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Canva founded itself to democratize design for billions of users. That’s an ambitious market size to chase.
But they very intentionally didn’t market to “everyone” at launch. They spent months obsessing over one tiny audience.
Most of this post is originally from February, before I built the category audit database. It was also a piece I sent people often so I went back and checked it against the 202 companies across 19 categories.
The results reinforced the advice: The majority of successful brands in the database launched with a very narrow ideal customer (ICP), saturated it, then added the next one.
Figma launched for individual designers inside a bigger team.
Stripe launched for technical founders at early-stage startups.
Deel launched for startups adding their first overseas contractor.
The Everyone Trap
Startup valuations (and investor interest) come from addressable market size. That means there’s often incentive to target bigger, wider, richer.
Canva co-founder Cameron Adams described the problem in an interview with First Round Review: when products are pushed out for “everyone,” the messaging becomes impossible. You can’t write a homepage, an onboarding email or an ad that resonates with a real estate agent and a YouTube creator and a nonprofit director. You end up kind of missing all of them.
We understood this at Recurrent and focused on the nerdiest and most passionate EV owners. These are the people who have all the charging apps, join all the forums, and talk your ear off about their car. By focusing on them, our message landed and early growth accelerated.
In addition to diluting the message, going broad loses the product signal, too: one segment loves you, one segment hates you, and one is indifferent. All you get is an average of them, which doesn’t really help much.
Here’s the first audience selection framework derived from Canva that any founding team in an emerging category can steal. (If you already launched and are looking to re-narrow your focus, I wrote the S.O.S. recovery version of it here.)
First Audience Framework
Ahead of Canva’s launch, the founding team chose social media managers as their core audience. That’s very specific.
Not “small businesses” = tens of millions of potential customers ❌
“Social media managers” = thousands of potential customers ✅
Here are the five criteria (or filters) for selecting your own specific audience.
1. Feedback Velocity
Social media managers needed a steady drip of high-quality graphics. Pinterest and Instagram were exploding when Canva launched in 2013 and the people creating that content were doing it dozens of times per day.
That frequency is feedback velocity. Daily users provide more nuanced product feedback in a week than monthly users do in a year. Canva could ship a feature by Monday and have an insight by Wednesday.
The same pattern shows up across the database:
Granola launched for individuals in back to back to back meetings.
Lululemon launched for yoga instructors teaching lots of classes.
Test it: Organize your pilot customers or waiting list by the frequency and variety of use. It’s a valuable view of your potential ICP that often gets overlooked.
Lesson: 500 daily users will teach you more in a week than 5,000 quarterly users will ever teach you.
Eliminate: For most startups, try to stay away from a first audience that uses your product/service monthly or less often. They just can’t help you iterate and grow fast enough.
2. Revenue Signal
A good first audience can (1) see what you’re worth and (2) approve the investment without asking for permission.
Social media managers had both qualities. Their work fed marketing metrics that execs already tracked and Canva was cheap enough to test on their own.
Test it: Go back to the list you sorted by frequency. For each group, name the tracked metric that goes up when they use you, along with its proximity to company revenue.
Lesson: Pick an audience that can prove your value and act on it. One that can only do the first will cap how fast you grow.
Eliminate: If you don’t influence one of the metrics that matter most to them, there’s no urgency and that audience is not a good place to start.
3. Organic Distribution
Social media managers post for a living. That’s a pretty incredible distribution opportunity for a first audience.
Cameron Adams referenced it in his interview with Lenny Rachitsky: these users loved being on social media, telling people about the tools they were using, and introducing Canva to others.
“[Early users] need to want to talk to other people about it, because in the early days of your startup you don’t have marketing dollars. You need to really foster the first people that are going to use your product. They’re going to be the ones that are going to spread it and they’re going to set the foundations for your growth.”
As a growth marketer, I tend to get caught up with channels. But it’s more about the mechanism: does the audience put them in front of the same or another potential audience?
Superhuman targeted founders, and founders talk to other founders.
Figma targeted individual designers who pull in other members of their team.
Lululemon dressed instructors who stood in front of classes each day.
Test it: Find the communities where your potential first audiences already gather: Facebook groups, Slack communities, Reddit, Discord, industry forums. Are they actively making recommendations or do they treat what they do as secret sauce to hide from the world?
Lesson: The best first audiences don’t need incentives (e.g. referral programs) to spread the word. They share because that’s part of their identity, industry or path to success.
Eliminate: If your first audience doesn’t naturally share with peers, you’ll have to manufacture every single bit of awareness from scratch (or cash).
4. Acquisition Cost
Canva found that social media managers gathered in predictable and affordable places. Many subscribed to the same public Facebook groups, attended the same conferences, and read the same niche publications.
No part of Canva’s early acquisition strategy required a massive media budget. They knew where to find their target audience and designed every piece of messaging to speak to them.
Clay answered questions in existing GTM communities.
Product Hunt contacted the builders featured in their own daily email.
Test it: For each potential audience, list the 3 ways you would put your product in front of them along with the expected investment (time + money) of each one.
Lesson: Affordable and repeatable channels let you run more experiments. That’s the actual cost of an exclusive or expensive audience.
Eliminate: If you can’t reach an audience (at scale) on your budget, they shouldn’t be your first audience.
5. Market Bridge
After social media managers, Canva expanded to startup founders with lean teams by adding a ‘Presentation’ feature designed, in large part, specifically for them.
They also didn’t have to abandon their first audience to reach the second: Tech founders were early with social media so they were the ones hiring social media managers.
Cursor launched for individual developers, whose output made them the case study for everyone else on the team.
Figma launched for designers then bridged (through the designers) to the engineers and PMs who worked with them.
Test it: Create a relationship map for your first audience. Who do they naturally influence? Who do they share with outside their immediate peer group? We’re trying to identify at least two adjacent audiences that interact with your first audience.
Lesson: Your first audience should have somewhere to take you.
Eliminate: A highly engaged vertical audience that doesn’t interact with other verticals can trap you in a niche.
Choosing your first audience
Run each of your prospective audiences through the five filters. I bet you’ll walk away with two things:
One audience will look a lot better than the others after surviving this test.
That audience will probably feel uncomfortably narrow.
The founding team at Canva always intended to use its product to help billions of people. They’re well on their way with 250+ million monthly active users. But they had the restraint to target a few thousand first, and serve them so well that those thousands became the growth engine for everything and everyone else.
Hit reply if you need a pep talk. That’s what I’m here for.