, a user-friendly visual design tool, has experienced tremendous
growth.

Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, the company's creators, recognised that graphic design tools
are complicated and had the vision to make visual creation accessible to everyone, seen in the
application's user-friendly interface.

Millions of people use Canva on a daily basis, making it the preferred tool for producing
stunning pictures. The main objective of Canva is to provide design software that enables anyone
to create stunning designs without any prior graphic design knowledge.

Three individuals saw a need for such a service and decided to fill it. As a result, they founded
Canva, which has grown to become one of Australia's most successful start-ups with over 130
million monthly users on its platform.

Business breakthrough through design thinking and innovative strategic

execution against big competitors:

On Australia's west coast, in Perth, the state capital, Canva got its start as a small yearbook
design company. Canva has developed into an international powerhouse from those remote
beginnings. The company's "freemium" Web-based tool is used by over twenty million users
from 190 different countries to create everything from eye-catching Pinterest pictures to tasteful
restaurant menus. Along with unbeatable pricing (millions of users pay nothing at all).

The simplicity of use has been Canva's main edge over competing programmes from industry
titans like Adobe.

How Canva brought behavioral change and accessibility to the masses:

Before Canva, inexperienced designers had to piece together designs in Microsoft Word or pay
exorbitant prices for complicated expert tools. Canva may now be downloaded by anybody,
anywhere, and used to create within 10 minutes.

The business makes money by upselling customers to a premium edition with swankier features
for $10 a month or, more recently, by selling a corporate account option with less restrictions.
Canva offers millions of high-quality stock pictures for an additional $1. They add up. With a
revenue forecast of $200 million for this year, the company is valued at $3.2 billion after its most
recent $85 million fundraising round. The estimated 15% interest owned by Perkins, who is
currently 32 and made the 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list, is worth $430 million. More than
$2 billion has already been invested in Canva.

How Canva made creative use of data to Scale its business

How much information in the form of data does Canva manage?

Data processing at Canva is massive. The Canva data warehouse includes around 400 terabytes
of information, with daily raw data volumes of around 2 terabytes. Their analytics events are
recorded in one massive data set known as the event tracking table.
How Canva is leveraging data science?

Canva has used a data warehouse and a data lake in the past, and it is probable that both will be
employed in the future.

The majority of incoming information is received via streaming. All incoming data is neatly
saved in Delta format in the data lake. The information is initially presented in a delta format.

The information is then transferred to the Snowflake data warehouse.

A raw data lake is also maintained by them. Both the warehouse and Delta Lake currently draw
their supplies from the raw lake, this helps in attempting to change and get behavioural insights
and help in removing wasteful duplication.

Canva's founder said, during COVID-19, workers who were physically separated from their
colleagues had special communication requirements and were on the lookout for new methods of
collaboration.

About 40 million presentations are made each month in Canva, he said, citing a recent increase
in that number. The groundwork for a collaborative vision of Canva used the following:

● Canva has worked ‘heavily’ with OpenAI - in terms of AI-based generated content
systems that collaboratively use the text-generation engine to provide useful output to
users. users can easily type what they need and rapidly produce strategy documents,
meeting agendas, or marketing briefs. By selecting text and providing instructions, such
as "transform this paragraph into a list" or "rephrase this sentence," they can create a new
version of the text.
● Canva made a recommendation system via machine learning: Canva uses machine
learning to make a number of suggestions to its users, such as which templates they
should use next based on their past work. This is done almost invisibly to the user.

Hence, leveraging data science, Canva has cracked the golden formula:

More data = more powerful segmentation = more relevant messages for users

How Canva uses reverse engineering to personalize marketing messages to 55M+ users?

● Canva, sends more data in form of the census via emails which enhanced Canvas
segmentation, resulting in more tailored communications to its 55M+ users.
 ● It uses marketing data analysts and can put more complex, or ML-based segmentation
models, in production in a matter of minutes, rather than weeks or months.
● Through Canva Data Science, and machine learning infrastructure their marketing and
data engineers spend more time unlocking value, rather than spending weeks creating and
managing integrations.

Business Journey and success story of Canva:

Most investors have never heard of Canva, a firm that has been breaking records every other
week while growing tremendously for years.

Canva has elected to remain private, making it the largest startup success story in this nation and
one of

Australia's most successful companies. Canva was created with the goal of creating digital
graphic design tools that are effective and easy to use for everyone, not just tech-savvy
individuals, such as greeting cards or marketing presentations.

The aggregate wealth of the three co-founders, all in their 30s, is reportedly $10 billion.
However, they don't seem to be interested in amassing their own fortunes; as one creator, Cliff
Obrecht, observed on Wednesday, "it's not our mood."

Despite the fact that they are up against some well-known competitors like Atlassian (another
Australian business), it appears likely that they will continue to expand because, at the time, they
declared a $1 billion global valuation back when "unicorn" status was attained last year!
Canva has been able to deliver exponential returns despite its reliance on US dollars. In contrast
to the 260 million dollars they made when they initially started, the company currently has 55
million members and generated $650 million in revenue last year. As a result, even if most
people don't know exactly how profitable or not they are due to private investment agreements
that remain a secret, their profits are probably already quite sizable.

● Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht are the founders.

● Cameron Adams was a co-founder.
● began in 2013
● Present yearly revenue: $650M

It will be interesting to see how much the company is valued as it looks to raise more capital.
Canva raised $80 million in equity financing nine months earlier, however the amount was based
on the ten times oversubscribed amount rather than the price paid by current investors who
traded stock for new ones.

Canva's Chief Financial Officer is not interested in sharing any investor information with any
parties. Nevertheless, he claims that there has been both an excess and an undersupply of their
equities, which resulted in the company going public sooner than was originally anticipated.
He also explains how the company's history demonstrates that it was tremendously assisted by
workers migrating into remote collaboration throughout Covid's economic uncertainty. This led
up to now, when we've witnessed huge gains in the number of active users and the revenue
streams they generate.

Founders have shares invested in the company on its valuations at any given time, regardless of
whether or not that is fair, in order to crystallise profits and provide a possibility for revised
compensation arrangements, should the founders want to do so.

He refers to them as validation points; the majority of unlisted companies appreciate the ability
to operate beneath the radar without pressure from Wall Street pushing their hand into fulfilling
quarterly goals, which frequently simply result in missed opportunities.

And despite the fact that it has been profitable for the past four years, the idea of paying
dividends is not something that its management considers to be in the distant future because they
are aware that at some point in the evolution of Canvas, this will become achievable.

The problem faced by Founder which encouraged her to build Canva as a

breakthrough solution:
In 2007 Perkins began developing what would become Canva from her mother's Perth living
room. Perkins, an Australian-born teacher's daughter and the daughter of a Malaysian engineer
with Filipino and Sri Lankan ancestry, endured adolescence marked by 4:30 a.m. wake-up calls
in pursuit of her dream of becoming a professional figure skater before enrolling at the
University of Western Australia. She had an idea while imparting basic computer design
knowledge to other students as part of her studies in communications and business there. In the
age of the internet, the process of designing and publishing a flyer or poster—creating it in
Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop, scaling it to the appropriate size, exporting it as a PDF, and
then going to a place like Staples to print it—seemed laborious. Wouldn't it be much better to
complete everything with a single online tool in one location?

The original concept, according to her, was to keep design as straightforward as possible.

Perkins afraid that if she waited, someone else would develop a solution first because the issue
seemed so obvious. She thus engaged independent contractors to create a Flash website to target
one market she determined to be consistent and underserved: school yearbooks, which are
traditionally handled by student volunteers. Fusion Books, the startup of Obrecht and Perkins,
found a market right away. And Perkins suspended her studies with just one more semester of
college left. In high demand, Perkins' mother would nightly feed ink to the printers. Obrecht
called potential clients on the phone. Obrecht merely lowered his voice when schools wanted to
speak with a manager. 400 schools eventually participated in the venture, and as far away as
France had licensees. It was a beginning. However, without venture capital, which was at the
time essentially impossible to get in Perth, a city founded on mining and petrochemicals, Perkins
couldn't advance very far.

When veteran Silicon Valley VC Bill Tai travelled to Perth in 2011 to judge a startup
competition, Perkins saw—and seize—the slimmest of opportunities. Tai, a talented kitesurfer
who supported TweetDeck and Zoom, was in town mostly to ride Perth's epic waves. Perkins and
Obrecht discovered a dinner Tai was organising and surprised the guests with a pitch for Canvas
Chef, a metaphorical pizza made of several document kinds (flyer, business card, restaurant
menu) as the dough and design components as the toppings. According to Rick Baker, an
investor who saw the pitch that evening, "It wasn't the most stylish comparison."

Despite having no money, the founders left with a renewed passion for extreme water activities.
They established themselves as regulars at Tai's future kitesurfing events, which also attracted
well-known IT executives wanting to invest in up-and-coming businesses. Perkins was appointed
as the sole CEO in Maui after a friend of Peter Thiel's advised them that they required a single
leader.

In their trips to the gatekeepers of Silicon Valley's venture finance on Sand Hill Road, Perkins
and Obrecht had little success. The unknown, emotionally connected cofounders from a startup
dead zone were rejected by dozens of companies. One person remarked, "I'm honestly not
comfortable completing a trade in Australia. Another person remarked, "I'm not sure it will make
sense just yet.

The relationships made while chasing waves eventually paid off. Through the network, they were
introduced to 40-year-old ex-Googler Cameron Adams, who had started a Sydney-based firm.
Adams signed on as a third cofounder in June 2012, anticipating their March 2012 advisor
meeting. With a technical leader in place, the founders finally made a breakthrough. In two
rounds of fundraising in 2012 and early 2013, Canva raised $3 million, including an essential
matching grant from the Australian government.

Canva – What Makes It So Popular?

In more than 190 countries, Canva has over 30 million active users each month. Canva's
enormous user appeal is mostly due to the fact that you don't need any prior experience or to be a
graphic designer to utilise it.

● Its user interface is friendly.

● This platform is adaptable. You can use the application on your desktop or mobile
device or open it on your browser.
● You can form your own design team or work together with others.
● It is a cost-free website. To make a good design, you do not need to spend a lot of
money on pricey tools.
● It is advantageous for startups and small enterprises to regularly provide
interesting content.
● A top-notch, captivating design may be made in about five minutes.
● All of your designs on Canva belong to you.
● Canva also allows users under the age of 13 to create designs under adult
supervision.

Top Features of Canva, which makes it different from competitors:

 ● Content Variety: Create a variety of materials Canva can assist you in designing
anything you require, from eye-catching social media posts to infographics and resumes.
You can start from scratch while making your designs.
● Drag and drop functionality Canva is user-friendly thanks to its drag and drop
functionality. With a few clicks, you may include templates and images into your design.
● Templates: You can select, tweak, and personalise more than 50,000 templates in
Canva's library to suit your needs. The current library is also periodically updated with
fresh templates.
● Easy Edits: In Canva, you can modify photographs in more ways than only by cropping
and texturing them. You can blur your photographs, add captions, make collages and
photo grids that will leave an engaging impression thanks to its user-friendly features.
● Free stock photographs, icons, and fonts are available in Canva's collection so you can
use them to make eye-catching graphic designs. You can upload photographs as well and
include them into your design.

Benefits of Using Canva as a Designer:

1. Canva is an easy-to-use graphic design tool that enables you to quickly create graphics with a
professional appearance.
2. Alternatives to high premium and complex softwares like Stencil, Visme, Crello, and Adobe
Spark.
3. Designing does not require prior knowledge or professional experience.
4. Canva may be used for presentations, graphic design, logo creation, and social media post
creation.
5. One of Canva's most unique features is its selection of pre-built themes.
6. You have the option to resize for any social media platform.
7. If you are a student, Canva offers a collaboration with Github where you can acquire a free
Canva pro version.

Key Take Away from Canva Success:

It has also been said that Canva has employed over a million people around the world. The
intended goal of making design accessible to non-designers has been met by leveraging data
science, machine learning and web 3.0 technologies and building software where you can
improve the visual appeal of your article or presentation without having any prior experience
with design software.
Reference :
● https://digitalscholar.in/history-of-canva/
● https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2019/12/11/inside-canva-profitable-3-billion-sta
rtup-phenom/?sh=3e1c84204a51
● https://www.zippia.com/canva-careers-1396684/history/
● https://venturebeat.com/ai/canva-targets-business-users-with-generative-ai-powered-tools
/