👉 Background: Canva is the design tool that let people design Instagram quotes and wedding invites and suddenly call themselves creatives. It was founded in Sydney in 2012 and has become a darling of the Australian tech scene. In fact, it is now valued at $49 billion after its latest secondary share sale.

‍👉 What happened: While Canva started as a design software to compete with Adobe and Figma, it’s slowly but surely been expanding:

• It first expanded into Docs to take on Word and Google Docs
• It created Presentation to take on Powerpoint and Google Slides
• And now, at its annual product release conference, Canva announced its annualised recurring revenue has tipped over $3 billion USD - up from $2.5 billion USD in October last year

‍👉 What else: It's biggest announcement was that Canva is launching a new rival to Excel spreadsheet. Canva claims this new product doesn’t require any formulas and coding but instead, you can build a spreadsheet using AI prompts (cue the existential crisis at Microsoft HQ). The goal for Canva is to take on the incumbents in the enterprise suite space like Microsoft and Google. With this enterprise approach, Canva will need to use both its bottom-up and top-down sales approach.

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‍What's the key learning?

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‍💡Sometimes the best way into a company isn’t through the front door—it’s through the side window. Traditionally, enterprise software were sold using a top-down model. That's where a salesperson would buddy-up to a big decision-maker and then roll out the software to the team - whether they liked it or not.

💡Over the past decade, the bottom-up sales model has become an effective way for tech companies to gain a foothold into organisations. That's where individual employees start using the tool on their own and then over time, it spreads organically within a company until the business pretty much has to buy a team plan.

💡We’ve seen companies like Notion, Slack and Atlassian nail this bottom-up approach too. In fact, Canva hit $1 billion USD in ARR through their bottom-up growth model before building out their top-down approach. But, as Canva heads deeper into the enterprise world to take on Microsoft, it needs to develop a strong top down approach as well.