How to Find Your Ideal Customer in the Early Days of Photoshop

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I would assume that figuring out who this new design tool is for was really important. How did you think about your ideal customer in the early days? And so my guess is that you picked a specific type of customer and then over a very long period of time kind of expanded that aperture as functionality and feature set grew. I'm interested, what do those early customers look like or how did you figure out who it was right for today versus tomorrow versus the next day? That's exactly right. In those early days, we did spend a lot of time with folks getting them into the product and talking to a lot of people.

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.