How Canva Grew From One User to 10, 10 to 1000 Users

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Before Canva, you were writing for a small publication covering startups in Sydney and around Australia. And so that would have become a really fantastic way for me to meet a whole lot of founders and local investors or folks like that. So I was out of a role and looking for work and so reached out to a few people with fortunately Nikki Shavak from Blackbird who introduced me to Melon Cliff. He tried pitching every reporter he could find at that point but ultimately there were some that didn't get him. But by the time we launched, we actually had this sort of hype and excitement from a community of people that were ready to get involved on the product.

Today’s episode is with Zach Kitschke, CMO of Canva, an online design and publishing tool. Since launching in 2013, Canva has grown from an Australian startup to a global company, with 60 million monthly active users, over 2,000 employees, and a $40 billion valuation.

Zach was one of Canva's first employees, leading comms efforts around their initial launch and fundraise. But since then, he’s done everything from answering support tickets and cooking the team lunch, to serving as a product lead and spinning up the people function.

This career history gives Zach a unique vantage point on why Canva worked. The discussion starts off focused on the early days — from unpacking all the work that went into their launch, to how they improved the early product and focused on the use case for social media managers and content creators.

Next, we dig into supporting and scaling the team during hypergrowth. Canva has several unique practices around onboarding, learning and development, and keeping the team connected — from vision decks, strategy docs and a specific skills framework, to their ‘chaos to clarity’ spectrum and ‘season opener’ ritual for making company planning more fun.

Zach also shares what he figured out personally along the different chapters in his career at Canva, including how to leverage advisors and when to bring someone else in to take over your role. Whether you’re a marketer, a founder, a people leader, or a product manager, there are tons of helpful takeaways for everyone in this conversation.

You can follow Zach on Twitter at @zachkitschke. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.