Zain Abiddin
Former senior global PM of subscriptions at Canva, now founder and CEO of Hewwi
Where to hear and read about Zain Abiddin1 episode or test
Zain Abiddin was Canva's first subscriptions PM and spent four years growing its subscription ARR into the billions before founding Hewwi. The thing most worth learning from him is to fix retention and monetization first, then match each growth lever to the stage of scale.
sustainable growth comes from retention and monetization and not just acquisition
How International Expansion and Canva for Teams Propelled Canva’s Growth
Zain Abiddin: the story and the lessons
1Zain Abiddin's four years at Canva and what he builds now
Abiddin joined Canva in 2020 as its first subscriptions PM. He spent four years growing subscription ARR into the billions. His remit was pricing, retention and international expansion.
He matched each growth lever to a stage of scale. Localized pricing drove the first billion in ARR, Canva for Teams drove the climb from one to over two billion, and beyond that new users sit inside large organizations like Amazon or Microsoft.
Each stage needed a deeper way to reach users, and the team had to keep learning what each segment needed.
He names planning as the worst part of Canva, and creation as the best. He would add less rigid structure to the planning at the end of each cycle.
Planning is a moving target that changes as a company grows.
He now builds Hewwi, an app for health, wealth and wisdom. The app guides people with structured daily habits and well-being practices. The name comes from staying healthy, wealthy and wise.
After a long product career, he says he is glad to be building again.
2How Abiddin took Canva's subscriptions international
Canva patched its retention leaks before pushing acquisition abroad. Voluntary and involuntary churn had to meet industry benchmarks before localized pricing experiments began. The first fixes were payment methods, churn messaging, recovery methods and payment retries.
In his words: "we wanted to make sure that our all our leaky buckets were kind of patched up first".
Canva's growth data, not a target list, picked the first markets. Latin America came first, with Brazil adopting the product fastest. Focus later moved to Asia and Southeast Asia, where growth also showed up.
No list of target markets was handed down. The team read the growth in its data and localized end to end, covering languages and pricing.
He localized in three layers: currency, purchasing power and local payments. Users subscribe more readily when they see prices in their own currency. $12.99 may be affordable in the US but is a significant cost in emerging markets, and UPI in India or Boleto in Brazil remove signup friction.
Translation alone is only table stakes. Some markets also need bespoke features or locally relevant content.
Price cuts of 20 to 30% beat the other international levers. Of local currency, local price points and local payment methods, price adjustment had the biggest impact. In some markets, cutting prices 20 to 30% caused a surge in new subscribers.
Price matched willingness to pay, so expect reductions to be part of the answer. Early experiments aimed at finding each market's willingness to pay.
He set prices with indices and studies, then tested them in product. Canva used the Big Mac index, World Bank PPP, van Westendorp and conjoint studies to find a directional price. It then A/B tested candidates in product before finalizing.
Product partnered with finance rather than setting prices alone. Smaller companies can hire a pricing consultancy, and many start by guessing or cost-plus pricing.
He kept localized pricing manageable with a few price tiers. A separate price per country becomes a nightmare when prices change or several platforms are supported. Teams short on resources can copy Apple's tier structure.
His crawl, walk, run path: US dollars only, then local currency with a few tiers, then more tiers as the team grows and eventually a price for each country.
He started local payments with PayPal, then added regional methods. PayPal was the critical first method. Brazil got Boleto, China got Alipay and WeChat Pay, and Southeast Asia got GoPay, each run as an experiment with significant conversion results.
Users who cancel inside PayPal hurt involuntary churn at first, and better messaging later fixed it.
He learned how people pay locally before setting any prices. In India people often pay for single days or short durations, which he calls the sachet way. Canva learned this by talking to people on the ground and to its diverse subscriptions team.
That understanding came first, then the plan for which prices to test and roll out.
He built tooling to change prices for existing users. Companies often grandfather old prices, but eventually prices must rise for existing users too. Tooling does this without disruption and sends the right messaging to the right people.
He calls changing pricing "one of the best tools to actually improve LTV". Triggers include currency swings, a strategy change and new product offerings.
He says teams overlook pricing and packaging in favor of acquisition. Too many teams chase new users without optimizing how they monetize them. He argues pricing and packaging should be revisited more often than once every few years.
3Abiddin on cutting involuntary churn
He calls involuntary churn one of the easiest ways to add revenue. Small tweaks to messaging, in-product notifications and retry cadence brought in millions of dollars at Canva's scale.
Paddle and Recurly estimate it makes up 20 to 40% of churn in consumer and prosumer subscriptions. Many companies assume all churn means customers dislike the product.
He split involuntary churn from voluntary churn and tracked it all year. Many companies above $100 million in revenue cannot break the two apart. His steps were to know it matters, split it out in analytics, then build a roadmap of tactics.
The pattern swings with payday timing in each market and with past promotions. He watched it for all four years under the growth umbrella.
He started with dunning emails and in-app notices. Warn users before a payment fails, at the right cadence, and let them update their payment method straight from the email.
In some markets people barely use email, so in-product notices or text reach them instead.
He added direct debit and PayPal to cut failed payments. Direct debit improves involuntary churn versus credit cards, and many people in the US use PayPal for recurring payments.
Prepaid credit cards, common in the US, also moved the numbers. Each market needs the methods its users already rely on.
He tells small teams to buy smart payment retries. Vendors like Paddle time retries by when users get paid in each market. Canva's large engineering team could build it, but a startup cannot.
Vendors also learn from many companies at once, which an in-house build cannot match.
Canva built its own churn messaging to control tone and timing. Canva wanted churn messages in its own tone of voice, with control over timing and the experience. Its fast growth paid for dedicated teams, which tipped it toward building.
Delightful elements in churn messaging help retention more than generic templates. Stripe and similar tools work out of the box, but the right choice depends on long-term strategy.
4How Canva for Teams carried Canva from one to two billion
He launched Teams because big companies already used Canva informally. Individual accounts were spreading inside large companies. The 2022 launch added invites, role-based permissions, admin controls and centralized billing management.
Teams existed in 2020 but adding members was hard, so the launch rebuilt the flow. Real-time collaboration matched what users knew from Google Docs and Figma.
Collaboration gave Canva a viral loop inside organizations. Inviting teammates to shared designs spread Canva within companies. Word of mouth was already strong because users loved the product.
Spread inside organizations was the stated focus, more than spread across companies.
Pay-as-you-grow billing removed the cost of adding teammates. Before 2021, every new team member had to be paid for up front. The new model lets teams add people freely and true up at the end of the cycle.
Figma used a similar approach early on. It also invited significant fraud in some markets.
Canva dropped Enterprise at launch so big companies could self-serve. The Teams pricing page had no Enterprise plan, so large companies grew without a sales team. Enterprise returned once the largest customers needed dedicated support.
Teams pricing had to suit small teams and still scale to large enterprises, and finding the price was iterative.
He adds AI only where it deepens the core value. For Canva, AI automates repetitive design tasks and suggests templates, which strengthens the creative feeling users come for.
He says the challenge for SaaS companies is building AI features that "truly add value rather than just being gimmicks".
How International Expansion and Canva for Teams Propelled Canva’s Growth
Canva's first subscriptions PM explains how patching retention first, then localizing prices and payment methods, cutting involuntary churn and launching Canva for Teams drove growth. Each lever matched a stage of scale: international expansion to the first billion in ARR, Teams from one to two billion, and large organizations beyond that.
Abiddin joined Canva in 2020 as its first subscriptions PM. He spent four years growing subscription ARR into the billions. His remit was pricing, retention and international expansion.
He matched each growth lever to a stage of scale. Localized pricing drove the first billion in ARR, Canva for Teams drove the climb from one to over two billion, and beyond that new users sit inside large organizations like Amazon or Microsoft.
Each stage needed a deeper way to reach users, and the team had to keep learning what each segment needed.
He names planning as the worst part of Canva, and creation as the best. He would add less rigid structure to the planning at the end of each cycle.
Planning is a moving target that changes as a company grows.
He now builds Hewwi, an app for health, wealth and wisdom. The app guides people with structured daily habits and well-being practices. The name comes from staying healthy, wealthy and wise.
After a long product career, he says he is glad to be building again.
Canva patched its retention leaks before pushing acquisition abroad. Voluntary and involuntary churn had to meet industry benchmarks before localized pricing experiments began. The first fixes were payment methods, churn messaging, recovery methods and payment retries.
In his words: "we wanted to make sure that our all our leaky buckets were kind of patched up first".
Canva's growth data, not a target list, picked the first markets. Latin America came first, with Brazil adopting the product fastest. Focus later moved to Asia and Southeast Asia, where growth also showed up.
No list of target markets was handed down. The team read the growth in its data and localized end to end, covering languages and pricing.
He localized in three layers: currency, purchasing power and local payments. Users subscribe more readily when they see prices in their own currency. $12.99 may be affordable in the US but is a significant cost in emerging markets, and UPI in India or Boleto in Brazil remove signup friction.
Translation alone is only table stakes. Some markets also need bespoke features or locally relevant content.
Price cuts of 20 to 30% beat the other international levers. Of local currency, local price points and local payment methods, price adjustment had the biggest impact. In some markets, cutting prices 20 to 30% caused a surge in new subscribers.
Price matched willingness to pay, so expect reductions to be part of the answer. Early experiments aimed at finding each market's willingness to pay.
He set prices with indices and studies, then tested them in product. Canva used the Big Mac index, World Bank PPP, van Westendorp and conjoint studies to find a directional price. It then A/B tested candidates in product before finalizing.
Product partnered with finance rather than setting prices alone. Smaller companies can hire a pricing consultancy, and many start by guessing or cost-plus pricing.
He kept localized pricing manageable with a few price tiers. A separate price per country becomes a nightmare when prices change or several platforms are supported. Teams short on resources can copy Apple's tier structure.
His crawl, walk, run path: US dollars only, then local currency with a few tiers, then more tiers as the team grows and eventually a price for each country.
He started local payments with PayPal, then added regional methods. PayPal was the critical first method. Brazil got Boleto, China got Alipay and WeChat Pay, and Southeast Asia got GoPay, each run as an experiment with significant conversion results.
Users who cancel inside PayPal hurt involuntary churn at first, and better messaging later fixed it.
He learned how people pay locally before setting any prices. In India people often pay for single days or short durations, which he calls the sachet way. Canva learned this by talking to people on the ground and to its diverse subscriptions team.
That understanding came first, then the plan for which prices to test and roll out.
He built tooling to change prices for existing users. Companies often grandfather old prices, but eventually prices must rise for existing users too. Tooling does this without disruption and sends the right messaging to the right people.
He calls changing pricing "one of the best tools to actually improve LTV". Triggers include currency swings, a strategy change and new product offerings.
He says teams overlook pricing and packaging in favor of acquisition. Too many teams chase new users without optimizing how they monetize them. He argues pricing and packaging should be revisited more often than once every few years.
He calls involuntary churn one of the easiest ways to add revenue. Small tweaks to messaging, in-product notifications and retry cadence brought in millions of dollars at Canva's scale.
Paddle and Recurly estimate it makes up 20 to 40% of churn in consumer and prosumer subscriptions. Many companies assume all churn means customers dislike the product.
He split involuntary churn from voluntary churn and tracked it all year. Many companies above $100 million in revenue cannot break the two apart. His steps were to know it matters, split it out in analytics, then build a roadmap of tactics.
The pattern swings with payday timing in each market and with past promotions. He watched it for all four years under the growth umbrella.
He started with dunning emails and in-app notices. Warn users before a payment fails, at the right cadence, and let them update their payment method straight from the email.
In some markets people barely use email, so in-product notices or text reach them instead.
He added direct debit and PayPal to cut failed payments. Direct debit improves involuntary churn versus credit cards, and many people in the US use PayPal for recurring payments.
Prepaid credit cards, common in the US, also moved the numbers. Each market needs the methods its users already rely on.
He tells small teams to buy smart payment retries. Vendors like Paddle time retries by when users get paid in each market. Canva's large engineering team could build it, but a startup cannot.
Vendors also learn from many companies at once, which an in-house build cannot match.
Canva built its own churn messaging to control tone and timing. Canva wanted churn messages in its own tone of voice, with control over timing and the experience. Its fast growth paid for dedicated teams, which tipped it toward building.
Delightful elements in churn messaging help retention more than generic templates. Stripe and similar tools work out of the box, but the right choice depends on long-term strategy.
He launched Teams because big companies already used Canva informally. Individual accounts were spreading inside large companies. The 2022 launch added invites, role-based permissions, admin controls and centralized billing management.
Teams existed in 2020 but adding members was hard, so the launch rebuilt the flow. Real-time collaboration matched what users knew from Google Docs and Figma.
Collaboration gave Canva a viral loop inside organizations. Inviting teammates to shared designs spread Canva within companies. Word of mouth was already strong because users loved the product.
Spread inside organizations was the stated focus, more than spread across companies.
Pay-as-you-grow billing removed the cost of adding teammates. Before 2021, every new team member had to be paid for up front. The new model lets teams add people freely and true up at the end of the cycle.
Figma used a similar approach early on. It also invited significant fraud in some markets.
Canva dropped Enterprise at launch so big companies could self-serve. The Teams pricing page had no Enterprise plan, so large companies grew without a sales team. Enterprise returned once the largest customers needed dedicated support.
Teams pricing had to suit small teams and still scale to large enterprises, and finding the price was iterative.
He adds AI only where it deepens the core value. For Canva, AI automates repetitive design tasks and suggests templates, which strengthens the creative feeling users come for.
He says the challenge for SaaS companies is building AI features that "truly add value rather than just being gimmicks".
Canva