How International Expansion and Canva for Teams Propelled Canva’s Growth

so we saw a lot of growth in certain Emerging Markets including Latin America and parts of Asia and we really wanted to make sure that we're koring to the needs of those users and making sure that the product was truly local involuntary turn happens when users lose access to subscriptions due to failed payments or things like expired credit cards or insufficient funds and it often gets overlooked because most companies just focus on acquiring new users and new subscribers and rather than retaining existing ones but in in reality like reducing involuntary turn is one of the easiest ways to boost Revenue many companies were already using canva informally we would see a lot of big companies coming in and using individual accounts and basically launching canva for teams was like an easy way to create a tailored experience for for collaboration welcome to subversive a podcast dedicated to sharing stories from the best consumer

subscription apps in the world we'll bring you lessons for how to grow your consumer subscription business including insights and inflection points that led to exponential growth from leaders at category defining companies and Innovative startups let's get into the show my guest today is Zayn abedine former senior Global PM of subscriptions at canva where he joined as the

company's first subscriptions PM in 2020 and spent four years helping to grow canvas subscriptions AR to billions of dollars in today's episode I talked to Zayn about his team's work on International price localization involuntary churn management and the launch of canva for teams all of which help repel the company to its current $49 billion valuation all right welcome Zay abedine to the subversive podcast super excited to have you on the podcast today canva obviously has been a meteoric success over the last several years so a lot we can learn from canva success not just on user growth but also subscription and subscription Revenue growth which is what we're going to be talking about for the most part today Zane you joined canva in 2020 as the company's first subscriptions PM so let's start there we love to hear a little bit more about what the company looked like when you joined a little

more than four years ago and how your role as subscriptions PM evolved over the years thanks Bill excited to be here canva is an incredible company and I was fortunate to join as the first subscriptions PM back in 2020 and my my role mostly focused on scaling canvas subscription business by improving pricing retention and international expansion and over the four years I worked on number of different initiatives including localized pricing voluntary churn management launching canra for teams and all of which kind of played a very critical role in can's growth trajectory and yeah it's been fascinating to be part of that growth and part of that learning and education over the last four years yeah well excited to talk more about that so let's start with the first thing you mentioned there I know you worked a lot on International expansion and specifically as the subscriptions PM working on localizing prices in international

markets and even building out some internal tooling to make the process of localizing pricing easier so so let's lay the foundation first you joined in 2020 why was International expansion such an important priority for the business yeah absolutely so we saw a lot of growth in certain Emerging Markets including Latin America and parts of Asia and we really wanted to make sure that we're tillering to the needs of those users and making sure that the product was truly local and part of TR being truly local meant making sure that these users had the right pricing right that was a aable for them as well as also making sure that they had the right payment methods that they could leverage so as an effort to make the product truly local in those markets and make it make make sure that the users can easily pay for for it that was that was one of our critical elments were there any particular markets that were most

important for Campa off the bat like did you receive a list of here's the markets we should go to first or is that on your team to figure that out yeah well I mean you know we we saw a lot of growth in our in in our data obviously and you know certain markets in specifically Latin America we saw a lot of growth happening and places like Brazil and that's where users were really adopting the product really fast so that was kind of like an area of focus in the beginning like Latin America region and then later on it kind of shifted towards Asia and Southeast Asia where we're also seeing a lot of growth as well and yeah we were pretty pretty aggressive in terms of making sure that the product was you know truly local including the whole experience end to end from languages and pricing obviously and yeah that was kind of the the initial initial focus and also we we saw it in our data right like just a lot of these growth

happening yeah and well one of the things I feel like companies underestimate when they think about International expansion is obviously there's localizing the product into the local language that sort of table stakes and that's the first step but then it's usually not enough right you then need to localize the product experience and sometimes that means building bespoke product features specifically for that market if you're a Content company sometimes you need to localize the content or come up with new content that's locally relevant as a subscriptions PM there's also a lot of work that often gets underestimated around making sure that the pricing of your product is localized and that can mean a lot of different things and so what does your road map look like early on as the subscriptions PM in terms of making sure that prices were localized you were supporting the right alternative payment methods in each of

these Latin American markets break it down for me like what what did you work on first yeah initially so when I joined we had some strong user love like a lot of growth happening in those regions and first before we kind of like invested too much into Acquisitions we wanted to

make sure that our all our leaky buckets were kind of patched up first so before even kind of going into localizing pricing and kind of running those experiments we we had a pretty heavy focus on a retention so making sure that our voluntary churn and involuntary turn look good and are meeting industry benchmarks and as you know like you know kind of retention is kind of like the new acquisition that included making sure that we had the right payment methods in place we were sending in the right churn messaging and we had the right recovery methods and payment retries so once once that was in place and we had a decent rate for churn then we kind of focused a lot on the localized pricing side of things right so the process for that is you know pretty making really kind of understanding like how users behave in those markets right so in places like India where kind of they have the sachche way of paying for like

individual days or you know shorter durations uh we made sure that we we we knew knew about that we also kind of talked to people on the ground and just kind of understanding from like also our diverse team of subscriptions folks on how people pay for things and then from there really kind of building the strategy around how we want to experiment and roll out certain prices and so I I heard you say meeting people where they are right and so India you don't tend to pay for long-term subscriptions as often there are these other ways that consumers think about paying for software products and so you have to meet the customer where they are you mentioned alternative payment methods were there any particular apms alternative payment methods that were most important in the early days as you were moving into some of these high priority markets like Brazil or India yeah obviously I think the one of the the key ones across the

industry you know we've kind of observed this PayPal was a pretty pretty key one just as we as as we initially scaled and then from there it was a lot of like kind of the local payment methods that are popular in certain regions right so focusing on if if you look at like Latin America Brazil you have boletto that's really popular there making sure that you know if you're in China users are able to pay through alipay and WeChat pay and then just in certain markets like you know southeast Asia some of the local payments method methods there right so gopay and some of the other ones that are available those were those were kind of like series of experiments that we to kind of run and see if actually conversions were improving and we saw like pretty significant results but I would say like in the beginning PayPal was pretty critical in terms of

really helping scale that growth yeah and that's pretty consistently what I hear so PayPal's the number one and that's usually where companies go first when they're trying to support apms but then you end up with this longer tale of locally relevant apms BTO in Brazil is a big one uh you've got so Ford and sea and Europe uh and it sort of varies by region you mentioned that that helped improve subscriber conversion and I know apms are growing rapidly as a share of payments across a lot of different regions did it impact subscriber retention or any other growth metrics at all yeah absolutely I think from a involuntary standpoint I think yeah with involuntary standpoint it was pretty interesting to observe right especially when users go on PayPal and they cancel themselves there we had a a bit of a impact on the involuntary turn side of things but then you know later caught up on that and made sure that we had the

right messaging in place but yeah definitely I think I would like making sure that if users are paying through direct debit right that definitely has like an impact versus credit card and certain markets where people using prepaid credit cards especially around the US you know us being aware of a lot of users just using those pre paid credit cards made an impact as well so having a lot of the payment methods in place definitely had an impact on the invol insurance side of things for sure got it yeah and we'll talk more about involuntary churn later I'm I'm really interested to hear your perspectives on that topic because it's it's another area that tends to get overlooked by growth and monetization teams um but before we go there so we we've talked about alternative payment methods let's talk a little bit more around price localization specifically so obviously there's the first step is often just

offering your product in the local currency not just using US dollars but there's also figuring out how to align pricing with local willingness to pay and so were there particular I don't know tools or indices or benchmarks you use to help inform what the right price was in any given International Market yeah I mean as you know like pricing isn't like a one-size fits-all type of approach especially like for a global product like canva right so we kind of had to focus on three different areas in the beginning first making sure that we support local currencies right so users are like more likely to subscribe when they see their prices in their own currency rather than the USD which was you know typical approach that a lot of companies do and then just adjusting pricing based on like purchasing power right so like you know for example $1299 might be affordable in the US but in Emerging Markets that's a significant

cost right so so a lot of like using Regional pricing we were able to improve accessibility and yeah again and then the third piece was just making sure that we support those local payment methods right so a lot of uh countries rely on local payment methods like UPI in India or BTO in Brazil and by enabling them you know it reduces a lot of friction for kind of the signup process it was a lot about like trying to understand the willingness to pay in these markets and doing a lot of experimentation as well in the beginning just to kind of get to that right right price point and so it sounds like you AB tested a bunch of prices in the product did you use I hear people talk about the Big Mac index or World bank purchasing power parody Or real GDB per cap but a media household disposable income were were there any sort of indices you Ed to help inform what the right prices to AB test might be or did you you just go

straight to AB testing them in the product yeah those indices are definitely useful like I think it's it's it's a great tool for trying to figure out the right price points right so we definitely did Leverage a lot of those tools to make sure that we come up with the right price points and you know a lot of a lot of it is a collaborative process right it's not just the the product team that's coming up with the with the pricing when I talk to startups and like you know do a lot of advising I recommend really partnering up with the finance team or you know other other teams to make sure that you come up with those price points so yeah we definitely leverage a lot of the tools that are kind of kind of popular when it comes to figuring out the right price points and yeah and I think you know in in a lot of cases there's companies dedicated if you know if you're like a company that's much smaller scale you can H you can

hire a lot of Consulting companies that focus in this area right right specifically and it's it's an area that gets overlooked quite a bit and typical approach as you know is you know a lot of companies in the beginning do do some form of guessing when it comes to pricing or they'll do like Cost Plus approach to figuring out what you know whatever whatever the price point should be but yeah it is it is a pretty involved process in terms of coming up with the right price points using those tools that you just mentioned including the Big Mac index and you know the van vest and Dr and some of the other tools got it okay so what I'm hearing is there's a combination of you can use off-the-shelf tools or methodologies you've got and West nor Maxi conjoin for sort of overall price studies you've got the international pricing indices like Big Mac index and World Bank PPP you can bring in an outside agency or Consulting

fir that specializes in in pricing or even International pricing specifically and so it sounds like you use those to sort of inform what the directionally right prices should be and then you ultimately a tested the prices in product before finalizing them in each market yeah exactly and which of these so we broke down offering your subscription in the local currency getting to the right price in that currency supporting alternative payment methods to the extent you can share and you don't have to share specific numbers but which of those areas drove the biggest gains for you all as you were breaking into some of these International markets yeah so I would say like all all three factors contributed to kind of the overall success I'd say like localized pricing adjustment had the most significant impact right and that's that's across the board like when I you know talk to other other subscription folks and other

companies as well if you look at like Netflix and Disney and that's usually kind of the the one that really makes makes the biggest impact and then in you know in certain markets like reducing the pricing by 20 to 30% leads to like a pretty surge in new subscribers because the price becomes you know just a lot more aligned with what they're willing to pay so a lot of it can be price reductions as well yeah that's often what I see as well did you all have different prices for each Target

International Market or did you have a set of tiers where it's like you know we've got our high tier our medium tier and our low tier and then we're just setting prices the same way you know localized to the local currenc in each country across those tiers because there's always this trade-off between getting the price just right in each country but then maintaining so many different prices that the complexity starts to become overwhelming yeah totally I think yeah TI is a good way to do that because I think also Apple gives that kind of follows that approach as well and yeah one way is actually one way is so like if you know have the don't have the resources to come up with the right price points you could like look into how Apple does their their tiers and their pricing right and for us yeah like I think following that initial tier approach helps and just you know a lot it's a lot easier to manage as well as

you're kind of making updates later on in pricing yeah just kind of managing all these different price points across the board can be a nightmare if you're you know you end up changing them later on or you have like multiple kind of platforms to support so having price parody is also important making sure that you follow that tier system is a is a pretty useful way to do that yeah so it sounds like this is what you would expect but there's sort of crawl walk run crawl is we're just offering the price in US Dollars without any price localization walk is okay we're offering it in the local currency and we've got a set of tiers but a manageable number of tiers so it's not too complex and then as you get Lar and you have more resources and the subscriptions team becomes more robust then you can afford to do more and more tiers or at some point um you get to individual prices across each country this starts to get

into another topic that you mentioned which is um price migration tooling and so I'm curious what were some of the internal projects that you did to build your own infrastructure to make this process of localizing Crisis faster and more efficient and then along with that to what extent have tools like stripe or the App Stores May made it easier over the last few years for companies to just use third party tools to do this out of the box yeah totally so again you know you see like price migration tooling a lot of it is all it's built into um products like the app store right like when you're changing pricing for users like in you know if if you want to adjust prices for existing users or new users right A lot of times companies grandfather uh old prices for you know existing users but you know there comes time where you have to actually you know increase prices for existing users as well and that's where you know price

migration tooling can help help out and just allows you to adjust the pricing over time without you know disrupting existing user making sure that you know over time like the right messaging is being sent to the right users and then also just making sure that the process is easier for long-term long-term price adjustment changing pricing is actually one of the one of the best tools to actually improve LTV right and so you have to kind of make sure that as you're scaling as you're growing as a company you have that uh capability built in so that you know as you're adding new features you need to adjust prices building that type of tooling really makes a big difference so yeah in in canvas case and you know a lot of big companies have that kind of internal tooling built in to just uh make it make that process easier right as there's currency fluctuation in different markets or there is you know the

strategy has changed or you've added new product offerings right so just having that in the back of your pocket when when the time comes especially if you're a pretty mature plat like Revenue team you it's really helpful and that's what was part of our strategy to kind of make sure that we we have that in the back of our pocket when time comes yeah that makes a lot of sense what did the bill versus buy decisions look like so as you think about canvas's pric stack what sort of tooling it sounds like the price migration tooling specifically that helped you increase prices for existing users you did a lot of that inhouse but were there party SAS tools that you were using to uh make some of the other stuff easier yeah those third party assass tools like some of the things that are offered out of the box from stripe and some of the other ones are are pretty helpful but it all depends on your longer term strategy

and like you know how you plan on improving the product right right and how customize of an experience that you want to offer users and that actually matters and that makes a big impact into

when it comes to retention right so if users are receiving certain delightful elements in their you know turn messaging that will help with retention rather than you know using something right out out of the box and then you have to be you also have to be aware of like the tone and the messaging that you that's part of the company's strategy right and all of those customer Delight elements make a big difference so you know in canvas case we made sure that we wanted to make sure like the experience is you know very very tailored towards the tone of voice that canva offers as well as we have control you know in terms of like the the timing of that messaging or what that experience looks like so so that factored quite a bit into like the build versus bu decisions and how how how much resources we had to invest as well right so you know canva is a pretty you been a pretty fortunate spot right like growing pretty

fast had the had the financial resources to have teams dedicated towards those things so that made a impact in terms of like you know if we wanted to use something off the shelf or just you know kind of build it ourselves right so yeah I think it there's various different factors and a lot of it comes down to like resources and time yeah yeah makes sense and one of the things you mentioned there specifically was using third party Tools in order to personalize messaging around subscriber churn which gets into one of the other topics we wanted to cover in today's episode and that's involuntary churn so there are a number of sources paddle recurly that estimate up to 20 to 40% of subscriber turn for Consumer and prosumer subscription businesses can come from involuntary turn can you say a little bit more about what involuntary turn is for those who don't already know what it means and then when and why Cana

decided that it needed to make this big investment in reducing involuntary TR yeah absolutely so involuntary turn happens when users lose access to subscriptions due to fa failed payments right or things like expired credit cards or insufficient funds it's usually not user initiated so that's involuntary churn so voluntary churn is user initiated right like when people cancel themselves and it often gets overlooked because most companies just focus on acquiring new users and new subscribers right and rather than retaining existing ones and I see that's pretty common across you know I'm sure like companies that you advise as well right but in re in reality like reducing involuntary churn is one of the easiest ways to boost Revenue right especially when you get to a certain amount of scale like even those small percentages can make a massive impact and you know in the millions of dollars right so it was

actually really fun getting getting a chance to work on involuntary turn initiatives because small improvements even including like messaging or you know in product notifications or certain you know Cadence of retry you know brings in millions of dollars just by making those small tweaks right and those those are those are you small wins that you can get and makes big significant impact on Revenue a lot of times when I you know when I talk to like larger companies that are doing about 100 million or over in scale a lot of times they don't even have a breakdown of what they're what the voluntary versus involuntary turn is right so first first step is always making sure that you're monitoring that and you know you'll see a lot of fluctuation throughout the year for that right so

depending on the time of the year like when people get paid in different markets and even around certain types of promotions that you run you know in the in the previous years right where you'll see a lot of different types of patterns and yeah I think just staying on top of that on a regular basis is pretty key and that's something that I kind of did quite a bit of actually throughout the four years and it was a focus not just in the beginning but also more recently as well where you know and you you constantly have to stay on top of it because there's just so many different factors that can impact it right so yeah it was always a focus and it was part of our kind of our growth under the growth umbrella as well and I think that was one of the smarter things that c focused on right in the beginning so from what I'm hearing it sounds like step number one just be aware that involuntary churn

is an important area for optimization right a lot of companies Overlook it entirely and they just assume most of their turn is coming because customers don't like their product not because customers have failed payment methods or other issues the second step is set up your analytics to be able to parse out how much of your turn is coming from involuntary versus voluntary turn so that you know the size of the problem scale of problem and the root causes of the problem and then the third step which I'd love to talk a little bit more about is building a road map of specific strategies and tactics to reduce involuntary TR and so you'll often hear about Dunning you'll hear about checking in with subscribers at various points of the year just to make sure that their payment information is up to date what were some of the specific tactics that can be used and which ones had the biggest impact yeah absolutely so yeah

there's some basic tactics right that you want to make sure that you've covered and a lot of them are are pretty pretty standard that cross the industry that you know when when I would talk to a lot of colleagues that they would they would Implement as well right so making sure that you have kind of the basics covered so making sure that you're you're Dunning emails and your inapp notifications work right and they're sent at the right Cadence so proactively notifying users about like upcoming payment failures or you know that really help kind of increase revenue or and Recovery rates so just you know those Dunning emails even the messaging in those emails makes a m pretty big impact like allowing users to update the payment methods directly from the email having kind of the right in product notifications as well because a lot of times now in certain markets people don't don't even use don't I mean I have

email addresses right so ensuring those users are getting those Dunning messages either through in product notifications or you know if they use um text that's that's like you know pretty pretty standard across the industry right so those are kind of like quick wins that you can get from just just the messaging component right and then over time you can enable the right alternative payment methods right so if you offer users you know direct debit right versus credit cards you'll see a lot of improvement there as well as just making sure that you know the payment methods that they use like in in markets in in the US a lot of people use PayPal for recurring transactions right so making sure that that's available uh that that's second thing that kind of makes it pretty pretty significant impact right and then it gets more and more complex right so then you can kind of dive a little bit more deeper into like smart payment

retries which a lot of these products off the shelf offer right so you know P you have paddle and some of the ones

that you mention right that's kind of their core core piece right where they're they're they're trying to like look at data and trying to like understand when users get paid in certain markets and then they would kind of optimize the payment retry frequency right based off of that and then that's and that's how they get you know that's their main product right building these type of capabilities is quite you know quite involved we have the luxury of a pretty large engineering team and we could you know we had we could we could do that but if you're a smaller startup you don't have that luxury right so using these off the off the-shelf products for smart payment retries for managing your involuntary churn is can be can be effective right it goes back to that build versus buy decision that we talked about earlier and I think one of the interesting things about the payment retry services in particular is one they're taking a

challenging but relatively well understood problem space off your hands so that even if you do have a large engineering team and canvas certainly did have that luxury their time is probably better spent elsewhere and then two they have the benefit of working with a lot of other companies who are trying to solve the same challenge around um using the right Communications at the right times with the right messaging to help users avoid involuntary turn issues and so they can aggregate those benefits across all the different companies they work with um which is something you wouldn't get if you were building that internally that's one of the other reasons I've I've heard why companies like working with these tools like like paddle and McCurley let's let's transition to one of the other topics we wanted to talk about today and that was the launch of Cana teams so you were at canva from 2020 to

2024 during that time canva launched its canva for teams product which as I understand it you know Cana is this productivity tool um that started with individual prosumers but then like so many prosumer SAS companies it sort of moved up Market into Enterprise and so what did the canva for team launch look like when did CA launch that product and what were the first steps to making sure that it was set up for Success yeah totally so we had yeah cam for teams was we had the ability to add team members pretty much like when you know when I joined around like 2020 but like it there was a lot of friction in terms of like adding new team members right and kind of the the big launch for c teams was in around 2022 right so 2022 when we looked at the flow you know we tried to make sure that there's like no friction in terms of like adding new team members we you know re-evaluated the whole billing model right looked at what's

going on in the industry looked at products like figma right that are doing a pretty good job of like also improving their team's product and at that time like canva had a pretty pretty strong individual user base so this like 2020 2021 right but we started increasing in demand for for teams and businesses right and that was kind of like the next step in terms of growth right for canva and you know many companies were already using canva informally right so you would we would see a lot of big companies coming in and using individual accounts and basically launching Cana for teams was like an easy way to create a tailored experience for for collaboration right and yeah so it was

around 2022 where you know kind of it was like companywide initiative where we focused on launching cam for teams and yeah it turned out to be a pretty important one for for for scal and growth and one of the things that is tricky about moving from Individual consumers to teams of professionals is you have to think about administrative features you have to think about security you think have to think about collaboration use cases so what were some of the additional product features that you had to build into canva in order to make canva for teams compelling yeah totally so yeah with you know some of the key features included making sure that yeah the collaboration features are are built in being able ble to like invite other team members right making sure that there's good role based permissions for you know for collaboration in a seamless way allowing admin controls right and making sure

that there's building management is done in an essential way as well those were kind of like you know some some of them and then across the the org you know there was a number of other ones you know if you go into Cana you can see right just being able to like see how people are collaborating real-time collaboration all of those that you also see in other products like Google Docs and figma and others so those were you know we wanted to make sure that we were we had those as well that a lot of a lot of the user base was already used to right that makes sense okay so you decide around 2022 to make the big can for teams launch you build in these additional product features as part of that launch that makes it more compelling to larger groups of professionals not just individual prosumers I'm curious if you saw any obviously this was a huge lever for Revenue growth because you have this higher priced subscription that can be

adopted by a larger group of people within an organization but from a user growth or a subscriber growth standpoint there are a number of cases you've got Dropbox slack figma notion grammarly where the move to a teams based product especially if there's like a natural collaboration use case built in causes this viral network effect not just within companies but also across companies as leaders and individual employees move to their next role did you see an increase in viral Word of Mouth after launching canva for teams yeah absolutely I think the viral word of mouth was already there the good thing with canva you know people had that product love in the in the beginning but then you know as soon as you enable like team collaboration that like naturally drives more viral growth in terms of being able to add certain team members when you're when you're collaborating on on different types of

dock types right so yeah canva f for teams definitely helped spread adoption and like within organization specifically that was kind of the focus

and as more people got invited to collaborate on designs you know that just kind of that improved that I think the the key the hard part is always like figuring out the the pricing how do you come up with the right pricing what does that model look like and that was a bit of an iterative process for canva and you know I think a lot of users have probably followed along that Journey as well as canvas Chang pricing along the way right so but yeah I think in the beginning the main focus was hey how can we make it easier for people to add new team members in the beginning you know pre 2021 you know every time you had to add new team members you had to pay up front right so in the beginning when we were launching that product we kind of introduced this whole pay as you grow building model right where you can add as many team members as you as possible and then at the end of a cycle you can true up right and that's been actually a

pretty effective growth model for adding team members you you've probably seen figma do that pretty effectively in the beginning and I think that was that was that was pretty interesting to kind of be part of and also see the the negative side of it as well right where you knew see a significant amount of fraud you happening in certain markets people taking advantage but and you have to be aware of that right when you're building those type of building models but yeah again in the beginning it was all about making sure that we can add team members without as much friction as possible got it and how did I was going to ask you about this so pricing and packaging obviously important for any subscription business particularly complex when you're launching a for teams or an Enterprise offering so how did the pricing and packaging for camera for teams evolve over the last few years and it it sounds like it's still evolving

yeah it's always it's you know it's evolving and you know pricing for teams

is like different from Individual subscription because businesses have different budgets and needs right so the the approach was always to create a flexible model right that would that would work for smaller teams while still being able to scale large Enterprises so yeah it was it was interesting because when we launched C for teams if you were following along the the pricing pages right like we got rid of Enterprise completely you know and we just wanted to make it so that large Enterprises could easily grow on them themselves without like you know having to have sales people involved yeah right and over time you get into like even larger organizations you know they do need that kind of dedicated support so later on you can see the Enterprise product reintroduced got it so but yeah I would say like overall like you know you just kind of have to understand a little bit bit more in terms of like what it's a

bit of an iterative process in terms of figuring out the right price points for individual users versus larger teams and what would be an incentive for them to add new team members yeah so what I'm hearing is there's a spectrum from catering to individual prosumers which is where canvas started and where many of these prosumer productivity tools start on the other end of the spectrum you have Enterprise plans where you're selling into a key decision maker and you've got a sales team that's selling top down for a certain number of seats or accounts and then the middle you have a for teams product which allows multiple consumers of the same company to use the subscription often at a reduced price per seat but there's sort of a spectrum there and it's a little bit of a moving Target depending on what the company's primary business goal is at any given time yeah totally well let's wrap up here to the extent you can

share how does your team's efforts across the areas we've talked about today International price localization involuntary turn management and the launch of camp for teams how did that ultimately Drive growth for Cana as a business yeah absolutely I think like you know there these were like all different strategies to kind of Hit the different Revenue goals within the organization right so kind of Hit the first billion in ARR localized pricing

was a key part right making sure that the you know product is available all over the world and it's growing organically in those areas you know kind of to scale from like a billion to over two billion in AR can for teams was like a pretty key initiative because once you've kind of covered the main individual users across all over the world next step is to make sure that they can expand so that was basically helping helping there right launching Cana for teams and then from there you know like when you scale from two billion plus then how do you find those new users it's it's within these larger organizations right so organizations like Amazon or M you know even Microsoft or like even you know some some of the big ones that's where you can find those users so I would say like it was these were all kind of like steps towards just overall scale and they all kind of had an impact and I think they're always

like a continuous process in terms of making sure that you're you're expanding and you're you're reiterating and making sure that you're understanding those user needs in those different types of segments yeah I love that well on every episode of subversive we try to talk about an inflection point that changed the trajectory of a business in this episode we've actually talked about a few inflection points and if I heard you correctly there it was sort of going broad expanding to International Market is what helped get Cana past its first billion in AR then going deeper with the can for teams product helped you get from 1 billion to 2 billion in AR and then as you sought to move Beyond 2 billion in ARR going even deeper within organizations and really pushing Enterprise accounts was was really important for that next Milestone last question here before we get to our lightning round how do you think AI is

going to impact prosumer SAS and obviously that's a loaded question so feel free to take it wherever you want

but there's there's just so much disruption happening in the prummer productivity category right now and curious to hear your perspective yeah totally yeah AI is like really transforming software as a service by making products more intuitive and efficient actually so like for design tools like canva like AI can automate a lot of repetitive tasks right like suggest certain templates and actually just improve creativity so I think that's kind of like area for you know the in the design space right like just improving creativity and I think the challenge for a lot of like SAS companies is building AI features that truly add value rather than just being gimmicks so I think I think that's kind of the key thing for a lot of consumer SAS companies to make sure that they're you know they're falling and yeah at the end of the day for a company like canva where you know creativity is kind of the big element you have you know the Can

the AI just make you know expands that right and enhances that so you have to kind of really focus if you're a consumer company what do you what's your core area and how can you enhance that you know the user feel right and I think why people love canvas so much is because it just makes them feel more creative right and AI just enhances that and I think um a lot of consumers other consumer companies can also follow that model yeah I love that and I've had other guests say the same thing which is the danger of AI is it can become technology in search of a problem so starting with your core value promise starting with what your customers really come to your product for and only investing in AI in cases where it can augment that core value promise makes a lot of sense so let's move to our lightning round I'm going to ask you a series of Rapid Fire questions you can give quick responses in a minute or so

um first one is just what was the best part about working at ca for four years and and what's one thing you might change yeah I would say the best part was working on a product that generally empowers people to create and you know if I would could change one thing it would be just kind of like overall the the more structured way of like planning right I think planning we had a lot of structure maybe like I think planning is something that a lot of product people don't enjoy at the end of each cycle so I think that was a bit of process each each each cycle so I think other product people can probably say the same thing in their companies too I was going to say planning is one of those topics that comes up over and over again I don't think there's any perfect way to do it there are certainly wrong ways to do it and it's also moving Target because as the company gets larger and more complex the processes

for planning efficiently start to look very different second question is what's your favorite consumer or prosumer subscription app and why yeah I actually love straa because how well it integrates with like social motivation into like Fitness tracking I use it all the time for for you my day-to-day tracking and just keeping in touch with friends as well yeah it's a great tool I I've been a runner my whole life since I don't know Middle School I was on the cross country and track team and I've always Lov stra and other tools like it that can just help me track where I'm at with my running what's the biggest lesson that you learned from leading subscriptions at ca for four years yeah I would say sustainable growth comes from retention and mitiz and not just acquisition and I think that was the focus throughout my time there and making sure that our retention and monetization is is done well and I think

we saw great results because of that yeah that's another one that comes up a lot I think acquisition is the first thing that a lot of companies think about it's it's sexy it's exciting but ultimately doing the blocking and tackling the hard work around retaining subscribers and and even avoiding involuntary turn which we talked about earlier ultimately ends up being a more compounding way to drive growth in the long run what's the biggest opportunity that you see subscription teams Overlook and do you think that happens so often yeah I would say pricing and packaging is you know like too many teams just focus on acquiring users again without optimizing how they monetize so uh I would say really looking into pricing and packaging in more more more depth I think really would help yeah I'm so glad you said that because I I wrote this guest post for Lenny's newsletter where I talked about the top 10 levers for

driving subscriptions growth and right at the top of the list was pricing and packaging I think it's one that companies know it's important but there's just a tendency for whatever reason to overlook it for years at a time and and not change pricing often enough and sounds like that was a really core part of your success at canva as we talked about on this episode so lastly you're now the CEO of a health and wellness app called huie tell us a little bit more about what huie does and why you were so excited to go build this company yeah totally so after you know long career in product I decided you know what what what are the areas that are important to me and for me it was like making sure that I'm staying healthy you know wealthy and wise and at the end of the day that's where the huei name came from and it basically helps people optimize their health wealth wisdom by providing structured gu

guidance in the form of daily habits and well-being and that's basically the product and you know it's great to be building again yeah that's exciting and certainly a product that I think I'm right in the Target demographic for so I'll have to check it out well thanks so much for coming on the podcast it's been a real pleasure before we wrap it up is there anything else that you want to share yeah thanks for having me on and yeah people can connect with me on LinkedIn and also I write a lot about subscription growth as well on subs.com so they can check that out and yeah it's great to be part of your subscription Community thanks for having me likewise it's great to have you Zan thanks for being part of the community and thanks for sharing a piece of canvas story today absolutely thank you