Bec Mitrevski on Scaling Canva's Creator Marketplace, the Power of Delight, and Becoming Unstoppable

Product State Q&A

Bec Mitrvski is the Product Craft Lead at Canva, a feature speaker at Product School, and a startup consultant at Giants. She was formerly a Product Owner Principal at Telstra, and a Mobile Innovation Product Owner at Commonwealth Bank.
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DS: How do you foster product variety without compromising on quality in a marketplace?

BM: Balancing quality and diversity in a marketplace is like being an orchestra conductor. You’re in this constant mode of trying to keep harmony, managing those who may be overly enthusiastic, bringing out the quiet achievers, and ultimately trying to create something that ‘just works’ for the audience. This balancing act is why marketplace products are some of my favorite products. They are so fun to build!

In 2020, Canva built Canva’s Creator program. Creators is an international program that empowers designers to earn by creating templates for Canva users. It quickly became one of Canva’s most significant activation and revenue drivers and was critical to Canva’s international scale efforts. Today, most of the templates in Canva’s library are from our wonderful, gifted Creators worldwide.

Beginning with the beginning, when forming Canva’s Creator marketplace, we curated who we onboarded. We curated based on the following:

• Location - we focused on strategically significant places for Canva’s expansion efforts.

• Content Quality - We needed to maintain the trust of our community that Canva has and always will have high-quality content. In our early beta phase, we wanted people with the beta mindset. We wanted creators eager to be part of a team building something bigger. These early beta testers shared our vision and were patient and transparent, partnering with us to co-create features and roadmaps.

This approach set us up from day 1 with creatives aligned with our own goals regarding mindset and location.

We made quality a focus for all of us. We showed Creators data highlighting the correlation between better-quality content and higher earnings. We gave visibility into quality metrics so they could identify their strengths and opportunities to improve. We wanted Creators to always have opportunities for upward mobility and betterment. We provided education and marketplace insights. Design educators hosted workshops and insights sessions. Creators would sometimes join the education sessions at 1am or 2am — their local time — to be part of the community and conversation. It felt great to get everyone together and learn together. It also helped our internal metrics. We hosted competitions and publicly recognized the winners who produced the highest quality content. It created a wonderful community that learned and celebrated each other. We also saw that our key metrics improved by orders of magnitude when we invested in education and insights. 

What surprised us during this process was how subjective quality is and how, if you don’t define it correctly, you can remove diversity from your marketplace. This came to light when our Brazilian Creators started producing content that, at first, we didn't think met our quality bar. We were puzzled. We’d onboarded strong designers, and some of their content was loud with reds, blacks and neon colors. It didn’t align with the neutral, pale aesthetics we hoped for. We brought on a Brazilian educator, and she instantly told us that the loud style was incredibly popular in Brazil, especially in food advertisements. We saw it performed extremely well once we started publishing that content in the library. So, you should consider quality, diversity, and local nuance in lockstep. 

The learning here was that the definition of quality in one market can be at odds with the definition of quality in another market. Find metrics that capture how well the goods meet the user’s job to be done and reward those who meet those jobs to be done in key markets.

There are also standard considerations around quality tooling. We called this tooling the three lines of defense and ensured we prioritized enhancements at each ‘line:’

• Provide education and tooling for Creators to QA their work before submission.

• Build scalable review systems to catch any quality issues.

• Measure early signals to gauge content popularity with the relevant niche and highlight user-loved products via your search engine.

DS: What are some of the successful strategies you employed to grow and scale?

BM: We focused heavily on intrinsic motivation to scale. Our goal was to create a marketplace that was delightful to be part of, and for that reason, it had to be about community. There’s really interesting research on intrinsic motivation. In the 1970s, a researcher called Deci found that external rewards — like money — can decrease intrinsic motivation. Positive feedback acts as a boost for intrinsic motivation. This prompted another thought-provoking product insight and decision: ‘Creators should be paid for their product.’ Our co-founder, Cliff, has always been adamant that we need to be generous. 

So we built our product and marketplace to ensure that Creators would get as much delight from the Product and the positive feedback as the pay itself — if not more.

We applied these insights to our education strategy and community-building efforts. We created Facebook groups for creators sharing the same language or interests, allowing them to connect and learn. The English-speaking page dominated without these groups, leaving little space for non-English speakers or niche designers. We enabled connections and collaborations that enriched the community by fostering these smaller subcultures.

DS: What tip would you share with a team developing a marketplace centered on experiences?

BM: Establish the right leadership on day one. Marketplaces are inherently turbulent, and you need an environment where your team feels safe to move fast and is trusted to fix things when they break. In the early days of the Creator marketplace, we had a misstep that had unforeseen impacts. We were nervous about telling Cliff, one of our co-founders. However, instead of laboring on the fact that something went wrong, Cliff responded, ‘We know we’re moving at the right speed when things are breaking.’

That gave the team and I a massive sense of relief and freedom. We just needed to go as fast as possible and not worry about breaking things — within reason, and as long as we fixed the mistakes. To not have the fear of breaking things is powerful. We were unstoppable after that.

I’ve been in teams where the leaders didn’t understand what rapid growth looks like, and being in this team at Canva, with a leader like Cliff, made me realise that as long as we’re going fast with the proper focus — we’re learning, we fix what we break, then we’re moving in the right direction.

“To not have the fear of breaking things is powerful. We were unstoppable after that.”
- Bec Mitrevski, Canva