Host: Reid Hoffman | Guest: Melanie Perkins, CEO, Canva
Category: Biz & Tech | 🚀 Startups
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[13:09] “At the time [around 2008], I think it was $1,200 to purchase [design] software, which was completely absurd and out of the reach of pretty much most people and certainly students and nonprofits and so many small businesses that desperately needed it.”
[15:45] “Every time we would give someone a new account, I'd actually call the customer and give them a walkthrough, or my partner Cliff would do the same. And so, it meant we spoke to hundreds of people, and got a really, really deep insight into what it was that they needed, questions that they had, things that didn't make sense, a button that didn't make perfect sense the first time they saw it.”
[29:35] “People had been told their entire lives that they weren't creative, that they didn't have a design bone in their body. And all of a sudden, they were put with this tool, and they were scared to actually use it. And so, we had to spend a lot of time refining that user experience when people first jumped into the product, to ensure that when people came in, within a couple of minutes, they were having fun, they felt playful, they felt that they could actually do this. And then very importantly, they would share it with their friends and their social networks.”
[33:03] “We've had over a million pieces of customer feedback, which gives us a lot of insights. […] I spend an incredible amount of time user-testing our product. So, actually watching people and listening to people use the product. If they click a button and they expect that button to work in a certain way, we want that button to work in the way that someone expected. Because the person is never wrong, it's always the software.”
[34:41] “We have 1,000 people now at Canva. More than half of that is in our product org alone. And so, we have them user testing their products every day, every week, trying to make sure that we're continuously refining that experience.”
[41:23] “I think that trying to create that shape and create that little moment of pride for people when they join a new company, is a lot of fun and really critical, I think.”
[43:44] “We're tackling 20 different industries at Canva, trying to combine them all together, make a simple integrated experience that feels like one unified experience for the customer.”
Rating: 🍎🍎🍎🍎
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify
🕰️ 44 min | 🗓️ 12/08/2020
✅ Time saved: 42 min
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