How a Gen AI Startup solved its product gaps with the Canva Apps SDK

Meet the sisters who co-founded a 3D animation company looking to make a previously inaccessible world available to everyone with their product, krikey.ai. Jhanvi Shriram and Ketaki Shriram sat down with the Canva team during a recent visit to our headquarters in Sydney to share their experience being with the Canva Developers program and revealed how it solved some key gaps for them while also opening their eyes to some product possibilities they never imagined.

If you haven’t already tried to create a fun, dancing animation with the Krikey AI Animate app, it allows you to choose a language, accent, voice, and animation from some of Krikey’s most popular avatars on krikey.ai.

The pivot

The sisters started their company in the mobile gaming world, creating an app that was in the Top 25 in the Google Play Store. With their success, many people started reaching out to ask if they could create animations for them or their games. They knew they didn’t want to be a dev shop, so they instead made the difficult decision to pivot their entire company to expose their 3D Animation toolset in a low-code and no-code way.

The team was already using Canva to create all of their social media assets, and a common pain point came up. Was there any easier way to get their animations they needed for the assets into Canva instead of having to download them and then re-upload into Canva? They discovered the Canva Apps SDK, and became their own first customer.

To build or not to build (for mobile)

One of the factors the team also considered was their mobile experience. They made the decision not to build native iOS and Android apps due to time and resource constraints. This meant they were losing all of their mobile traffic. By building an app on Canva, they were immediately available via the Canva mobile app, and could redirect all their mobile traffic to that experience, netting them back about 20% of their traffic. What is normally a 6+ month effort to build custom mobile apps, they were able to achieve in just 12 weeks and immediately impact the time to value for their end consumer with less engineering complexity.

Not only were they able to recoup lost traffic, they were also able to acquire tons of new traffic. The Krikey AI app was featured on Canva's Apps Marketplace for the month of January. With over 170M monthly users, this had a massive impact. As CEO of Krikey Jhanvi Shriram stated, “In a day, the traffic to our site went up 23x”. There was a meaningful funnel of new users discovering their product through their app on Canva who were converting to users of their full product and buying subscriptions.

Essential feedback

The feedback Canva gave the team was more robust than they expected. As experienced mobile app developers, they expected a simple “approved” or “not approved”. The Canva team sent back three pages of feedback on areas to approve, questions to ponder, suggestions, and ideas on how to make their app successful. As a small founder team, they don’t always have time to think about some of the smaller details. Krikey CTO Ketaki pointed out that Canva helped them see how “Some of these animations or error states that we think are minor, are actually quite important to having a robust user experience.” To the team, building an app with Canva felt like a true partnership.

Canva is well known for its expansive free offering, crediting this for much of its growth. Krikey started out only offering 1 free generation on their app, and at Canva’s suggestion, they increased that to 5. That small change alone doubled their app traffic. This mirrors the results other apps have seen - apps with stronger free offerings see much better uptake and retention.

Overall, the process took the sisters 12 weeks from start to finish. The developer tools and community forum enabled them to work quickly and solve problems swiftly. Many of the UI and UX lessons they learned from building their app on Canva they have actually taken back to their main product and found ways to improve the overall experience.

While their product traditionally is used by game creators, creating an app on Canva allowed them to tap into new audiences, primarily the education sector. They started seeing teachers and students use their app for everything from lesson plans to book reports. Especially their skeleton avatar; it’s Ketaki’s favorite character! Canva opened up a whole new market for them, and a new ground for user testing. While they conduct their own user research, Jhanvi mentioned “The only place we can get [these types of user findings] is Canva where we actually have real, motivated, intentional users coming to try out the product.”

Lessons for other AI entrepreneurs

When asked about their tips for other generative AI founders, the Krikey AI team strongly recommended building an app on Canva. They mentioned how it’s a great place for new startups trying to test an idea. CTO Ketaki stated that if they didn’t already have their tool created, then “We absolutely would have started with a Canva app because it’s a great way to put an idea out there that is well designed [...] and try it out with engaged customers and see if there could be product market fit.” And for startups that already have a robust, compelling foundation model, it enables them to do more with their cool outputs. Ketaki went on to say “Building a Canva app will teach developers what are the appropriate design guidelines and user flows to really get users to leverage this interesting technology.” Embedding into Canva enables startups and developers to integrate into real users workflows helping increase product adoption.

We can’t wait to see how bright the future is for the Krikey team. Just like Canva is helping to empower anyone in the world to design, Krikey is empowering anyone in the world to create 3D Animations. And they’re doing just that!

For the full recording of the conversation with Krikey.ai and more nuggets of wisdom from this female founder team, check out this video.