
How Grammarly Grew to 6.9M Daily Users in 9 Years - allenleein
https://producthabits.com/how-grammarly-quietly-grew-its-way-to-7-million-daily-users/
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gumboshoes
It's a shame its product sucks so bad. I see compliments here, but every test
I've done comes up terribly short. Perhaps the bar is set rather low because
people are comparing it to Microsoft Word's built-in tools, which are so
incompetent they're easy to improve upon. And I say this a linguist and
lexicographer who has written three language-related books. Many copyeditors I
know, too, find themselves having to clean up Grammarly's work when an author
uses it on an MS to decrease the amount of work/money needed for a copyeditor.

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yoz-y
> And I say this a linguist and lexicographer who has written three language-
> related books.

I know this is an easy mistake to make but in this context the irony is
palpable.

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tentaTherapist
What's the mistake?

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yoz-y
It should be "I say this _as_ a linguist..."

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shubhamjain
Grammarly is a great tool. I never forget to check my article with it before
publishing. If you had asked me a few years ago how much would anyone pay for
a Grammar-checking tool, I would have guessed it would be no more that $3-4 /
month. Grammarly charges $29 a month. Of course, its value can be measured
with the improved communication but $29 _is_ a lot. It's amazing that it
convinced people that it's worth it.

High price point is the only reason why I haven't gotten around purchasing its
premium plan even though I think it would very beneficial for me.

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hobofan
$30/month is a lot, I agree with you there, but there is also the quarterly
billing for $20/month, and the annual one for $12/month. I highly suspect that
the monthly billing price is a decoy price to make the $20/month look cheaper.

Personally, I've been a premium user for more than a year now, and it has
become an invaluable tool for me, especially as a non-native English speaker.
$20/month is not too cheap, but I feel like it's worth it for the boost in
professionalism that all my writing gets.

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CincinnatiMan
That's a good point regarding the $29/month being a decoy price. By the way
for anyone curious, that concept I think is known as anchor pricing or price
anchoring, if you want to read up on it some more.

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jcampbell1
This article completely leaves off any mention of Adwords. Grammarly
absolutely crushed it with Adwords on the content network. There was so much
cheap inventory they were able to buy such as on dictionary sites.

There is a bit of a Y Combinator attitude against buying advertising to build
a startup. If it ain't viral, then the product isn't good enough.
Unfortunately, a grammar checker isn't exactly something you tell your friends
about, but it is quite cheap to tell the world with cheap display ads on
dictionary site garbage inventory. Advertising is a really good option when
there is cheap inventory in the niche, and a profitable CPA can be
established.

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citricsquid
I'm also surprised that wasn't mentioned as they advertise a lot on YouTube
too, they have over 200,000,000 combined views on their YouTube adverts. Paid
advertising is a major component of their strategy.

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jcampbell1
The first rule of paid advertising, is don't talk about paid advertising.
Customers don't like to think they "fell" for an ad, and the advertising is
often secret sauce. It is pretty easy to duplicate a technical product, and
actually reasonably easy to copy the advertising. The big difference is most
tech/product guys look down on advertising. Also many make the mistake of
pricing lower than the competitor which means lower margins to buy
advertising, losing every ad auction, and never getting off the ground.

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garrettdimon
As a Grammarly user, the thing that's been most surprising is that there's no
option for an API to integrate with other tools. I guess with the growth
they've experienced, there's not a lot of pressure to expand it, but it seems
like a world of opportunity. I'm sure there are some good reasons, like the
editing experience or API abuse, but their tool simply isn't the best overall
writing experience.

To be able to use Grammarly within Sublime text or other editors would be
incredible. As it stands, because you're forced to copy and past content over
into their editor, the workflow is the biggest drawback. It's really handy in
textareas on the web, but I've struggled to integrate it into my writing
workflow because of the copy/paste process. Writing mainly in Markdown doesn't
make it any more elegant either.

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dspillett
There is an open source engine offering similar features that might be a
better candidate for other products to integrate with -
[https://www.languagetool.org/](https://www.languagetool.org/)

I've been meaning to have a play with it as a potential replacement for
Grammarly before the special offer subscription of that is due to renew in a
couple of months (though if I keep the special offer rate it is probably just
as well for me to stick with Grammarly).

It is Java based which may put off a lot of projects from including it
directly in their desktop or mobile products, but they could host their own
instance and have their applications submit data to that. Assuming the extra
admin (keeping the service running & up-to-date, and monitoring/enforcing API-
key use if they don't want the service to become de-facto public once other
developers notice it exists) and hosting costs would not be too high, of
course.

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tyingq
I assume Grammarly, via the plugin, can read every piece of data you use on
the web. Emails, etc.

Are they upfront about their plans to use (or not) this data?

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Rainymood
You (others) probably clicked "accept ToS" without fully reading them. Oh
well. If its free then you're the product.

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zeveb
A little-known fact is that Grammarly is a Common Lisp app:
[https://tech.grammarly.com/blog/running-lisp-in-
production](https://tech.grammarly.com/blog/running-lisp-in-production)

~~~
kgwgk
They use clojure as well (instead?).

[https://tech.grammarly.com/blog/building-etl-pipelines-
with-...](https://tech.grammarly.com/blog/building-etl-pipelines-with-clojure)

[https://www.grammarly.com/jobs/engineering/software-
engineer...](https://www.grammarly.com/jobs/engineering/software-engineer-
functional-programming?gh_jid=793339)

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AdamSC1
While I love the detailed growth article, I've been disappointed by Grammarly
recently.

It used to do a really good job fixing my notes, but I feel like it's
detection ability dropped off a cliff recently. I've had some pieces with
pretty obvious mistakes that it has previously caught not get highlighted on a
regular basis.

I saw the same thing happen with FoxType's V1 product, and then they pivoted
away from it and eventually closed.

I wonder if there is some issue in aggregating people's writing mistakes into
AI that lowers its value over time?

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ajmarsh
I love the weekly report. You are more productive than x% of Grammarly users.
You are more accurate than y%. X always makes me feel good, Y not so much.

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SparkyMcUnicorn
This week I got 80% for accuracy! It's usually... lower.

If it didn't invade privacy, I wish I could know who I was competing against.
I consistently get "You used more unique words than x% of Grammarly users."
where x is always 95% or more, but I didn't think my vocabulary was top 5%
territory.

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e12e
Hm, I was half-expecting to see "by starting from 2500 users and managing 10%
monthly growth" :)

But:

> By the time Grammarly transitioned to freemium, it was already profitable
> with millions of users—and could fund a freemium plan to drive even more new
> user acquisition.

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DoctorMemory
It might be an apples to oranges comparison but does 6.9 million DAU seem low?
My expectations for DAU were set by working in the game industry. Both for
Zynga (back in the CityVille days) and for some mobile game companies. If by
DAU they mean "people who pay $11 or more per month" then that does sound
decent. But if that number is free and paid it seems a little low over all. Of
course if you look at the stats for F2P, web, or mobile games that launched in
2008 maybe 6.9 million is still a good number for their DAU.

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coldcode
It's useless to me as I write in markdown in an app, not plain text in a web
browser. How can this be useful? I don't really care about my Facebook posts,
I care about my blog posts.

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ajmarsh
It works with MS office as well as having their own editor you can use. For
unsupported apps, I just cut and paste it into their editor.

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CapnCrunchie
It's interesting that they started off selling to universities. This is the
same strategy that Qualtrics used, where they started with Universities then
moved into enterprise:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/qualtrics-
raises-180-million-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/qualtrics-
raises-180-million-at-25-billion-valuation-2017-4)

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StephenConnell
I liked it and it improved my writing. I stopped using it after I noticed that
it was leaving css classes in wysiwyg editors that were showing up on websites
that I had edited.

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_pmf_
Probably with their catchy, absolutely non-cringey video clips.

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icantrank
Used it for a month and got annoyed at pay2play popups. Chrome spellchecker
will do.

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st3fan
Isn’t this a patent minefield?

