I’m intrigued by how consumers and businesses decide when to do things themselves vs. when to hire outside help. What spurs my interest in particular are the opportunities for either innovative DIY tools (such as for video creation) or agile gig outsourcing services to more effectively cater to the (latent) demands among consumers and businesses.

The question of when DIY vs. outsourcing solutions makes sense is not unique to the field of visual communication – far from it – and the answer is also not carved in stone.

For example, before COVID you might have thought the options for dinner were spending the required time to shop for ingredients and cook at home, or going out for a nice meal, or picking up fast food on your way back from work.

But, adapting to pandemic restrictions, many restaurants engaged delivery services, enabling you to enjoy a fancy meal at home without you needing to spend time shopping and cooking. Some deliver prepped meals that you can simply finish cooking yourself – a hybrid DIY/outsourced solution.

DIY Video Creation Apps report

Analysis of 82 innovative DIY video creation apps, trends, category recommendations

It’s the solutions that manage to bridge the seemingly conflicting customer needs (such as outstanding quality vs. ease of use) that I find the most intriguing.

Take the world of visual communication. Many of us feel the need to create nicely designed personal or business materials but don’t have the money to hire a graphic designer, photographer, web designer, ad agency, or video editor. Or we have other reasons for creating these materials ourselves – if we could only do so in an easy and affordable way. In short: the end result should look better than what’s feasible with Microsoft Office; while creating it should be easier and cheaper than using the Adobe Creative Suite.

This was exactly the DIY opportunity Canva targeted when it launched 9 years ago. Canva’s primarily web-based platform enables consumer and business customers to design materials, such as presentations, brochures, party invitations, business cards, posters, or marketing videos, that look professionally created thanks to an easy and affordable toolset that leans heavily on a drag-and-drop user interface, tons of templates (currently 250K free templates and another 170K templates for pro subscribers) and tons of stock media assets (currently 100M photos, illustrations, audio track and videos).

Canva’s success has been astounding: the company now has 55 million monthly active users, who have created 5 billion designs to date. The company’s revenues have soared more than 130% year over year to $500 million for the year ending March 31. Canva has been profitable since 2017.

And all of this is what investors like. Last week, the company announced that it raised $72 million at a valuation of $15 billion in November of last year, mere months after it raised $60 million at a $6 billion valuation.

What can we learn from Canva? There’s way more to it, but here are my 4 high level takeaways:

Position your platform as a means to a goal – not as apps for specific functional domains. Canva positions its design platform as a vehicle for creating well-defined deliverables that a customer might need (such as Instagram Story posts, printed flyers, infographics, company presentations) rather than marketing it as a collection of apps for separate functional domains, such as for photo editing, video creation, drawing, or page layout (as Adobe does, with tools such as Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator and InDesign).

Choose a strategy your main competitor can’t easily follow. Canva is nibbling at the edges of Adobe’s territory. While Adobe keeps cranking out record-breaking revenue numbers (most recently, its Digital Media segment’s revenues grew 19% in FY 2020), the company is not well suited to aggressively go after the consumer and SMB/enterprise DIY design market, as its technology base and pricing options are too dependent on – and risk the chance of cannibalizing – its high-end products.

Plan for AI as the driver of DIY solutions that combine ease of use with creative control. AI not only provides an opportunity for DIY video creation apps (see our last issue), but also for various other functional domains, such as screen and print design. Canva is clearly looking at expanding their offerings through AI, as indicated by their acquisition of Kaleido, the Austrian developer of the one-click AI-based background removal tools, removebg and Unscreen (presenter at Visual 1st last year).

Web-based apps are the future. As we’ve also seen among many of the 82 DIY video creation apps we reviewed for our DIY Video Creation Apps study, more and more visual communication app developers are creating web apps as their primary delivery platform. While this has the predictable advantages of being able to avoid separate code bases for different OSs, web apps increasingly also get traction because they enable easy collaborative design among friend & family groups or corporate teams.