Do you know what Grammarly is?
Eight years after their birth, they were valued at $1.3B. (unicorn!)
The best part, do you know what it is?
They were entirely self-funded in order to do this, investing nothing.
Here is their remarkable growth tale:
Two Ukrainian men named Alex Shevchenko and Max Lytvyn developed the paid plagiarism detection programme MyDropbox in 2002.
From the beginning, they were offering their answer to universities to assist them in resolving their unique, academic difficulty.
They increased to 800 universities by 2008.
They made the decision to expand their market in 2008 Grammarly released its easy WYSIWYG editor with premium spell checking (you could copy and paste text into it).
They were upselling to universities, who were already their clients.
and requested customer input to enhance the product.
2010: 300,000 students signed up as users, and 250+ universities purchased the service.
$10 million in income was earned in 2012.
2013: They made the decision to alter its strategy and bring Grammarly anywhere people write, as opposed to bringing users to Grammarly.
have released Word and Outlook plugins.
Grammarly covered everything, from contextual spelling to style, unlike Microsoft Word’s spell checker, which simply looked for apparent spelling and grammar errors.
The end result was a 2,326% increase in revenue from 2009 and more than 3 million registered users.
2015 saw the release of their free extensions for Safari and Google Chrome. The business adopted a freemium business model for consumers.
2016 saw the release of their no-cost Firefox browser plugin.
2017 saw more than 8 million active users of Grammarly’s free Chrome extension alone. At a $1.3B valuation, they originally raised $110M in investment.
Source: Product Habits, Inc.