Making design accessible to the world - with Cameron Adams(Co-founder&CPO at Canva) - a podcast by Shamanth Rao

My guest today is Cameron Adams. Cameron is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Canva, the graphic design tool website that recently was valued at over $1 billion. In today’s interview, we talk to Cameron about his long and checkered career. We talk about his work on Google Wave, which seemed to be a product way ahead of its time - and which gathered some incredible buzz but saw limited adoption. In his next startup Fluent, he seemed to have everything going for him with a huge surge of user interest - in spite of which he had to shut it down. Cameron was third time lucky with Canva, which has a steady start and growth before it really took off in the last couple of years. In today’s conversation we talk about Canva’s gradual rise and the forces behind it. We go into some of the key product decisions they’ve made in their pursuit of the mission of making design accessible to everyone.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

• The promise of Google Wave to rethink email as it was reimagined for the modern age - and what the problem with this approach was.
• How the economics of Cameron’s next startup Fluent didn't quite work out even though it had 80000 users on its waitlist.
• What inspired Canva’s onboarding process to make the design process seem less intimidating to users.
• How the proliferation of visual media like Facebook, Instagram & Pinterest helped drive the adoption of Canva.
• How Canva built up relationships with bloggers & social media marketers to support its launch & post-launch growth.
• How Canva’s growth after its early year 1 growth was a function of its growth marketing strategy that was intentional about bringing users in the door.
• What Canva learned about why people tended to go with low-quality imagery - and how this insight led Canva to pick the freemium model and to offer much lower prices than alternatives.
• What Cameron had to learn as he progressed from a creator to a manager of large teams as Canva scaled.
• What drove Canva’s huge wave of growth in 2017 that converted its user growth into tangible revenue growth.

Check out the full transcript and show notes here:
https://howthingsgrow.co/making-design-accessible-to-the-world-with-cameron-adamsco-founder-cpo-at-canva/

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