First customersSource reviewed 2026-09-25 · founder reported
Start with a narrow customer and an observable problem
How Canva approached first customers.
What they did
Before tackling broad design software, Perkins and Obrecht built Fusion Books for school yearbooks. Perkins described calling schools and sending sample books as useful early sales work.
Reported outcome
The smaller business gave the founders practical experience selling an online design workflow before Canva.
An idea to test, from Afterlaunch
A narrow initial use case can test a broad vision without requiring the whole platform.
Small experiment: Choose one customer type and manually demonstrate a solution to ten prospects before expanding the feature set.
A company’s reported outcome doesn’t prove one tactic caused it. Treat this as a hypothesis.
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