Sounds like Print Shop Pro 30 years ago!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Print_Shop

So the idea is a library of templates/icons/clip art combined with a web UI to edit the text and objects? With some sharing/collaboration features built in.

Sounds like a good idea. Templates have pretty much taken over web design, it makes sense that it will take over other run-of-the-mill categories of design (where hiring a custom designer doesn't make sense).

Can confirm, I just logged into Canva to check whether I had an account and turns out I made one a year ago for some project and had forgotten

Hmm there is an entirely free version and has quite a lot of features, it's more than a trial. This is popular not just because of people re-creating accounts on different emails. https://about.canva.com/pricing/

Canva is ranked at 170 on Alexa [1]. Hootsuite is ranked at more than 1100 [2].

So we'd expect Canva to have a lot more users than Hootsuite.

Also, they've raised over $80M in multiple rounds from top VCs including Sequoia [3], which would be hard to do if they were bullshitting about their numbers.

[1] https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/canva.com?ver=classic

[2] https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/hootsuite.com?ver=classic

[3] https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/news/canva-50-9...

You don't "need" hootsuite, you can login on twitter and facebook just fine to craft your social media. Sure for professionals it helps to have your calendar of content, but tons of people get away without it. Hootsuite also kind of missed the transition to Instagram and they are left to do whatever is being allowed by the API of the social media platforms. However, if you need any kind of design work, you absolutely need a software to do it and Canva let you do all of it, up until the final output. Potential for growth is definitely bigger with Canva than Hootsuite.

Well it also depends on what is considered a 'user'. For example let's say you had 'only' 50,000 users. So you then pack the database with hundreds of millions of fake users. The purpose of the fake users is simply to lessen the probability that the real users get their data used in some way. Further to the point if the number of fake users is high enough it makes it more difficult to sell the data because nobody knows what data is fake and what is not (sure you could cross ref it with other data but that would take some effort).

And even moreover a news story saying that 25,000 users data was stolen is not a big deal. A news story saying that 1 billion users data was stolen is a big deal. And then brings up the obvious question of whether the stolen data is really real in some way.