Cameron Adams: evaluation

Transcript context

…This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now, you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risk. Plus you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/lenny. I'm going to go back to the beginning of Canva. I know that it took you guys a year of building before you launched it, so it took you a year to build the MVP essentially. And I know you have some strong opinions on how long to wait, how MVPs are often way too early. Can you talk about that just why you guys waited so long before launching clearly worked out and so I'm just curious your lessons from that experience. Yeah, so when we launched or when we were building the Lean Startup book came out, so that was all anyone talked to us about investors, other people building products, trying to give us advice. They were like, "Just get something out the door, as crappy as it is just to get in front of users." I think, for us, the product is the experience and giving people a great experience is an intrinsic part of the product. It's also an intrinsic part of how we've grown. People having a good experience of being enthusiastic about it has been how we've spread the word of Canva and organic word-of-mouth growth was the biggest driver of Canva's growth for many years and probably still is, I think. People just telling someone else to jump on this amazing product, I don't think we would've had that if we just put our pretty crappy product that people didn't have joy in using. Sure, it might've got the job done, but if they weren't excited about using it the next day, then that wasn't a bar that we wanted to hit. So we did hold off on launching the product for a long time and investors did ask us many, many times, "When are you launching? Can you just get this thing out the door?" But we had done enough research, we knew the problem space, we knew what people wanted from the product. Part of that was due to the work that Mel and Cliff did on Fusion Books in a very constrained area. They had looked at school yearbooks, they had built an experience for that, and they had observed what worked didn't work and how they might scale that into a bigger product. It also worked for me who'd worked in a lot of creative tools and built a lot of creative tools over the previous 15 years. So I had a lot of understanding of how people interacted with these systems and the experience that we wanted to build. So we did hold off and the product we launched launched, we obviously weren't happy with. You have to launch something that you're not completely happy with, all the rough edges, but you're releasing it knowing that the rough edges are going to be outweighed by the joyful experience. We still did a ton of user testing, right? It's not like we just launched this thing blind and said, "We hope people like it." We did a ton of user testing. We did a ton of user research into the features that people wanted, and we built that up over time. And one year to me actually seems like short time, a lot of people think it's a long time, but one year was just enough for us to scrape in with an experience that people did truly love when we launched, and particularly the market that we went after when we launched really loved it. I'm curious just what advice you share with founders when they're asking you how joyous does this first version have to be? How awesome does my MVP need to be? One thread I picked up as you were describing your experiences, you all had deep experience in this space, so you knew what you wanted to build. It wasn't like this dark forest of exploration is like we know what we want generally. Do you have advice you share with founders of how awesome their MVP should be and when it's worth spending a year or two or three building it?…

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