20Product: How Canva Builds Products: Lessons Learned, What Works? What Flopped? The Top 5 Product Lessons in Scaling to 185M Monthly Active Users with Canva Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Cameron Adams
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 19 July 2024
⏱️ 50 minutes
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Summary
Cameron Adams is Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Canva where he is responsible for heading up the design and product teams. Since launching in 2013, Canva’s global community has grown to over 185 million monthly users in over 190 countries. In 2021, Canva was valued at $40 billion, following a $200m funding round. This saw it become one of the most valuable private software companies in the world. Prior to joining Canva, Cameron found himself working closely with Lars and Jens Rasmussen (co-founders of Google Maps) to realise the design vision for Google Wave.
In Today's Episode with Cameron Adams:
1. From Accidental Joining to Most Valuable Private Company:
- How did Cameron go from working on Google wave with Lars Rasmussen to co-founding Canva with Mel and Cliff?
- What was the single closest near-death experience in the life of Canva?
- Why did Canva fail as a social network? What did Cameron learn from that?
2. How to Create Users that Truly Love Your Products:
- What have been Canva's biggest lessons on what it takes to do world class onboarding?
- What is Cameron biggest advice to founders on how to create moments of delight in your product?
- Is simplicity always best in product? What, when made more complex, is better for the user?
3. Scaling Canva into the Enterprise:
- What are the biggest product changes that are required to move into enterprise?
- What does Cam know about moving up market that he wishes he had known when he started?
- What are the biggest product and design mistakes founders make when making the transition from PLG to enterprise sales?
4. AI Changes Everything: More Money or Better Products Only
- Who will win the foundation model layer landscape? What will it be in 10 years?
- Will companies actually make more revenue from having AI in products or will it just create better products?
- How does Canva's implementation of AI in their products impact the margins of their products?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Speed is definitely important. |
| 0:01.7 | You can't take five years to launch a product. |
| 0:04.3 | But it also needs to reach a certain level where people get excited about it. |
| 0:09.2 | You don't just want to launch something that people feel like it just gets the job done, |
| 0:15.0 | but they're not that crazy excited about it. |
| 0:17.8 | Launching something at Canva that people will spread, they will tell others about |
| 0:23.5 | has been the biggest growth driver for us. You are listening to 20 Product with me, Harry Stebbings. |
| 0:29.0 | Now 20 Product is the monthly show where we take you inside the world's best product teams and sit down |
| 0:34.6 | with the best product leaders in the world. Today, we're joined by none other than Cameron Adams, chief product officer and co-founder |
| 0:40.9 | of Canva, where he is responsible for heading up the design and product teams. |
| 0:45.2 | Since launching Canva in 2013, Canva's global community has grown to over 185 million |
| 0:51.7 | monthly users in 190 countries. In 2021, Canva was valued at $40 billion following a $200 million |
| 1:00.0 | funding round. This saw Canva become one of the most valuable private software companies in the |
| 1:06.7 | world. It's an incredible story, and this is a masterclass from Cameron Adams, co-founder |
| 1:11.7 | at Canva. But before we dive in, ever wondered what your customers actually do. The team over |
| 1:17.1 | at Thay Do have been living it for decades and they have recently built a product that is |
| 1:21.3 | frankly enabling the world's biggest businesses to literally know what they do. Harnessing journey |
| 1:26.7 | mining with AI, you can turn unstructured data into structured |
| 1:30.1 | data into structured customer journeys in minutes, saving weeks of work and months of analysis. |
| 1:35.0 | They Do journey management platform is already helping over 100 leading businesses, including |
| 1:39.8 | Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Royal London and Home Depot, to know what they do. Don't waste another step, check out they do.com. |
| 1:47.8 | But before we continue, let me tell you about One Schema. One Schema is the embeddable CSV importer that will save your team months of development time. |
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