We bootstrapped for 8 years before taking a single dollar of venture capital. By the time investors showed up, we were already profitable. That changes the power dynamic completely.
Everyone writes. CEOs, students, customer support agents, engineers writing Slack messages at 2 AM. Writing is the most universal skill and the most universally bad one. That is our market — everyone.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, we had hundreds of engineers in Kyiv. We had to keep them safe, keep the product running, and keep competing with Google and Microsoft simultaneously. That was the hardest year of my life.
Google has AI writing in Docs. Microsoft has Copilot in Word. Apple has writing tools in iOS. And 30 million people still use Grammarly every day. That tells you something about how hard it is to build a great writing assistant.
We started as a plagiarism detection tool for universities. Turns out helping people write better was a much bigger business than catching people who write badly.
The browser extension was the most important product decision we ever made. It made Grammarly work everywhere — Gmail, Google Docs, LinkedIn, Twitter. You install it once and forget it is there until it saves you from sending an embarrassing email.