# Canva turns more than a million yearly requests into product work

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/canva-turns-more-than-a-million-yearly-requests-into-product/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Melanie Perkins](https://realalpha.app/builders/melanie-perkins/) · Melanie Perkins is CEO and co-founder of Canva. · Co-founded Canva and leads its mission to empower everyone to design, while steering its pledge to do good.
- Host: [Lenny Rachitsky](https://realalpha.app/people/lenny-rachitsky/) · Host, Lenny's Podcast · Spent seven years at Airbnb; his product newsletter has over 1M subscribers.
- Show: Lenny's Podcast
- Episode: [She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/), Nov 2, 2025
- Moment: 37:59 to 40:40 of the episode (3 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/canva-turns-more-than-a-million-yearly-requests-into-product/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=2279

## Quote

> “we get **more than a million requests** from our community every year.”
> — [Melanie Perkins](https://realalpha.app/builders/melanie-perkins/) at [38:16](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=2296) · Lenny's Podcast

## Takeaways

1. Canva receives more than a million community requests annually.
2. A team tallies the requests and delivers them to product teams.
3. They closed over 200 loops that year, including requests for classroom AI.

## About this segment

Melanie Perkins says Canva receives over a million community requests each year and routes them to product teams. Closing those loops helps the company prioritize features that many more users may need.

From “She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins”, Nov 2, 2025. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[38:03](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=2283) I want to come back to this closing the loop process, let's say, that you have where you figure out what to build. A lot of your ideas come actually from the community. Talk about just that process and how many of your ideas actually came from your community. Oh, it's one of my favorite things. We've been doing it for years now. And so we get more than a million requests from our community every year.

[38:24](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=2304) And we then we've got a whole incredible team that then tallies them, breaks them down and then delivers them to all of our product teams. and then those actually get closed. So this year we've closed more than 200 loops, but we know that each one of those things is going to be loved and needed by so many more people that don't bother to actually fill out the request form. And so, so many things from gradient text, like little things like gradient text, to really big things like our Sheets product.

[38:53](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=2333) There's just been countless products. In the early days with our AI products, we didn't release them to teachers because we knew there was a lot of hesitancy for teachers using AI in the classroom. And we got so many requests from teachers saying, can I please use this magic right in the classroom? And so with them, we unlocked that and put on safety controls for teachers. And so it's just constant, actually.

[39:15](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=2355) It's just part of our product process. I think there's two parts to product. One is building the future and towards the mission and the mission pillars, as I was saying before. And the other is actually listening to our community and building what they want. And so I think that that's the two core pieces of product in my mind. And the closing the loop comes in so many different forms. There's the explicit asks.

[39:37](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=2377) And then the other thing that we double down on all the time is user testing and watching people use it. And if people hesitate clicking a button or people don't quite understand how something works, it's amazing to me how you can find 10 random people on the internet and they can give such astute feedback that then is so representative for such a large number of people. So I've personally run hundreds, if not thousands, of user tests myself, and it's been deeply embedded in our product teams also.

[40:03](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=2403) Wow. That must be really stressful for someone looking at a test of Canva, trying to try something when you're in the room. It's actually, we do it all online, actually. I mean, the ones I've run are typically online. So people are so much more frank, I think, when they test, it's just them and their camera, and they don't really, yeah, they tell you really how it is. Is there a tool or a kind of a process there that you find really helpful?

[40:27](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=2427) I don't know if you want to name names of products or anything like that, but it's something that you find helpful and useful. Yeah, we use a lot of usertesting.com. I find that super, super valuable. All right. Go user testing. Okay.