- Bootstrapping your business often means you do a lot yourself and some of the most invaluable tools are those that make your daily to-do lists easier.
- Business owners said Canva is one of the most useful tools for creating branded materials and marketing content.
- Canva is a free, online graphic-design program and mobile app that helps you create and customize documents using templates, text, photos, and graphics.
- We broke down Canva's most useful basic and paid features, like finding font combinations and making a brand kit.
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Bootstrapping your business often means you do a lot yourself. In addition to being owner and founder, you might be CEO, in-house PR, social media manager, accountant, customer service, logistics manager, HR department, and everything in between.
Some of the most invaluable tools for your business are those that ease all these daily responsibilities, especially when you don't yet have the resources to hire many employees or outsource to contractors.
When Business Insider asked business owners what tools help them create branded materials and marketing content, one name kept coming up: Canva.
Canva is a free and subscription-based, online graphic-design program and mobile app that was cofounded by Cliff Obrecht, now CEO Melanie Perkins, and Cameron Adams in 2012. The company has a $3.2 billion valuation, and the program is used by 20 million people every month, with users from most Fortune 500 companies, Canva told Business Insider.
Matthew Cummings, the owner of Pretentious Glass Co. and Pretentious Beer Co., a taproom and beer brewery in Knoxville, Tennessee, told Business Insider that designing his own content on an as-needed basis has been a challenge of bootstrapping.
"Over the course of seven years, there are a lot of things that don't quite meld together," he said.
He plans to roll out his own brand kit with Canva to create a more unified style across all of his marketing materials. "I am personally psyched to walk through all my imagery with a professional crew and hone our voice, improve the graphics, and really embody what our unique personality is like on a design front," he said.
Here are the features Canva offers to make professional branding and documents, whether you're a team of one or 100.