A lot of people missed this last week: Canva just announced a suite of new products to challenge Microsoft Office + every other productivity tool.
Hereโs why I think this might be one of the most significant product announcements ever:
Canva initially started as a simple, browser-based graphic design tool. It was built to be 10x easier than Adobe Photoshop. This meant it hit an entirely different, much larger customer base.
h/t @Sacra for the graphic (customer base not quite to size, but you get my point)
With Adobe and Microsoft's existing scale, Canva needed to be scrappy to grow
Enter SEO: it lived in the browser and built design templates created programmatically for every single use case someone might Google for
Instead of going back to Photoshop, they would just use Canva
Canva's first product expansion was into adjacent creative categories like presentations and video editing.
Finally over the past month, it launched whiteboards, websites, and docs...
all tools its customers were already using. And most likely, pasting their Canva designs into.
This recent launch may not seem like it at first glance, but it positions Canva to eventually expand into many other products.
Design a Canva website that turns into a store, manages inventory, books meetings, and runs a newsletter off of customer data.
Canva's suite expands the scope of what it competes against. But its customers are underserved and its products are all interconnected: a Canva design embedded in a Canva doc updates like magic.
If someone starts using one product, chances are they'll start adopting the rest.
Canva reported it was targeting $1 billion in ARR by the end of 2022. And there's a lot of other revenue sitting in these adjacent categories it could expand in to...
If @Canva had tried to launch as an all-in-one app from the start it would have failed. Finding their one thing to be the best at was what now allowed them to take on new challenges. A testimonial for focus. Congrats