Canva: the design tool that started from what users could not do

Melanie Perkins was a student at the University of Western Australia when she started tutoring other students in graphic design software, and she has said that watching them struggle with how hard those programs were to learn gave her the idea. In 2007, with Cliff Obrecht, she founded Fusion Books, which let schools lay out yearbooks in a browser with drag-and-drop templates. In 2012 the pair spent months in San Francisco pitching a broader version, met former Google designer Cameron Adams, who became the third co-founder, and launched Canva in 2013 from Australia.

The company reported more than 265 million monthly active users and over 31 million paying users at the end of 2025, with annual recurring revenue of about 4 billion dollars, according to figures its co-founder Cliff Obrecht gave TechCrunch in February 2026. Its last valuation, in a share sale in August 2025, was 42 billion dollars. In March 2024 it bought Affinity, a British maker of professional design software, for about 380 million dollars, and in October 2025 it made the base Affinity app free.

The bottleneck was ability

The books read adoption through three conditions that have to hold together, the MOA model: motivation (people want the result), opportunity (they have a context where it makes sense) and ability (they can actually do it). When adoption stalls, the reflex is to spend more on persuasion. That cures only a motivation problem.

In our reading, by the early 2010s motivation for visual content was everywhere. Small businesses needed social media posts, teachers needed worksheets, employees needed slides and invitations. Opportunity was everywhere too. What was missing was ability. The professional tools assumed training and a licence fee, and the books are clear about what happens when ability is missing. People never buy what makes them feel stupid, and for most people a blank canvas in a professional design program did exactly that.

How ability was built into the product

Canva removed the blank page. A user starts from a template sized for the job (an Instagram post, a poster, a presentation) and changes words, colours and pictures by dragging them. The interface names things in the user’s vocabulary: “presentation”, “flyer”, “logo”. It runs in a browser, so there is nothing to install, and the core product is free.

Each of these is one of the levers the method lists for building ability: calibrated language, visual simplification, layered explanations that reveal advanced features only when someone looks for them. None of them is a breakthrough in technology. Together they changed who could take part in the category, and the free tier turned that new ability into an opportunity anyone could try in a lunch break.

Moving up without losing the first user

Every successful ability play faces the same question later on. Users who learned on the simple tool grow more demanding, businesses want brand controls and collaboration, and the company’s revenue starts to depend on customers who are closer to professionals. TechCrunch reported in February 2026 that Canva’s business with customers of more than 25 seats had grown by 100%, to 500 million dollars in annual recurring revenue. The Affinity purchase gave the company tools for trained designers, which an analyst quoted by TechCrunch saw as a way to compete more directly with Adobe.

The risk lies in the premise. Canva’s original promise was written for the person who cannot design. Each feature added for experts makes the product heavier for that person, and the company has to keep the first screen as simple as it was while the depth grows behind it. Keeping Affinity as a separate application, free at its base, looks like one way of doing that: the professional depth sits next to Canva, outside its main path. Canva is still private, and Obrecht said in late 2025 that a stock market listing could come within a couple of years, so how this balance holds under public-market pressure is still an open question.

If your own market says it wants your product and still does not adopt it, the missing condition may be ability. Train your team to run the MOA audit and find which of the three is holding you back.