Cameron Adams: evaluation

Transcript context

…Interesting. So piece of advice number one is work on something you really want yourself that you're excited to work on. Two is get it to a place where it lights up people's eyes. They're just so excited with this thing. For that second bar, what was it for Canva? Was it just that it was impossible to do this design in a browser? It was 2012, 2013 when we launched and visual content was still in its infancy. Instagram had only been out a couple of years. Pinterest was on the rise. People were just getting used to creating visuals and it was hived off to a very select few because to create those visuals you needed to afford some expensive software, know how to use that expensive software, nowhere to go to get fonts and photos and illustrations, know how to put that together into something that looked decent and then ship that off. It was something that only 1% of the world could do and democratizing design, empowering the world to design is Canva's entire mission, and we saw this sweet spot at the time in social media. It wasn't what we set out to go after. We set out to democratize design to bring design to literally everyone in the world and to everything that they're doing. But through the user testing that we did, through the levels of excitement that we saw from different people, social media managers really came to the fore at that time. So we knew that they really fit what we could ship right now. We didn't ship a presentation product or a T-shirt builder in our very first version. We shipped a thing that could make square landscape and portrait graphics and blog post graphics, and that got a particular segment of society excited. We added on all the things afterwards because that was part of vision and ultimately what we wanted to build. But with a team of 10 people in the space of a year, building something that really got social media managers excited was what we could pull off. And that's something we realized in the last six months of that launch year. We didn't quite know who our audience was going to be. We knew it was a tool that anyone could use, but in that last six months of user testing and refining is when we really identified that first target market and we just leant into it. There's so many things you all nailed early on. One of them is the focus persona/ICP, which is you said social media managers. Just to take the lesson from that, you basically saw that segment getting the most excited about the product and that told you, let's focus on this group. Is that right?…

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