Canva Started With Yearbooks, Not Everyone

Find the smallest real market

In the February 8, 2023 First 1000 issue I published with Jaryd Hermann, Canva’s early story starts with Fusion Books: a yearbook product for schools. The company wanted to simplify design for everyone, but it first needed a customer group it could reach, understand, and serve end to end.

Melanie Perkins had been teaching students to use InDesign and Photoshop. She saw people who were not designers spending an entire semester learning where the buttons were. The insight was not that design mattered. It was that ordinary people needed a simpler way to get a design job done.

The team did not begin by trying to replace every design tool. They started with school yearbooks, where the workflow was painful, recurring, and close to Melanie’s existing student network.

Fusion Books lived in Melanie’s mother’s lounge. Students and schools could create yearbooks with drag-and-drop tools and customizable templates. To find customers, the founders used direct mail, phone calls, sample yearbooks, and their own families to fold envelopes and stick stamps.

The tactics were manual because the learning was the product. They were learning who bought, what the workflow required, and where a simple design system could remove friction.

A beachhead is a product decision

Four years into Fusion Books, the team saw the larger opportunity. Canva would eventually become a browser-based, free-to-use design platform, but the early product was not “design for everyone.” It was a narrow workflow where the customer, job, template library, and distribution path were visible.

The later Canva launch kept that logic. The source says the team used a private beta and had more than 50,000 people waiting before public release. It focused early designs on Facebook: cover photos, flyers, social posts, and event banners. Those designs created a loop because users could share the output on Facebook and invite colleagues to collaborate.

The original issue says Canva reached 150,000 users in less than 24 months. That is a historical source-reported milestone, not a current Canva metric or a promise that every beachhead compounds the same way.

The beachhead checklist

1. Is the first job frequent enough to learn from? Yearbooks were annual, but the workflow was deep and painful enough to expose the real product problems.
2. Can you reach the first customers without buying a giant audience? The founders had students, schools, phone calls, mail, and samples.
3. Does the narrow product teach a larger behavior? Yearbooks taught the team how non-designers wanted to create.
4. Can the output travel? Facebook-oriented designs gave users a reason to share the product’s work in the place they already spent time.
5. What does the next market inherit? The templates, browser workflow, and collaboration ideas could expand beyond schools without discarding the core product.

Sources and original research

• Original First 1000 case: 🎨 Canva, February 8, 2023

Adapted from my original Canva First 1000 issue with Jaryd Hermann, published February 8, 2023. The historical Fusion Books, direct-sales, private-beta, waitlist, Facebook-template and early-user details come from that issue; the beachhead checklist is my adaptation. I do not add current Canva metrics or claim a new study.