Grammarly: how Ukrainians created a $ 1 billion company in the USA - ForumDaily
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Grammarly: how Ukrainians created a $ 1 billion company in the USA

Grammarly's English spelling checker is known and loved by tens of millions of users around the world. A few years ago, AVentures Capital’s managing partner, Yevgeny Sysoev, estimated Grammarly at $ 100 million. Since then, the number of users of the service has increased tenfold, and the service has grown in valuation to $ 1 billion. Three Ukrainians founded Grammarly: Alexey Shevchenko, Maxim Litvin and Dmitry Lider .

Edition MC Today invited to recall the story of Grammarly and published an excerpt from the book "Startup in a million" Timur Crows.

History in brief

Aleksey Shevchenko and Maxim Litvin met at the end of the 1990's while studying at the International Christian University. It was one of the first fully English-language universities in Ukraine, all the training in it was conducted in English, and the teachers were Native Americans.

It was while studying with two friends that the idea of ​​the first joint business was born - the service of checking student work for plagiarism MyDropBox. Students polls downloaded term papers and homework from the Internet and gave them out as theirs. It was a real headache for both Ukrainian and foreign universities. Teachers could not check the texts for originality and often gave excellent marks for works downloaded by students from the Internet. Tools for checking texts for plagiarism did not exist in principle. In addition to Ukrainians, only one company from California TurnItIn was involved in solving this problem - it appeared after the launch of MyDropBox.

The guys rolled up their sleeves and got down to business. Initially, the startup team consisted of three people: two buddies and one system administrator. Maxim Litvin almost completely wrote the program code of the service and after creating the working technology, friends began to think about monetization.

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Maxim and Alexei tested the service on several pilot clients in Singapore and the USA and started selling licenses for the use of technology to leading American universities. And then they ran into a problem: selling to American customers while in Ukraine was very difficult. As a result, friends decided to move closer to the potential market and continue their education in Western universities. Maxim entered the MBA at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, and Alexey two years later moved to the MBA in Toronto.

These two years, MyDropBox was half asleep. Maxim intensely nibbled on the granite of science, and he had almost no time for sales, and Alexei could help little from Ukraine. But friends were not going to quit what was started - preliminary negotiations with textbook publishers showed that the idea was worthwhile and a profitable business could grow out of it.

After Maxim Litvin moved to Toronto, the partners took up active sales. They were looking for the first paying customers at educational technology conferences. At events, friends collected feedback on the project, got acquainted with representatives of universities and invited them to try the service. The name of the service was not associated with the famous Dropbox file hosting service, as it appeared several years later - in 2007.

In parallel with universities, publishers of educational literature became interested in the service. They supplied MyDropBox complete with textbooks and thus added value to their books. After the sale of the first licenses, the company grew to 12-15 developers in Ukraine and five to six sellers in North America. By 2007, the product was used by 800 universities and about 2 million students. Today, similar services are used by 95% of American universities.

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After the start of sales, MyDropBox joined the Blackboard Developer Network and developed a plugin called SafeAssignment for the largest US educational platform Blackboard, which allowed you to check the work of Blackboard users for plagiarism. The plugin was deeply integrated with the Blackboard and imitated the system interface so that Blackboard users could easily and conveniently work with it.

“We took the path of full product integration, and it shot,” Maxim recalls. SafeAssignment began to grow rapidly, large customers recommended it to each other. In the end, he caught the attention of Blackboard, and the company made a purchase offer to MyDropBox.

Alexey does not name the deal, but, according to him, it was relatively small. One of the conditions of the purchase was a two-year cooperation of Maxim Litvin with the company. During this time, together with the startup team, he had to transfer his knowledge and technologies to his Blackboard colleagues, adapt the system for Blackboard and implement multilingualism support.

Then the third co-founder, Dmitry Leader, joined the Grammarly team. He first worked as a developer at MyDropBox, and after his sale, he led the project to adapt the product to Blackboard requirements. With the founding of Grammarly, Maxim and Alex offered him the role of technical partner in a new project.

While Maxim was in Washington, Alexey Shevchenko and Dmitry Leader began work on a new product to preserve the backbone of the MyDropBox / SafeAssignment team. “From the experience of the previous project, we knew that even native-speaking students in the States have big problems with writing literacy. We had an idea to create a service that would help them write better in English, ”recalls Dmitry Leader.

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At the end of 2008, the first version of the product called EssayRater appeared. A few days before the launch, Ukrainians briefly opened the start page to test integration with AdWords, spent a few dollars on an advertising campaign, and unexpectedly received the first user who bought a subscription worth ten times the cost of advertising.

A year later, it turned out that many buyers of the product use English at work and in everyday life. “We realized that we can make a tool that would be useful to anyone who writes English on the Internet, and decided to move towards the mass market, starting with improving grammar checking,” says Dmitry Leader.

The idea worked, and by the end of 2009, Grammarly was born. In 2010, Brad Hoover, a former partner of the General Catalyst CEO investment fund, joined the team as CEO.

How it works

Grammarly helps users create literate, understandable, and effective texts. The service monitors grammatical errors and stylistic flaws in real time, and also explains how to avoid the repetition of errors in the future.

The algorithm identifies potential problems in the text and offers corrections or recommendations that users can accept or reject. Each correction is accompanied by an explanation of why this turnover is better not to use and what are the alternatives. The product is available both in the free version and by subscription.

Grammarly is available in three browser extensions Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, two desktop applications for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS, as well as in Microsoft Office products. Users can also check an already prepared excerpt of the English text by copying it into the online editor on the site.

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A solution to a similar problem has been struggling for many years at Google and Microsoft. Unlike Grammarly, these companies have almost unlimited financial opportunities and human resources. However, the grammar checking tools in Microsoft Office and Google products are still far from perfect and often miss or show errors where they are not.

According to Alexey Shevchenko, Grammarly from the first days began to use user reviews to improve algorithms. “Our system was imperfect, and we added the ability to vote whether a correction was proposed correctly or not. This smoothed out the negative from mistakes, ”recalls the businessman.

Gradually, these reviews, statistics, and other data received from users helped to improve the verification technology, which now covers more than several hundred categories of text problems. Under the hood, Grammarly is a sophisticated hybrid system combining English rules and machine learning.

How to Get Cisco, Boeing, and Leading US Universities

Despite the huge popularity among ordinary users, the company continues to engage in corporate sales. Grammarly has about 700 corporate customers, including Cisco, Boeing, Dow Jones, Dell, Expedia, Salesforce, and leading US universities.

“For several years of work on MyDropBox, we have well studied the academic market and made many contacts. The first sales of Grammarly were made thanks to this experience and loyal customers of MyDropBox. Buying lists of leads and participating in specialized conferences and exhibitions also worked well, ”says Igor Karpets, head of the corporate sales department of the company.

Igor identifies three points that help Grammarly sell its service to large corporations.

  • Treat the client as a partner, be focused on long-term relationships. First build a relationship and only then sell something. To do this, it is important to study the company and its key decision makers.
  • Be prepared to customize the product to customer needs. In most cases, Bank of America customers present a list of certification and legal requirements, as well as request a series of product changes. Without them, they simply cannot work with suppliers. Compliance with safety criteria, for example, may be more important than functional filling of the product.
  • Hire sales therapists, not Wall Street wolves. Aggressive sales are aimed at a quick deal, which often brings a one-time profit. The seller-therapist will develop relationships with the client, working primarily as a consultant.

Igor notes that in the West, business relationships are often built on trust. “You may be surprised that customers without any questions give access to their systems or send card details to make a payment. But once you submit misrepresented information or fail to fulfill a promise, you will be deleted from your contacts for years, ”he says.

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Sales of licenses to companies and universities brings Grammarly less than 20% of total revenue, but eminent corporate customers increase the reputation of the service and contribute to its promotion. “We write according to the priority of the position: to the president of the company, then to the leaders of the second and third levels. Having four contacts from the corporation that are somehow involved in budgeting, you can try to sell the product, ”- says Igor Karpets.

Grammarly doesn’t strive to “match” the service to the client at any cost. “Customers are not always right. Moreover, they often do not have a clear understanding of what they need. The seller’s goal is to listen to the client and help him formulate the optimal solution, taking into account the budget, timelines, scale, product support, and maximally detail all the details of the service, ”Igor Karpets is sure. He also notes that you should not be too assertive - in North America they do not like this.

Grammarly sometimes uses small tricks to search for contacts of important customers. The company has a whole team called the Lead Generation Team, it is engaged in the search for quality leads. For example, it picks up the email addresses of bosses of large companies.

Priority in cold mailing is given to people who may be responsible for procurement and budget allocation. Grammarly collects a detailed profile of each potential customer and writes personalized letters instead of mass mailings of the same messages.

“The letter itself is written according to the scheme I'm searching for appropriate person who handles copywriting (for a company) or academic resources (for a university). If the letter goes to the president of the company, they mention those officials who have already been written. So it will be easier for him to choose the person responsible and forward the message to him. And the person directly responsible for the procurement will not be able to ignore the letter from the boss, ”Igor Karpets tells AIN.UA.

Naturally, all sales staff are fluent in English and at least lived or studied in the United States. By the way, the current CEO of the company, Brad Hoover, got acquainted with the service precisely because he wanted to learn to write more literally.

Work with social networks and service promotion among users

Like the vast majority of modern IT companies, Grammarly sells its products exclusively online. Therefore, the company does not have offices in all countries where it operates. Kyiv residents are looking for customers using standard methods of promotion: banner advertising, search engine optimization, content marketing, email newsletters and SMM. “We tried to take on everything at once, looked at what works best, and invested more resources there,” says Litvin to AIN.UA.

Grammarly works best on social media promotion. The first subscribers to Grammarly received thanks to requests from friends to “like” the page. At that time, Facebook was not overloaded with information, as it is now, and people eagerly subscribed to communities with interesting materials.

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After this method has exhausted itself, the company thought about what their potential users want to see and what they want to share with their friends. From the very first days, Grammarly refused direct advertising of the service on social networks and made a bet on interesting content for people who are interested in developing and improving themselves. Many of them are loyal users of the service. Convincing a person to pay for a service using social networks is not easy, but still possible.

For example, a user can go to the Grammarly website by clicking on the infographic with a list of 10 most popular errors in the resume. Grammarly will have a more detailed article on the same topic. And already in the article itself - a banner or message in the style of "Install our application - and it will automatically fix all these errors." Such methods often work, because a person already understands the value of the product and is friendly to it.

According to Kimberly Jocky's SMM manager, social networks need to behave as naturally and quickly as possible to adapt to changes in Facebook itself: internal social network algorithms, audience preferences and other things. “Creating a loyal community takes more than one month, but if you publish interesting and useful content all this time, then it ultimately works,” says Kimberly.

Entertainment posts also work great: GIFs, short videos, and live streams. “We follow the interests of our audience and try to choose topics that are interesting to users,” notes Grammarly SMM manager Celeste Mora. For example, posts with involving headings in the style of "Check if you are ready to return for school desk" "go" very well.

It is noteworthy that the multi-million army of subscribers is overseen by a team of only a few people. Two employees are responsible for the compilation and publication of posts, the designer creates viral images, and engineers, developers and even the company's management offer ideas for posts on social networks.

Employee motivation and teamwork

It is extremely difficult to find bad reviews about Grammarly as an employer on the Internet. The company regularly takes prizes in the ranking of the best IT employers in Ukraine.

Grammarly pays a lot of attention to developing a healthy and productive inner culture.

According to Dmitry Leader, an ideal corporate culture should reflect the values ​​of the team and help the company achieve its goals. “I am very pleased to see Grammarly today, and I am inspired by her tomorrow. I can confidently say that we now have the best team that I have ever worked with in my life, ”he says.

“We are a startup, and this leaves an imprint on so many things: philosophy, culture, a sense of urgency. It’s extremely important for us that we all understand that startups need growth and that every person in the company should contribute to this growth, ”says Aleksey Shevchenko.

“We are looking for people who are consistent with our values ​​and culture, want to gain experience in a fast-growing company with a global audience and grow with it. The work process is built very transparently, and every employee from the very beginning understands what tasks he faces and what results are expected from him.

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Material motivation does not stand in the first place simply because self-development and involvement in creating a product that helps millions of people around the world are of great value to us, ”adds Anatoly Visikirsky, manager of the Kiev office.

For many people, Grammarly is primarily associated with grammar checking. But, according to the founders, the company has set a much more ambitious goal: to improve the quality of communication in the modern world with the help of technology, to help people, and in the future, possibly machines, communicate effectively.

“This is a project for years. We want to show the history of Grammarly that in Ukraine there are good opportunities for creating high-tech businesses, and to contribute to the development of the product development community and artificial intelligence technologies. I would be very happy if our example inspires one of the readers to implement their own ideas, ”summarizes Dmitry Leader.

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