What you need to know:

• The darling Australian visual design platform Canva will unveil its biggest expansion of products since launch in 2013 at Sydney's Hordern Pavilion – 300,000 users are streaming in globally.
• Canva CMO Zach Kitschke, initially hired for a single day before Canva launched a decade ago to announce a large seed funding round, says its investment in brand advertising has surprised the exec team with the gains made in awareness and customer acquisition in the short-term – when they were actually banking on impact further out.
• Canva's biggest gateway for new customers remains its free access to all – and Canva means all. It is targeting every internet user on the planet as its addressable market.
• Today announcement is hitched to massive expansion plans for users inside companies – Canva is poking pretty much every software giant with its new product suite from Microsoft and Adobe to Google, Tableau and Getty Images.      

Re-hacking tech growth hacking

Earlier this year a former Silicon Valley growth hacker Jonathan James told Mi3 the strategies that fuelled the meteoric rise of Paypal, Tesla, Amazon and the rest were “failing miserably” and the growth hacking playbook that many tech start-ups were using from 2017 and earlier was all but over. 

He cited Canva as a case in point: it was moving into TV advertising and out-of-home to build brand awareness and consideration for the masses in an experiment to achieve its mandate faster for global domination in visual communications. 

“A lot of these traditional growth hacking channels have been saturated by a lot of these firms… The ones that are trying to use a 2017 playbook to grow in 2022 are failing miserably,” said James, founder of Project x1AB.  

Canva’s CMO Zach Kitschke all but confirmed a broadening of the company’s marketing and channel remit to Mi3 this week after a series of mainstream brand ad campaigns to build mass awareness for the firm – particularly in the US – was having an earlier impact on user uptake than the former fleeting journalist and PR operative figured.

“We've been very pleased with the impact that [brand advertising] has had – and the fact we’ve been able to see results not just over the long term,” he said. “I guess a lot of this [brand investment] is a long term play, but we’re seeing results in the short term … The brand has probably been more receptive to some of these new activities than maybe we would have anticipated.”

Kitschke said it was true “even in the US, despite our growth, we still have a lot more people that don't know about Canva. We've seen that as a big opportunity for us. If we can actually introduce more and more people to Canva, hopefully we can help solve the problems that they have – which we [highlighted] with our last [brand] campaign.”

Kitschke said Canva “sort of threw out the playbook in terms of a traditional TV campaign” where it heroed key products and what they were solving for across linear and streaming TV channels, OOH and social media. 

“We see our total market at the moment as every internet user. So that kind of guides everything that we do from the products that we build through to localisation. We’re in over 100 languages and 190 countries around the world. So we sort of use that North Star to guide the decisions that we make. We've definitely seen substantial uplift in terms of search traffic and over the past 18 months or so, we've managed to double our brand awareness as well.”

Kitshcke said he didn’t have the latest brand awareness numbers at hand to cite although Canva’s primary channel for customer growth remains its community and word-of-mouth. 

Prior to its launch in 2013 – when Kitschke was hired for one day by founders Cliff Obrecht and Melanie Perkins – Canva had built a community waitlist of 50,000 to spread the word. Today that number is circa 1 million and Canva retains the classic start-up strategy of offering a base product for free and moving those users to a subscription product which today has about 10 million paying accounts. Those loyal users remain Canva’s biggest gateway channel to acquiring new customers, Kitchske said.    

Word of mouth still reins

“Word of mouth plays a big role and comms and PR … obviously the brand work that we're doing as well. So it's all sort of part of the puzzle," said Kitchske. 

"A big part of the philosophy and really the mission for Canva has always been to power the whole world to design. A big part of that was always having an incredibly generous free product platform. Even today, the vast majority of our user base is using Canva for free and creating that way. That's become a really great way for us to reach people in all corners of the globe and really make Canva available to anyone, no matter their experience, their income level, where in the world they live." 

As a result, reckons Kitchske, "Our products have been our greatest marketing. So you've got this incredible user community using the platform for free that actually will tell others ... as they start using it more, they'll start to bring Canva into their workplace, which has fuelled this sort of bottom up adoption that we've seen today.”

The ”bottom-up” strategy is also what will drive Canva’s growth into enterprise, per Kitschke. And individuals that have taken the product inside of their companies have done at some pretty major outfits: Amazon is now among Canva's biggest B2B customers – and the firm is making a concerted B2B push.

Today’s unveiling of Canva’s snappy product suite expansion is aimed squarely at enterprise and sees the Australian upstart poke just about every software giant on the planet from Microsoft, Google and Adobe to Google, Tableau and Getty Images.

The visual design products are under wraps until this afternoon when Canva unveils the new line-up at the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney where 300,000 people will stream-in globally to get their next Canva fix. Across the harbour at Sydney’s Luna Park, Nine will be going hard at its upfronts presentation for 2023 where user experience and design for its streaming platforms will feature prominently.  

“We now have 85 million people using the platform each and every month and people will often come in with a particular use case in mind,” Kitschke said.

“They might use us because they need to create a social media post or they've got to do a presentation, a particularly important presentation to a client. So we think a lot about once someone has come in to try one product, how do we help them discover the full breadth of what Canva can offer? I guess that's a big part of us launching the Visual Workshop this week as well – it’s making sure that there's a breadth of products that people are able to do everything that they need to in Canva.”