When I was at university I was teaching design programs, such as Photoshop and InDesign. They were difficult to learn, and I realized that in the future, design would look entirely different—it would be online, simple, and collaborative.

To take this idea and turn it into a company was a huge leap of faith. I didn’t know anything about software development, hiring people, marketing, accounting, anything much at all. But I think the early experience gave me the faith in myself to just get started anyway and trust that I'd be able to learn everything as I went.

We launched Canva in August 2012, and within the first month had more than 50,000 people sign up to use the platform. Now, two years later we’ve grown to 4 million users. It’s been incredibly popular with marketers, bloggers, graphic designers, and small businesses who need to create lots of visual content and struggle with the existing tools, and it’s been exciting to see it come together.

Fusion Books took the idea of a simple design tool and applied it to the niche market of school yearbooks. Over five years, my co-founder Cliff Obrecht and I grew Fusion Books into the largest yearbook company in Australia and expanded into France and New Zealand. 

But we knew all along that the technology we had built could be applied much more broadly—that's how Canva was born. 4.5 million people now use Canva to design their marketing materials, documents, and social media graphics.

The most important thing for a startup is to solve a real problem. To find something that is truly significant, a problem faced by lots of people. With Canva, the problem was that creating engaging, professional-looking graphic design was incredibly difficult unless you had expensive software and spent years studying.

Several years into running Fusion Books, I met investor Bill Tai in 2010 at a conference in Perth. He said he was interested in my startup and if I went to San Francisco he would have a meeting. Six months later I jumped on a plane. He introduced me to Google maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen. Together, they introduced me to a range of other investors. 

Fast forward two years and hundreds of investor pitches later, and I was able to raise our seed round. It takes a long time to do anything as a startup. It took a long time to find our technical co-founder Cameron Adams, to raise funding, and to grow to the size we’re at now. You learn a lot along the way.

Our largest market is already the US, but our team is very happily located in Sydney, Australia. Many of our investors are from the US, which has given us great connections there. In a way, we’ve been able to have the best of both worlds. There are incredibly talented people here, and we’ve got some great people working for Canva, who used to be at companies like Google.  But most of our users are international. We have people using Canva in 179 countries. The US is the largest market.

Running Canva is the best job in the world. I love coming to work each day and figuring out how we can achieve the big vision we have.

Being an entrepreneur is an incredible path. It's challenging, it's a roller coaster, it's exhilarating, it's my dream job. I get to work with the smartest people I have ever met, get to invent, get to realize my vision.

My biggest piece of advice for any entrepreneur is to solve a real problem. If you find a problem that people care about, then it will make every other aspect of running a business much easier.

Getting Canva off the ground has been difficult and taken a long time, more than six years. It was difficult starting our first company, Fusion Books and bootstrapping it to profitability, it was difficult getting investors to invest, it was difficult building a team, difficult to build our product. In fact, every stage has been an incredible challenge, but also an incredible adventure. My advice would be to just get started as you learn so much along the way.

We have only achieved 1% so far of where we think we can take Canva. Our vision is to enable people to take their idea and turn it into a design as seamlessly as possible. We think we have made some big steps in this direction already, but we are just getting started.

Solve a problem that you feel passionately about and really believe should be solved. It’s taken over nine years from the initial idea to get Canva to where it is today. It’s a long journey, so make sure that you are solving a problem worth solving.

Don’t be afraid to jump in and get started. You can’t possibly know everything you need to know about starting and running a company before you start. If you are determined to solve a problem and passionate to learn everything as you go, that is enough. Take the first steps and the rest will, eventually, follow.

While the last few years have seen the development of HTML5 and tablets, design programs haven’t caught up with the Web. Our objective with Canva from the start has been to enable people to get up to speed with Canva as quickly as possible. Thanks to the technology now available, we were able to build something that is really simple to use.

That’s why learning Canva only takes 23 seconds, literally. Everything has been designed to be intuitive to use. You search for what you want and drag straight into your design.

Social media has really increased the need for good design. Every brand now needs high-quality visuals. As a marketer, you need to be able to create great visuals quickly and easily. Individuals need to be able to design good-looking resumes and create a brand. Nonprofits need to be able to share their story through visual social media to raise funds and educate people about their cause. Everywhere you look, design has become more critical to communication.

Learning from people who have walked the same path as you is incredibly important, as there are so many lessons that you can learn without having to make each and every mistake.

While it may be difficult to have a ‘coffee’ with a lot of people you wish to learn from—there are a huge number of blogs that you can read (check out www.paulgraham.com and The Venture Hacks Bible), books (I’m currently reading Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules and love the book Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman Jr), podcasts, and conferences. You will be able to absorb a wealth of knowledge from these free or inexpensive sources.

 If you do get a meeting with someone that can help you, try to be succinct and respectful of their time. See if there is a way you can help them in return. If you are looking to raise funds, to avoid getting a hard ‘no’, ask for advice, take the advice on board and then go back three to six months later showing great results. Showing that you do what you say you are going to do is really important, and surprisingly uncommon.

I would definitely say out of those three it would be the huge opportunity we are pursuing at Canva, a complete transformation of the design and desktop publishing industry.

I knew as I was teaching students to use incredibly complex design software that the industry was ready and ripe for a huge change. The vision we have at Canva is making design accessible to everyone. We launched two years ago and are now used by more than 4.5 million people. Every day we are hearing from educators, corporates, small businesses and not-for-profits about how Canva has opened up a new world of design to them.

This is so amazing to hear and what really gets me excited is how we can reach more people who will benefit from using Canva.