The challenges of building a global startup in six new languages
Although India, Brazil, Spain and Mexico are among its 10 biggest markets, graphic design startup Canva has so far only been available in English.
For a company that has set its sights on reaching a global scale, that's been a must to change. On Tuesday, the Australian company launched six new languages online — Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, German and Brazilian Portuguese — helping it reach more than 1 billion people in their native tongue.
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The Sydney-based startup says it has more than 10 million users from 179 countries, giving it a large audience that could benefit from a localised platform. During a recent soft launch of European Spanish, Canva found more than 350,000 people switched over their app, co-founder Melanie Perkins told Mashable Australia.
Canva has favoured the Roman languages first up, simply because they were easier to translate, Perkins suggested.
"In the coming months, we're focusing on a lot of Asian languages, including Thai, Malay, Bahasa, Japanese and Chinese," she said. The team is aiming to launch those languages by the end of 2016.
It hasn't been a simple process, and it's one other startups looking for a broader audience could learn from.
The nature of the new words themselves have meant the platform has had to adapt. For instance in German, words are a lot longer than in English, and Canva also had to make sure their range of fonts work with all different accents.
The team has also had to check that layouts and templates are culturally appropriate. "For example, in the United States, they have Halloween, while in Mexico they have Cinco de Mayo," she said.
To get things right, Canva has been working with local linguists for each language, working through everything from the company's emails to interactions with bloggers. Learning from others who have gone through the process has also been important.
"One of our mentors is the head of international at Pinterest, Silvia Oviedo," Perkins said. "We've been able to learn from a lot of the processes they put in place."
As part of its global push, Canva has tried a team-based approach. One group focuses solely on internationalisation — their goal is to get Canva into 15 to 20 languages this year.
"Each team has its own goals and missions, which means as we grow rapidly, we're able to still have each team really moving the needle," she explained.
After internationalisation, next on the list is payments.
"Payments are a really important thing to have in your local currency, so that's something we're looking at and is on our roadmap," she said. Currently, all transactions are in U.S. dollars. "Now that we have the infrastructure in place, we will be able to localise a lot more quickly."
Ultimately, the startup hopes a local approach will help the platform keep growing rapidly.
"Certainly, in markets like Germany and France, having it in the local language will make it instantly more appealing," she said.
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Ariel Bogle was an associate editor with Mashable in Australia covering technology. Previously, Ariel was associate editor at Future Tense in Washington DC, an editorial initiative between Slate and New America.
