Leveraging Resilience: Spotlighting the Melanie Perkins & Canva Success Story

Every rejection is a step closer to revolutionizing your industry—just look at Melanie Perkins’s story.

In this episode, we unpack the remarkable journey of Melanie Perkins, the female tech CEO who got over 100 rejections before launching Canva, a revolutionary design platform now used by more than 100 million people worldwide. Tune in for actionable insights on handling setbacks, the importance of consistency, building a winning team, and daring to dream big. This episode is a must-listen for female entrepreneurs, coaches, and creatives ready to turn obstacles into opportunities.

Time Stamps:

01:06 Spotlight on Melanie Perkins and Canva

01:37 Overcoming Rejection and Building a Vision

04:02 The Revolutionary Impact of Canva

06:46 Lessons in Resilience and Rejection

11:48 Building the Right Team

15:22 Dream Big and Set Goals

23:54 Philanthropy and Giving Back

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Transcript

Episode 092: Melanie Perkins Canva

[00:00:00]

Joanna Newton: Melanie is such a great example of a founder that found a true problem, an amazing solution, believed in it, and just stayed consistent, right? Stayed her course. Didn't stop because of rejection, didn't stop because she didn't have the right people or resources. She went out and found them and really just had that core vision that. Drove her to success and helped her bring the right people along to do that. And I think such a testament of it is that philanthropy and that giving back, right?

Michelle Pualani: Hello and welcome back to the Her First Podcast. So we talk all about personal branding, marketing, and your digital presence. Oftentimes on the podcast, we spotlight successful female entrepreneurs, politician I. Business, women or celebrities in order to learn from their incredible stories, [00:01:00] look at their successes, look at their struggles, and be able to extract lessons and takeaways that we can apply in our day-to-day lives.

Today we're talking about one of the youngest female tech CEOs to build a billion dollar company from the ground up.

Melanie Perkins, the founder of Canva, with over 100 million users in 190 countries and evaluation in the tens of billions. Her story isn't just impressive, it's incredibly inspiring, But what most people don't actually know about her story is that before Canva really took off, Melanie faced more than 100 rejections from investors.

No. After? No. After, no. She pitched for three years straight before anyone said yes. She didn't have the tech background, the Valley network. Or any big name investors to support her in those early stages. 

just a relentless belief and vision that graphic design should be simple and accessible to everyone. So today we're gonna dive into how she scaled from a high school yearbook [00:02:00] idea to a global design empire. Why building the right team can be a turning point in your company and brand, and how her commitment to generosity and inclusion really shapes everything that she's been able to build and what she does today, which includes her pledge to give away most of her wealth.

Melanie's story is a great example of resilience, believing in a vision, and continuing to move forward independent of those external circumstances, telling you no along the way. So, hello, I'm Michelle Houston, founder of To Be Honest Beverage Company, a non-alcoholic functional spirit brand as well as coach to where personal development meets personal branding.

Joanna Newton: And I'm Joanna. I'm the co-founder of Millennial Marketer, and I help service providers build their own digital online businesses.

Today, I'm so excited to talk about Melanie Perkins. I think her story is really interesting and Canva is something that I think just about I know in the online space uses and needs. To use what she [00:03:00] did really revolutionized a problem that marketers have or anybody really trying to create any sort of digital art or digital graphic. one thing that I know we can learn from her in her story. Is that she really started with a real world problem. So a lot of times we just like have ideas of things that we could make, but we don't connect them to a problem. So when she started with Fusion books, it was an online tool for students to design yearbooks, right?

So she a real world problem. There are schools all over the place with students creating yearbooks, and they need something to do it. Simply and quickly and well, and this first business and this first product of hers was that solution that then morphed into Canva, which we all know today as a go-to design resource, right?

Like if you post on Instagram, if you have a business, if you're trying to grow on social [00:04:00] media, you've likely used Canva. what is so interesting to me about Canva is. When I started in social media, it was by happenstance, so I worked at a company, the entire marketing team was laid off except for two people.

It was myself and someone from the parent company. All of a sudden, I was expected to be email marketer, graphic designer, social media poster copywriter, that we did have a web developer. The web developer was on like the tech team. So I had a web developer to send things to, but all of a sudden I was expected to do everything.

And I remember trying to plan a month of social content and saying, who's gonna design all of this? Because I wasn't trained in design software. And Canva, if it existed, was not what it was today by any means. And so I had to go and say, I know you laid off all of the designers, but I need a free, like I need a freelance designer.

I literally could not do that job. Right without, a design support. Now, fast forward to really three years later, when I [00:05:00] first started as a freelancer, I started as a freelancer helping people with their social content, and Canva existed and I was able to create a lot of graphics myself without that heavy, heavy design background.

Now, of course. Real designers with design background and expertise are completely invaluable, and there are definitely things I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot foot pole when it comes to design, right? But Canva makes design and creating graphics so accessible to everyone. You know, what Melanie was able to do was to tap into a. Massive problem and come up with a solution that was easy, user friendly, and like we all want to use. 

Michelle Pualani: Canva is a tool that you've either heard of or have used before. It meets that real world issue it creates simplicity in design. And I kind of was the same way. I've actually taken a class on Photoshop before. But it's so complex, so convoluted and so confusing [00:06:00] for me, who's someone who doesn't wanna do it as a full-time profession and who actually doesn't care about it that much.

Like I'm just not that interested. And so having a simple tool that is accessible, user-friendly, full of templates that you can just. Use and now you've got the brand kit and you can apply colors easily. You can upload all the photos you need, like seriously. It's a great tool. I've actually been exploring other AI content creation tools recently to see if I can find something that's a little bit more automated in the process.

Honestly, I haven't found something that still even comes close to what Canva is able to do in a really simple, easy, user-friendly kind of way. So what she's been able to even just envision, conceptualize, and then build is incredibly powerful. So in her early stages, we talked about a lot of that.

Rejection. We have a really great podcast about Sarah Blakely. You can go back and listen to that episode and hit subscribe if you're not yet. But that episode really focused on [00:07:00] dealing with failure now. The case for Melanie is that she dealt with rejection over and over and over and over again. And we've heard a lot of stories.

I've heard a lot of stories of entrepreneurs, business owners, people who just kept going, who held to the vision, who knew what they were creating. really, it was like a revolution in the design world, right? We're coming from like very complex, complicated design graphic. Systems that were not something that someone could just pick up and use easily to literally, a child could get into Canva and figure out how to create a design and do it in a really beautiful, easy, professional way.

So the revolutionary visionary. Aspect of Canva is a really beautiful story that sometimes we've talked about. This is innovation. As you're innovating, as you're creating, as you're developing something, you might get a lot of nos. You might get a lot of, this doesn't work, this isn't right. It's never been done before, that [00:08:00] could just be part of your story and part of your process.

But if you believe in it, if you know that it's something that's needed, that the world is going to embrace, that you are driven to create, keep going because there is a light at the end of the tunnel. So dealing with over a hundred rejections could have been seen as like, well, maybe I'm not on the right track. But she didn't listen to that. She continued to keep going, and with time they actually found an investor, bill Ty, they secured the support that they needed to, which then led to key introductions, key investors, and moving the business forward.

So we forget that sometimes one opportunity, one piece of content, one feature, one thing. Can completely transform your life, your business, your brand, in such a huge way. And I heard this thing recently about timing that I really love, like divine timing, the right timing, lucky timing, what, however you wanna call it or think [00:09:00] about it.

Is not just because you waited around and then it happened. When it happened, it's because you've put in the reps and you're going and you're going and you're going and you're consistent and you're showing up. it could be a year and it could be six months and it could be 10 years, it could be three years, whatever that length is.

That divine timing only happens because you're on the path and you're doing the thing. So don't just sit back, watch everything, go past you and think someday the right timing will occur. When you're consistently putting yourself out there, you're pitching yourself, you're putting out the content, you're creating products and programs, you're developing, you're innovating, you are sharing your ideas.

That timing is gonna hit you when you're consistently doing that over and over and over and over again. So know that that is part of the path and that is part of your journey, and it's okay to keep going even if you're not seeing that luck, even if you're not seeing those direct results right away, you're still a part of that process and it's building and it's growing. 

Joanna Newton: entrepreneurs, have to be good [00:10:00] about accepting rejection. We talked about in the episode a few weeks ago about Sarah Blakely, right? Like if you are not. Failing. You're probably not trying hard enough, you're not pushing enough. You're not actually putting yourself out there if everything is just coming to you. And I know on that episode I shared that even though I'm one of the top like salespeople in the Kajabi expert marketplace, I probably also get the most nos, I get tons of nos, and sometimes as I'm going through my list of people, I'm like, okay, I guess I'm done with this person and this person and this person, but then the next day I might close three clients. Right? And so we just have to learn how to reframe and handle rejection and not let us completely, completely crush us. I've seen too many entrepreneurs get one or two nos change their their entire business model. Right. They have one person say they don't like their website. They're like, now I need to redesign. Like, no, you don't. Right. Maybe something wasn't clear. You might need to change a sentence. Right? But like, I think that we just throw things out [00:11:00] way too fast, and there's too many stories of people who worked and worked and worked and worked, and that's how they became a multimillionaire or a billionaire, right?

And that's what Melanie Perkins did, right? She pushed and pushed and pushed, and now she owns a $40 billion company. which is massive. If she took her first three nos. didn't wait until she got the yes at around 100. She wouldn't be where she was today. And we wouldn't have Canva. I know Jamie Krn Lima, the founder of it, cosmetics, is another great example of this. She pitched QVC over and over and over again to get on that show until she finally got it. She got it and then she sold and then. Now it cosmetics everywhere, right? It's a huge, brand. And she got that payday because she was facing rejection and just kept going. Anyway, another key thing that we can learn from Melanie as a CEO and as a founder, that you have to be resourceful and you have to be proactive as a [00:12:00] founder, you're not gonna have every skill. every everything that you need to be a company. But you need to find those resources, whether it's software, whether it's people, whether it's co-founders, You have to go out and get the people that are gonna help you have that vision. So she's not a technical founder, which if you're in a, tech space, can be really hard if you're not a coder.

If you're not a developer. Most tech founders are coders and developers. So her not having a tech background meant she needed to find people, so she sought out developers. She wanted that were gonna bring her vision to life. And actually, one of the co-founders of Canva was someone that she pitched multiple times. told her now multiple times, but she knew that she wanted him and was able to bring him on board in the end, And I think as founders it can be really easy to wanna pretend that we can do it all, that we don't need anybody that we just have the ability to do all of the [00:13:00] things, but recognizing, okay. lacking a skillset. I need to find that skillset. And then you can bring those people on, either as co-founders or as employees or contractors to help you build that vision. But you have to be self-aware enough to find your gaps, right, and hire for your gaps, and then trust those people to bring that expertise. 

Michelle Pualani: I also think that's really freeing as a founder, visionary, business owner, creator, is that you don't have to be good at everything. Like just imagine if you can sit back and think through where are the places that I need support, where are the places? Is in which I can hire for my weaknesses and actually secure the talent in order to drive the business forward.

If you're not really great at sales, stop trying to manage your sales. If you're not great at publishing and scheduling your posts, stop trying to do it all by yourself. We can start to hire. In small ways, even with a very small budget, even as we're just getting started, even if we don't have the experience [00:14:00] just yet, we can start to think through, okay, where can we hire out?

Or if you're at the place where you just need to delete things, like just get rid of things. That don't really support your business as a whole. A lot of the things I was trying to do at the beginning of TBH really didn't lead to the growth and the scale of the business. So I started saying no a lot more frequently and eliminating those tasks and activities that were just distractions.

So if you can start to think about the 20% of activities that are actually gonna grow your business and start to reduce the amount of time invested in the 80%, that's huge. Or if those activities are key to your business, where can you hire? Where can you find the talent? Where can you get support in those areas?

I think that there's really a misconception a lot of times in the online space about solar entrepreneurship and doing it all on your own. And there likely are people who are qualified, who are a bit more balanced in their strengths. If you haven't listened to a StrengthFinder episode, go back and listen to that 'cause it is [00:15:00] so clutch for understanding yourself, your skillset, your talents, and where you can really focus in and hone in on those so that you can see more success and see more joy and enjoyment of what it is that you're doing.

So often we kinda hit our head against a wall doing things that we don't actually enjoy in our business because we feel like we have to do them. Get them off your plate, hire out for it, get the support. It's totally okay. So the next lesson that we're gonna chat about extracting from Melanie's journey is really to have some big ass goals, to dream big, to create that vision.

The concept that she was working with, that she was pitching, that she kept getting nos for. Was big. Like I said, it's a revolution in the graphic design space, in my opinion. It's a huge shift. It's a huge change. You can have those big dreams and those big goals, even if you're taking small steps along the way.

Encourage that within your own mindset. And then of course, the team that you bring on, she really worked to set. Bigger goals, celebrating milestones along [00:16:00] the way, working with your team to think through creatively what is possible, how can we do this differently? One of the great successes of Amazon is due to the fact that they were customer obsessed, so.

Listening to your customers, getting the feedback and learning, where are the breakdowns? Why is someone canceling? What would they rather have? And whereas you can't listen to two people out of 200 million people. But when you're starting to see a collective percentage of folks who are interested in a key service.

Let's say two day delivery times, maybe you should start to pay attention and that could radicalize and transform the business that you are offering and bringing to the community and to the marketplace. But coming back to this concept and idea of belief is so powerful. Believing in your own vision, believing in the power of what you're creating, sharing that vision and having that success with others is so, so incredibly powerful. Think big for your business, think big for your personal [00:17:00] life. I think that so often we are too limited in the way that we approach the way that we're living our lives.

We get caught up in the day to day. I understand that things need to get done. There are task lists, there are personal things, there are relationship things. Set those aside for a little bit and take a step back and think about the vision of what you're creating, what you're bringing to the world, your mission, your purpose, and how you're sharing that.

it'll really, really start to change the way you show up to work, what it is that you're creating, and just how you present yourself in general. It'll really transform your personal brand as a whole to take some time to reflect on those things.

Joanna Newton: I think we can really underestimate how much own limiting beliefs affect how far we can go. so if you are hitting a wall or you are struggling to keep going, or you think your business is struggling to grow, it's important to just reflect internally on like, is there something in my mindset that's holding me back? Do I not believe that I'm worthy of this or do I not [00:18:00] believe I should be charging these prices? Because if you don't believe your customers aren't gonna believe. One thing that really sticks, like a moment that sticks out to me in my life is when I was interviewing for what was my first job after college.

So when I left college, I started working at the Princeton Review, which is a test prep company starting in the education world. Definitely changed my life because I've stayed there since. And, and now, you know, I help other people sell all kinds of educational products and services and memberships and, and all of that. But in my interview, I remember I didn't really know what I was getting myself into, but the job that I was applying for was a tutoring manager role. So in this role I would connect, students to tutors, like match students to tutors, sort of manage their customer lifecycle. But I also sold tutoring packages the Princeton Review tutoring packages were expensive.

Um, you know, this was in. 2013 and the [00:19:00] minimum package was something like $600, right? For a certain number of hours of tutoring, these packages could go up to 15 K for tutoring. And in that range, probably average person spent three to $5,000 on tutoring with a Princeton review. And in my interview process, the person interviewing me was said to me something like, well, these packages are expensive.

They're this to this. do you feel about telling someone they have to that much money? I remember the back of my head thinking like, oh my God, that's a lot of money. How could I even tell someone? I mean, that was like a 15 k package was like half my yearly salary then. Do you know what I mean?

Like, that's a lot of money. But I just remember the interviewing being like, Nope. If that's what it costs, that's what it costs. And know, as long as I say it like confidently, then I'll sell it. They seem to believe me. They hired me and then I went on to become, in that year, one of the top selling tutoring managers in the company because It just clicked with me in that moment, in that interview as like a recent college grad. When you're selling something, you have to be [00:20:00] confident in that price you're giving out. Right? if I went into those sales conversations thinking, oh, it's not really worth 15 K, then I would never sell a 15 K package.

Right? And so we need to get our mindsets right. And this is such a great example of someone who is getting those, has a vision that's so different from what we have is. A revolutionary idea, setting big goals, believing in herself, and then also getting her team right to all believe in that goal and move forward. 

Michelle Pualani: What we think and believe we become. Truthfully, and I believe it more and more every single day, is you've gotta believe in you. You've gotta believe in you so much that anything you face, whether that is a troll comment, whether that is a bad client experience, whether that is a shitty customer review, whether that is.

Your stuff getting banned or taken down online, whether that is your product not selling, whether that is rejection from investors, whether that is your [00:21:00] family doesn't think that you can do it, whether that's being on a sales call and getting told no, your services are too expensive. If you are going to be in business, if you are going to be an entrepreneur, if you are going to create big things, you're going to deal with big rejection and it's so critically important to start to build your resilience, your sense of self to deal with those things. All of that rejection that Melanie experienced over a hundred nos was never a reflection of her value or her worth. she had to know that and believe that inherently in order to keep going. And so often when we are experts, when we are content creators, when we're in. The personal brand space and creating vulnerability in our visibility by showing up, sharing our thoughts, sharing our opinions, and teaching or coaching something that we truly care about.

We can open ourselves up to a lot of the emotional attachment to how that is received. when that happens, it sets you up [00:22:00] for failure because when you get those negative responses, it's gonna make you. Turn around, it's gonna make you pull back. It's gonna make you second guess. It's gonna make you doubt.

So what we have to do is really work on our internal fortitude. We have to be able to build ourselves up, believe in ourselves, believe in what we do, what we offer, and continue to put ourselves out there consistently. Not without worrying about the rejection, not without thinking about it, not without addressing it.

Sometimes crying is the right response, but then you gotta be able to pick yourself back up and keep going and keep moving forward. And knowing that you are worthy, you are valued, and you have that inherent sense of self despite all of the external circumstances, the rejection that you're getting along the way.

So one of the other lessons that we're gonna chat about real quick is how she really started. Small and then built larger. So when you think niche and then you go global, right? She's in 190 countries now with Canva. She didn't start there. The [00:23:00] programming didn't start there. The quality of the actual service and software didn't start there.

So starting with a niche, even before she got Canvas started right at 19. She co-founded and launched Fusion, which was the yearbook software program. That's where she started. It was focused in Australia. It launched to a couple other countries, and that was kind of the initial, and then she moved on and built Canva later on.

Started with a niche ability to build graphic design. What it is now is much more robust, but being able to simply put things together was kind of where it started. Start niche and then go bigger from there. Have a bigger vision, let that lead you. But being able to focus on who am I speaking to? What am I giving them?

What's the simplification of this offer in the beginning? And then over time, you can expand, you can grow, and you can get bigger with that vision. and included in that bigger vision for Melanie Perkins is actually philanthropy and giving back. So in 2021, [00:24:00] her and her co-founder and partner joined the giving pledge, committing to donate at least half of their wealth To charitable causes. I love that as a great example because a lot of times people look to wealth and think it's greedy, it's power hungry. They're just harming the planet. They only care about themselves. No, this is a billionaire who's decided to create a really functional tool that has honestly, just by being software as a service, which Canva is.

Changed people's lives, right? Given them access to graphic design that they wouldn't really be able to. So many small businesses, content creators and like local people can operate off a very small monthly investment to be able to design beautiful content in a way that is easily accessible to them. So not only is she changing lives on the actual software side.

But with the Giving Pledge, to be able to take that income, that wealth, and be able to give it back to the community is such a powerful thing to have. So knowing that as you are building [00:25:00] wealth, you can do generous things with it, and that can be a part of your mission and a part of your purpose, and a part of your why, and you build.

Joanna Newton: Melanie is such a great example of a founder that found a true problem, an amazing solution, believed in it, and just stayed consistent, right? Stayed her course. Didn't stop because of rejection, didn't stop because she didn't have the right people or resources. She went out and found them and really just had that core vision that. Drove her to success and helped her bring the right people along to do that. And I think such a testament of it is that philanthropy and that giving back, right? She was lucky enough and worked hard enough to create massive wealth for herself, but doesn't wanna just forward that for her herself. And I think that's such an amazing. path that she's going down. One of the things recently that happened with Canva, and everyone who has Canva is probably aware of this, there was a point where they were changing their prices and, and there was some [00:26:00] backlash for the company with this because out of nowhere it felt like they almost were gonna double their yearly subscription fees for users.

And this was upsetting to people and talked about it and they rolled it back. companies do need to increase pricing. Larger infrastructure, more tools requires price increases, but they recognize that doubling the price was too big of a step, right? and changed course. And that's pretty, that's pretty amazing for a company to realize, wait, we made the wrong decision.

I think that really comes back to having amazing core values and having a vision, right, of that accessibility of design. Let them listen to their customers and say like, wait. This was too much. We need to adjust. And I think she's just such a great example for us to look at, for someone to, how to move forward with rejection. How to really, really build something that's revolutionary. and then how to build a company that takes its. kind of footprint and it's influence, not lightly and really does the best they can with that [00:27:00] influence, wealth and notoriety that you get when you build that size of a company. So thank you so much for listening to this episode. If learning about high achieving women, what their companies are and what we can learn from them, sounds interesting to you. We have a whole bunch more episodes about different women that we profile and talk to. We also have guests on our show who are building their own businesses and learn from them as well.

So we'd love for you to stick around. Subscribe and share this episode with a friend who you think would benefit from hearing this message today.