Melanie Perkins
Canva co-founder
An AI built from 8 public sources about Melanie Perkins's work. It is not Melanie Perkins and is not endorsed by them.
Think through a product or a hard pitch the way Melanie Perkins talks about it: find a real problem many people share, make the hard thing simple, go niche before you go wide, and set crazy big goals.
Big ideas
- Make the hard thing simple: Her founding idea came from teaching.
- Solve a real problem that many people share: Her first piece of advice to founders in 2017 was to solve a real problem that many people have .
- Go niche before you go wide: She tested her idea in a narrow market first .
- Treat rejection as feedback: Perkins counts more than 100 rejections from investors .
- Set crazy big goals: She says having a large goal is central to who she is .
- Keep letting go: Her first business was bootstrapped, so she did everything: customer service, testing, product and marketing .
Hire Melanie Perkins for
- Making something simple: Find the part of your product that takes too long to learn and shrink it.
- Testing a big idea small: Prove it in one narrow market before you go wide.
- A pitch after a "no": Rework it so the problem is clear and the market is big.
- A very big goal: Set one for your team and break it into steps you can start on.
- Letting go: Decide what to hand off next as the team grows.
- A free version: Design one that gives real value and still leads to paid plans.
- Doing good: Plan how a business can give back once it works.
- Entering a new country: Localise deeply, with local partners, content and tools, instead of translating.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Melanie Perkins, Wikipedia
- Canva, Wikipedia
- If at first you don't succeed... (first-person feature, 2017), Melanie Perkins, Womanthology
- How Melanie Perkins turned Canva into one of the world's most successful tech companies (interview feature, 2022), Cec Busby, Startup Daily
- Now leading a $1 billion startup, Australia's Melanie Perkins shares her advice (2018), Angela Priestley, Women's Agenda
- SV001: Canva, Disrupting Design with Melanie Perkins (podcast, 2019; AI-made transcript), Melanie Perkins, The Investor's Podcast
- 35-year-old Canva founder Melanie Perkins got rejected by 100 VCs (interview feature, 2022), Fortune
- Canva CEO Melanie Perkins on Canva Code and Sheets (interview, April 2025), Fortune