Founders Invest Previous Exit

A story about how much initial investment it took to build the first version of Grammarly.

"We invested close to a million dollars, but it was a product that worked only for a very small audience and use case. It wasn't real-time - you'd write a book chapter or research paper, submit it to the old Grammarly, then go make a cup of coffee, drink it, wait a bit more, and then it would give you results.

The results were probably half real issues and half false positives, but the target market was fine with that. If you spent 2 months writing a book, what's an extra half hour to review potential issues? But that wouldn't work with business writers - if you're writing a business email you need to send in 20 seconds, you're not going to deal with false positives.

Because of our previous exit, we had substantial savings we could put into Grammarly. We were both founders and first investors. We hired quite a significant number of people and had a technical cofounder who helped build out the technical team."