You Can Build a $60 BILLION Company From Scratch Like Melanie Perkins

[0:00]This woman faced rejection from over 100 investors. Today, she's the CEO of Canva, a $60 billion company that makes design easy for everyone. When Melanie Perkins was 19, she was a university student in Australia, working part-time as a tutor teaching design to her classmates. She quickly realized that the design software that they were using was complicated and hard to learn, even for design students. Frustrated by how long it took her classmates to create even simple designs, Melanie had an idea: what if she could create a simple design tool that anyone could use easily? In 2007, Melanie Perkins and her co-founder, Cliff Obrecht, started their first company, Fusion Books, which let students design their own high school yearbooks. While working on Fusion Books, Melanie pitched the idea of a platform that could help people design anything online, but getting investors to believe in her idea was tough. She faced over 100 rejections, with many investors thinking her idea wasn't big enough to grow. Still, Melanie kept refining her idea, learning from each rejection, and stayed focused on her goal of making design simple and accessible for everyone. In 2012, Melanie and her team officially founded Canva and secured $1.5 million in funding from investors like Bill Tai, who believed in her vision. This was the turning point Melanie had worked so hard for. Canva's easy-to-use interface with drag-and-drop features and templates made design accessible to everyone, even without advanced skills. After launching in 2013, it quickly gained popularity, and millions of people began using it for everything from presentations to social media posts. Today, Canva is valued at over $60 billion, and Melanie Perkins, one of the youngest female CEOs in the world, has an estimated net worth of over $7.5 billion. As she once said, solving customer problems and making sure that the customer is representative of a large market, and then you will have a pretty good formula. Melanie's frustration with design tools led her to create Canva, proving that great things often come from solving simple, everyday problems.