Before Canva, there was Fusion Books.
It was Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht's project to help schools design high-quality yearbooks for students. During her studies, Perkins made additional money by teaching other students about design. She saw they needed a simple graphic design tool - printing flyers or posters was problematic. Her mom was a teacher and had a lot of work with the school's yearbooks. That inspired Perkins to create a tool for designing yearbooks.
She couldn't code, so she paid someone who could. She borrowed money from friends and hired freelancers. They made her a website. Students could work there together to design their own yearbooks. Together with Obrecht, Perkins would print them and deliver them to schools. Her mother's living room was their office. Obrecht cold-called schools to pitch the idea of Fusion Books. He changed his voice when the schools wanted to speak with the project manager. They reached 400 schools. They started from the local ones. They even sent some free samples of the designs. Perkins left her studies to focus on Fusion Books.
To promote Canva, Perkins kept going to as many conferences and meetups as possible. She attended conferences for bloggers, designers, and social media marketers. She pitched Canva to the attendees.
She and Obrecht also reached out to graphic design influencers. They asked them to talk about Canva, so the influencers recommended it to their followers.
During that time, Perkins tried to raise funds and look for investors for Canva. Up to this day, Canva and Fusion Books operate separately.
Perkins and Obrecht built a community around Canva and created a waitlist. It was all before Canva even started.
50,000 users have signed up on their waitlist before Canva's public launch. It got to 150,000 pretty fast thanks to a tech influencer, Guy Kawasaki. One of Kawasaki's employees was using Canva and made him get interested in the app.
