Melanie Perkins: Building Canva Like a Kitchen, Running It Like a Movement

Illustration
inspired by Melanie Perkins

Some people start companies.

Others start movements—by solving problems so real, so common, you wonder why no one did it sooner. —inspanet.com

When Melanie Perkins launched her first business, she wasn’t trying to build a billion-dollar company. She just wanted to fix something that was broken—high school yearbook design. That small, specific problem became her starting point. Years later, it turned into Canva, one of the world’s biggest design platforms used by over 100 million people.

So, what can early-stage creators, solopreneurs, and students learn from her story?

1. Go niche before you go wide

Melanie didn’t begin with a world-changing vision. She started with Fusion Books, a tool to help Australian schools make yearbooks more easily. That focus gave her a space to test the idea, understand user needs, and build confidence.

In her words: “We tested the idea for Canva with our first business... for the very niche market of high school yearbooks in Australia. Once we’d learned a lot and proven the idea, we decided to tackle a much larger problem.”

To her, building Canva was like cooking a great dish—you gather the right ingredients, test flavors, and improve the recipe each time.

Design, she realized, needed that same treatment. Fonts, templates, images, drag-and-drop simplicity—all in one place.

That’s how she baked Canva.
And that’s how you should build, too.
Start with your ingredients—your skills, your idea, your “why.”
Then mix, taste, tweak, and try again.

 

2. Crazy big goals start with small moves

Melanie set massive goals—but she took them on one smart step at a time. It took her three years to land her first investor check. She once got up at 4 AM just to catch a train to Silicon Valley for a breakfast pitch.

Instead of quitting after her latter rejections, she improved her pitch deck, refined her strategy, and kept showing up. That kind of quiet persistence is what real startup grit looks like.

3. Solve a real problem

Canva wasn’t built to be flashy. It was built to help people who aren’t designers—students, small business owners, marketers—create professional-looking content without the stress.

“Design can be really difficult and daunting for non-designers,” Melanie said. “There is a dire need to change design from being such a complicated process to something attainable and accessible for everyone.”

 

This simple mission—make design easy for everyone—is what makes Canva powerful.

4. Focus on what you can control

Being a young woman in the tech world wasn’t easy. But Melanie didn’t waste energy on what she couldn’t change. Instead, she worked on what she could: her message, her product, her pitch.

“If I was to think that being female was the reason I was rejected... it would have been very disempowering,” she said. “I have always preferred to pour my energy... into things that I can change.”

 

It’s a mindset worth stealing.

5. Your impact might be bigger than you think

Canva isn’t just a design tool. It’s helped people track down lost family, catch criminals, boost small business sales—and so much more. When you build something that really solves a problem, it spreads far beyond what you imagined.

Final Word

Melanie’s best advice? “Just get started.” If she’d waited to feel ready, or listened to the stats about startup failure, Canva wouldn’t exist.

At Inspanet, that’s the kind of energy we love. Start small. Dream big. Don’t wait for perfect. Just start.