Building a $42 billion company starts with a deceptively simple philosophy: "Everything good was once imagined." That's how Canva CEO Melanie Perkins describes her approach to creating one of the world's most valuable private companies, as she explained in a recent appearance on "Lenny's Podcast" with host Lenny Rachitsky.

Perkins didn't stumble into success. She built Canva through a customer-centric approach that prioritized listening, improving, and making design tools accessible to everyone. The result? A platform that turned ordinary users into enthusiastic promoters who couldn't help but share the photo tool with their friends.

Dream So Big You Feel Inadequate

Perkins credits much of her success to setting goals so ambitious they force you to work harder than everyone else. Back in 2012, she imagined design tools that anyone could use to create beautiful visuals within seconds, not just professional designers.

"The thing that I love about a crazy big goal is that you feel completely inadequate before it. You want to work really hard to will it into existence," she told Rachitsky on the podcast.

But Perkins' ambitions extend far beyond building a successful software company. She's set goals for 2050 that include ending poverty and ending human loneliness. Canva isn't the endgame for her; it's the vehicle. Her plan involves growing Canva into a massive company and using those funds to create meaningful social change.

The Customer Marketing Flywheel

Canva's growth strategy sounds almost too simple to work, but the numbers tell a different story. The company now has 240 million monthly active users and generates $3 billion in annual revenue. How'd they do it? By turning customers into their marketing department.

Canva leaned heavily into customer feedback for both product ideas and promotion. They listened, they improved, and they encouraged people to spread the word organically. "Use Canva, spread Canva, teach Canva," Perkins said. "Come to our events. We do events all around the world."

Perkins also revealed that she largely ignored the competition, focusing instead on creating a high-quality product that solved real customer problems. "We didn't really worry about competitors at all," she explained. "We actually just saw a gap in the market that we can uniquely fill."

Keep It Dead Simple

Canva's secret weapon isn't fancy technology or aggressive marketing. It's simplicity. The company obsesses over creating a straightforward user experience that new customers can figure out immediately.

Take Canva Print as an example. This feature lets customers print their designs and have them delivered. Perkins emphasized the simplicity when describing it: "You just click print and it pops up beautifully packaged to your door."

That focus on removing friction makes it easier for people to use the product and, crucially, to pay for it. If someone's first experience goes smoothly, they'll come back. The free version offers plenty of features to get users hooked, while the paid accounts unlock even more capabilities. It's a classic freemium model executed flawlessly: make it easy to get committed with the free tier, then convert users through a frictionless experience and a genuinely useful product.

The combination of ambitious goals, customer obsession, and relentless simplification turned a design tool into a $42 billion empire. Not bad for something that once only existed in someone's imagination.