Canva, a user-friendly graphic design app with over 125 million monthly users, sought to better understand its customers beyond traditional marketing attribution. They decided to build their own composable customer data platform (CDP) using best-of-breed tools like Snowflake, Census, Fivetran, and dbt to support targeted lifecycle marketing strategy. Canva's journey highlights the shortcomings of out-of-the-box CDPs, which often duplicate specific customer data in silos, confining marketers to a sandbox. A composable CDP offers a single source of truth, flexibility, and control over data, allowing for more personalized results. By leveraging their first-party customer data, segmenting audiences in the warehouse, and activating data in all marketing tools, Canva can identify power users, target them with ads, and personalize content based on user behavior. The composable CDP approach also improves attribution, visibility, identity resolution, accuracy, and unlocks customer insight by eliminating redundancy and providing a single source of truth.