Plagiarism Tool Becomes Platform

A story about how Grammarly evolved from a narrow academic tool to a massive communication platform.

"I had a plagiarism detection company called MyDropbox (not to be confused with Dropbox) that was bought by Blackboard in 2007. It was a relatively small success - the education market was difficult and our product was narrow, just doing one thing for one group of people. We saw it could grow, but further growth would be slow and difficult, so we decided to sell.

The breakthrough moment with Grammarly came when we realized we could help not just professional writers, but casual writers - people who write as part of their job or life but aren't novelists or researchers. When we saw we could make a product useful for everybody, it clicked.

We used a simple formula: If you look at the amount of time humanity spends communicating and creating knowledge, it's a huge percentage of our time. It's increasing because we're spending less time manufacturing and doing things with our hands. If you take this time we spend communicating and make it even 1% more effective, the impact is in the trillions, not even billions. We asked ourselves: can we do something that makes communication 1% more effective on average for everybody? That seemed doable, so we decided to pursue it.

Now we're valued at $13 billion, and I still think that's conservative. Grammarly is a very nonstandard company and product - it's easy to see it for less than what it is, but that also helps with less competition."