This is the motto of an online app for the spell and grammar check by a Ukrainian start-up Grammarly. It is well known overseas, the western media, RopTenReviews in particular, includes it to the lists of the most successful technology companies – by 2017 Grammarly was the first “the best online app for spell check with 9, 68 rating. However, the app isn’t very popular in Ukraine.
The Grammarly company has offices in San-Francisco and New York. However, the main team of developers is still based in Kyiv. The company has been put in the top best IT employers of Ukraine for many years. 150 people are now working here, however, in 2008 there were only three friends Oleksiy Shevchenko, Maksym Litvin and Dmytro Lider.
Since 2002, they have been working on MyDropBox program, a plagiarism checker for academic papers. The developers started to collaborate with universities (in the USA as well), and up to 2007, their product was used by 800 universities and about two million students. Then, the company started to think of market development. They sold MyDropBox to a current market leader Blackboard and started to work on Grammarly.
At first, they just created a tool, which allowed to make a text mistakes-free. For professional and academic correspondence was more frequently conducted via the Internet. In the beginning, they needed to choose a language. It had to be the most frequently used language – English is spoken by 2 billion people, and this number is dramatically increasing. There is the biggest number of resources (data, algorithms) created for English. The target group of the project was business. Actually, in the beginning, these were universities which were expected to use the product, however later, it became clear that universities were buying it quite slowly, and the process of a product integration was very inert. Meanwhile, private users made a quick decision towards buying the program and could easily use it. So, in 2010, founders changed their strategy and started to offer their product to those who use English in everyday life.
There are other services and apps in this segment except Grammarly. However, Grammarly tended to persuade users that their offer was the best on the market, being even more efficient than similar products by Google or Microsoft which also have some flaws. For example, Microsoft Office doesn’t always find misprints or indicates mistakes when actually there are none of them.
“We turned our flaw into our advantage,” founders of Grammarly tell journalists. “Our system wasn’t flawless, that’s why we added a vote function which lets a user say whether a correction was indicated rightly. On the one hand, it made users’ negative experience less when the app was wrong, on the other hand, step by step, it helped to improve the program. Due to users, Grammarly boosted its efficiency.” The app involves artificial intelligence technologies and adds a recommendation base with data received from users. According to the Privacy Policy, the application uses only those documents which users save voluntarily in the Grammarly base. As the program has a wide target group, it allowed analysing much more information. The base with more than 250 main rules and some thousands of sub-rules was created. The project began being developed and improved much more rapidly.
The rules used by Grammarly are the same for the English language as well as for its American and other dialects. Ambiguous and slang issues are ignored by the program. For example, if a user writes gonna instead of going to, the program won’t correct the text. It just can say that coma was omitted.
Universality and relevance of the platform let avoid mistakes in writing, however, it isn’t the only advantage of the app. Today, Grammarly helps users on three levels at once. The first is a basic mechanics of writing which involves a check of spell, punctuation, grammar and construction of sentences.
The second level includes proofreading, dealing with stop-words, repetitions etc. which make a text harder to read.
The second level provides proofreading taking into account context and style. During such a check, the program can highlight expressions which seem aggressive or interfere with gender-neutral lexis policy. The company is still working on the efficiency of this level. In future, the app will be able to indicate the presence and relevance of jokes. It means that Grammarly is gradually turning from a spell check service into a comprehensive artificial editor.
After the analysis is completed, the application doesn’t just correct a text but offers a user option of corrections to be made and provide explanations and recommendations. On the one hand, it makes a user friendlier to the platform, on the other hand, it helps a user to improve his or her language skills. This way, Grammarly teaches and goes on learning and adapting to never-ending changing language norms.
Grammarly can check a text of any size. Besides, the service can show statistics of mistakes and check English letters in e-mail programmes.
Up to 2015, Grammarly was a pay service. But then, the company shifted to a freemium-model which opens a basic version for all users. It resulted in a dramatic increase in the audience. Some years later, Grammarly has got into all spheres of life where written English is used. The service is popular in business, marketing and support spheres, as well as in educational institutions and among people who work much with e-mails and social networks.
According to the founders, the differentiation between free and pay versions is simple. A free version offers all the needed functions to omit a mistake which can lead to a decrease of a text value. A pay version has all the functions to “polish” a text. It includes an improved manual check, plagiarism checker, a bigger amount of mistakes (a free version provides check only for 400 mistakes) and recommendations towards a text editing according to a style given. The service works with more than 30 styles of writing including academic, medical, business-style etc.
A free version is a full version. It is not a cut product which stops working in a month or week. A free version can check a small motivational letter, especially taking into account that the interface is ultimately friendly. A freemium-model of subscription has brought to the company 15 million active daily users, the most of them are from English-speaking countries.
A number of users are enough to make a company profitable, finance administrative overheads, marketing etc. Grammarly works with 1000 universities and companies such as Expedia, Penn State University, Phoenix University, DeVry University, University of Illinois, Dell, NASA, Microsoft and Cisco Systems.
“Our goal,” the developers say, “is not to teach everybody with a grammar book but to improve a mutual understanding and efficiency of communication among people. Communication is ultimately important for a modern economy. Today, most of the people work not manually somewhere at a factory but create knowledge which is presented in the form of a text – communication. If we can improve it at least by some per cent – it will show an increased efficiency of team, company or social group work.”
Some universities such as Central Michigan University and the Australian University of Applied Psychology, as clients of the service, have made a research on the influence of using Grammarly on the academic progress of students. The study revealed whether students became better communicators or improved their text-writing skills. It turned out that Grammarly influences the academic progress of students as well as their text-writing skills. Students who had been using the app for some time passed tests more efficiently and showed better literacy, even without the help of the app.
However, the service is not going to add new languages. According to the developers, success requires a focus on a consumer market, which is estimated at more than 90% of users. Adding more languages, the founders believe, will slow down the progress. The aim is to achieve a certain level of check and deepness of help to users even if there is only one language.
A big advantage of the service is an ability to interact with all the key platforms including an extension for browsers and PC programs. The service works with Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Windows and Mac soft wares for PCs. There is an application for MS Office, Outlook and web-app. The Grammarly extension for Chrome Web Store with more than 10 million users is one of the most popular. The service can also be used in Google Docs.
For a long time, money received from the selling the previous MyDropBox project let the founders develop Grammarly by own efforts – according to the bootstrapping model when a business is built on small funding provided by external sources or when there is no funding at all. However, in 2017, the Ukrainian project raised record investments of 110 million dollars. The generosity of investors General Catalyst, IVP and Spark Capital is accounted for the fact that Grammarly has already proved its sustainability and already become profitable. Money was used to hire more people and to improve the algorithm.
The company started to create some content in social networks (Grammarly and Grammarly Kyiv on Facebook) – from tips on CV and professional e-mails writing to researches of policymakers’ literacy.
Grammarly invests in the Ukrainian technical education helping different universities of the country. Last year, a new client joined the platform – the Lviv Ukrainian Catholic University which has English-speaking programs. This way, Grammarly helps to define Ukraine as a technological centre of eastern Europe.
“Ukrainians now often develop some completed foreign ideas, unfortunately, we don’t have many own projects. We are the part of this community. That’s why we get benefit straight from its development. As Ukrainians and as a company with Ukrainian origin, we are responsible for that,” Dmytro Lider says. By the way, Grammarly IT-manager is connected with many interesting projects in Ukraine. For example, a famous project which was created at the beginning of the Revolution of Dignity – Galas. It was designed on the basis of an open platform Ushahidi to coordinate cooperativeness on November 30, when all the protestors on Maidan were attacked by special police units and dispersed. The website was created in 24 hours, as well as a hotline for SMS, pages in social networks. Volunteer-operators were involved and contacts among managers in different corners of Maidan were set. Except for all these, the Galas team helped to bring dozens of tons of woods to Maidan so people could be in warmth.
Text by Hanna Drozd
