Your Startup Story
A Startup Story
A Hundred Rejections: Melanie Perkins and the Design Tool That Refused to Die
Hall of Fame · an editorial retelling
Melanie Perkins was a nineteen-year-old teaching design software in Perth when she decided the tools themselves were the problem. It took a yearbook business, more than a hundred investor rejections, and a kitesurfing wager to build Canva.
Origin
In 2007, teaching university students to use professional design programs in Perth, Australia, Melanie Perkins watched people take a whole semester to learn where the buttons were. Her conviction: design should take one click, not one course. Too ambitious to fund directly, the idea shrank to a wedge — Fusion Books, a drag-and-drop tool for school yearbooks that she and Cliff Obrecht ran from her mother's living room. It became Australia's largest yearbook publisher.
The Grind
Raising money for the bigger vision from Perth was brutal. Perkins pitched for three years and collected more than a hundred rejections. A chance encounter with investor Bill Tai led her into the orbit of Silicon Valley's kitesurfing scene — she learned to kitesurf partly to stay in the room. The persistence paid off in 2012: funding closed, and former Google engineer Cameron Adams joined as the third cofounder.
Traction
Canva launched in 2013 with a simple promise — anyone can design anything — and grew through the same insight that started it: most people don't want to be designers, they want a poster by Friday. Templates, a browser-only editor, and a generous free tier turned it into one of the fastest-growing software companies in the world.
Vision
Canva became one of the world's most valuable private software companies, with its founders pledging the majority of their equity to charity. The Perth startup nobody would fund became the counterexample cited to every founder told they're too far from Silicon Valley.