How a $1B company Canva started

Canva was founded by a 19-year-old university student, Melanie Perkins.
By 2018 Canva achieved 294,000 paying customers and $1 Billion valuation.

Here are the first hardest steps for Melanie:

1. She started from a tiny niche – an online design platform for the school yearbook market.
Her customers were schools and they were paying real money.
Within 5 years it became Australia’s largest yearbook publisher, expanding to France and New Zealand.

2. After that, she decided to get back to her initial idea of Canva – to “democratize design”.
For 3 long years, she traveled back and forth from Australia to the US, pitching her idea to various investors.
After 3 years she managed to land her first investment and started creating the first lines of code for Canva.