Listening Schedule
Dragon Reborn RED | Jun 2024 Multistage Stage IVC6
15 mins, Tues and Thur, 7 days break after 21 days
On-WashOut
I like this Canva story, very inspirational.
A 19-year-old college student with zero coding experience built a $26B company that now stands toe-to-toe with Adobe.
Melanie Perkins was a design tutor at a university in Perth, Australia.
She watched students wrestle with Photoshop and InDesign—powerful tools that required weeks of training just to create a basic poster.
Everyone told her the same thing:
“Adobe owns this market.”
“You can’t compete with billion-dollar companies.”
“You’re too young. You don’t have the background.”
She didn’t buy it.
Perkins saw what everyone else overlooked:
Design software wasn’t built for ordinary people.
It was built for professionals. And 99% of people weren’t professionals.
So at 19, she started small.
A humble yearbook business called Fusion Books—
not flashy, not funded—just her and her boyfriend Cliff solving a real problem.
Let students design yearbooks online with simple, drag-and-drop tools. No tutorials. No complexity.
They bootstrapped everything.
They learned by doing. They grew slowly, step by step.
For three years, Perkins pitched her bigger vision:
a design platform anyone could use.
She collected over 100 investor rejections.
“Why design online?”
“Photoshop already owns the market.”
“The opportunity is too small.”
They were looking at the wrong market.
Perkins wasn’t building a better Photoshop.
She was building design for the billions of people who would never open Photoshop.
In 2012, she finally met investor Bill Tai.
One introduction led to another… and another.
Momentum started to build.
In 2013, Canva launched with backing from top-tier investors.
The pitch was simple:
Design should feel like using Google Docs—instant, intuitive, effortless.
On launch day, the site crashed from demand.
Millions of people had been waiting for simple design tools—they just didn’t know it until Canva showed up.
Fast-forward to today:
Canva serves 170+ million users across 190 countries.
Valued at over $26 billion.
All from an insight a 19-year-old teaching assistant refused to ignore.
She turned watching students struggle into the blueprint for a global company.
She proved that massive opportunities don’t come from building better tools for experts—
they come from building accessible tools for everyone else.
So ask yourself:
What problems do you see people struggle with every day?
What markets are you avoiding because the “experts” say they’re too competitive?
Remember:
Perkins had no tech experience.
She faced over 100 rejections.
She started with a small, unglamorous business no one cared about.
But she understood something most people miss:
The best businesses aren’t about improving what already exists—
they’re about making what exists accessible to people who’ve been left out.
Your lack of experience could be your biggest advantage.
Your tiny start could be your training ground.
Stop listening to those who say the market is crowded or the competition is unbeatable.
Start thinking like Melanie Perkins.
Find a simple solution to a complicated problem.
Build for the people everyone else overlooks.
And never let your age, background, or inexperience convince you that you can’t build something global.
Because the biggest companies often come from the simplest observations.
When everyone else is focused on the top 1%, you can build for the other 99%.
Think big. And start now.