Canva: A 55M user-base and one of the fastest growing SaaS Products in the world.

SaaS Case Study 🔦

Let's take a look at Canva, how they acquired a 55M user-base and became one of the fastest growing SaaS Products in the world.

What can we learn from Canva's hypergrowth?

Most likely, you already heard about Canva.

But in case you didn't:

Canva is a graphic design tool used to create visual content for Social Media.

They earned unicorn status in 2018 and was valued at $15B in April 2021.

How it all began

The company was founded in 2012 when one of the founders, Melanie Perkins, realized that most photo editing and design tools (like Photoshop and InDesign) were way too complicated for regular users to learn and use.

This formed the vision: Helping everyone create stunning-looking designs with a minimum of friction and cognitive overhead.

As it turned out, there was a huge crowd of starving users for this.

Two pillars became essential for Canva's growth strategy:

• The company vision
• An enormous potential market

Today, Canva's company vision has many variants, but they still all revolve around the same basic idea: being able to design anything, quickly.

A key element here is simplicity.

When you visit Canva's website, and when you use their app, you will notice how everything is cut to the bone.

Simple. Easy to use. Very few elements that may lead to confusion or ambivalence.

Their website contains very little text and a lot of visuals.

There's not a lot of information to digest.

Since Canva is using a freemium model, the website doesn't need to appeal to decision-making, rather, it's designed to make the visitor want to sign up. Fast.

The app itself follows the same principles.

It's really easy and intuitive to use.

You can create and share your visual directly from the app.

And with an enormous library of ready-made templates, it perfectly adheres to their vision: Being able to design anything, quickly.

It's noticeable how short they managed to make the action-to-result trip.

• One-click signup
• One-click publish
• Create visuals with a few clicks

Everything is made impressively easy and accessible.

Another key element is scalability.

When Canva was growing at the fastest rate, they had an average of almost 4,000 new sign-ups per day and more than 100K new sign-ups per month.

It is crucially important to have an infrastructure that supports this level of growth.

Canva is built on AWS.

Handling image processing at scale, in the way Canva does, is certainly not a trivial engineering task.

Canva is using AWS G3 instances to handle this task.

G3 instances are optimized for graphics-intensive applications, with powerful GPU capacity.

“We couldn’t run Canva without these instances,” the Head of Infrastructure, Jim Tyrrell, says.

Canva also relies heavily on AWS's Multi-Region Model.

AWS enables Canva to back up a massive amount of data with ease.

G3, S3, and the Multi-Regional Model of AWS allow the perfect infrastructure to support the hypergrowth of Canva.

Social Proof

A natural consequence of growing this rapidly is word-of-mouth and social proof.

Being able to write "Join 10M users [...]" clearly seems very convincing, and combining that with the many testimonials from both businesses and individuals, Canva kept accelerating.

So - what can we take away from Canva's story?

🔹 Crystal-clear company vision.

It can be said in a one-liner, and everyone is able to understand it.

The vision is still the same today (8 years later), and everything Canva does still complies with this overall vision.

🔹 An enormous base of potential users.

When Canva was founded, there was a huge crowd of hungry users, literally starving for a solution like Canva, in a market where there were no good alternatives.

🔹 Freemium pricing model and one-click signup.

Canva did an impressive job of nudging the user to sign up fast.

The website is simple, filled with visuals, and very little information to digest.

With a free plan and a one-click signup, users were storming in!

🔹 A dead-simple app that makes the user stick.

Canva is very simple to use.

After signing up, the user is able to see a final result after a few minutes.

The trip from action to result has been made extremely short.

🔹 Infrastructure and architecture that supports hypergrowth.

By using AWS and Cloud-Based computing, Canva was able to scale its infrastructure seamlessly as new users were pouring in.

I hope you enjoyed reading.