Melanie Perkins
About Melanie Perkins
32-year-old Melanie Perkins founded Canva, a free-to-use graphic design website, which is now valued at $2.5 billion together with her fiance Cliff Obrecht.
Background
Perkins recalls that she had humble beginnings back in 2010 when she started the digital graphic design website specific for school yearbooks in her mother’s living room.
“My mum’s living room became my office, and my boyfriend became my business partner, and we started enabling schools to create their yearbooks really, really simply,” said Perkins in an interview with CNBC.
Journey to entrepreneurship
Perkins studied communications, psychology, and commerce at the University of Western Australia
During university, she worked with her classmate Cliff Obrecht to create FusionBooks, an online tool to facilitate design of yearbooks
FusionBooks became widely popular both in Australia and globally, and Perkins dropped out of school to grow the brand. This venture later fueled her idea to develop a graphic design tool that anyone could use
After years of hard work and many rejections, Perkins received funding from a silicon valley investor in 2010 and co-founded Canva with her now husband Obrecht when she was 32 years old
Advice to entrepreneurs
Sarah Perkins believes that the most important thing in building a business is finding a problem you want to solve passionately.
“There's gonna be so many barriers - every single barrier you can possibly imagine...But I think once you really got a crystal clear pitch of the problem you want to solve, that’s step one.”
“We have over 15 million people using it every month and that is 50,000 schools using it across the globe, 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies,” —said Perkins during an interview with 60 Minutes Australia.
With her drive to help people of all skills create beautiful designs, Perkins states that it’s finding solutions for everyday problems that would inspire individuals to create platforms that will help propel themselves towards greater heights.