How Grammarly Grew to 7 Million Daily Users
By: Tameem Rahman
Tags: Branding, Marketing, Digital Marketing, Business, Business Strategy

As you can imagine, developing the cutting edge technology that Grammarly uses today wasn’t easy. But, instead of trying to build a perfect system from the get-go, they remained humble and relied heavily on user feedback.

Screenshot by author

As feedback kept streaming in, constant tweaks were made for development. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s services remained relatively stagnant.

Grammarly was more concerned about the quality of their product than they were about their public image or attracting investors.

They also learned to adapt and move with the market.

Originally, they advertised their grammar-checking services on Facebook but soon realized that this wasn’t enough. People have an ego sometimes and most will trust themselves with their grammar. Paying for that kind of novel service is almost insulting and embarrassing.

Grammarly needed something bigger, something most people aren’t as confident in. So, they started to craft content around other professional skills, like resume-writing tips and professional email-writing advice.

In 2014, they also expanded their horizons to Microsoft services like Word and Outlook by launching MS plugins.

This was one of the best decisions Grammarly could have made.

Not only did they attract the large audience that Microsoft had, but now, they brought Grammarly to the consumer. Whereas before we lived like cavemen, going to their website and copying and pasting or uploading our documents, now, we didn’t have to go anywhere and grammatical edits would be fed to us.

The process now had significantly less friction and people love when things are made easier for them — we’re inherently lazy.

That year, Grammarly had achieved 2,326% revenue growth from 2009, with over three million registered users.

Just when you think that they couldn’t make more smart decisions…they made another smart decision.

Unlike most companies, Grammarly didn’t start with a freemium model. They actually monetized backward.

In the beginning, they charged universities for their service and used the revenue to improve the core product. Then, they expanded to the larger consumer market and charged 11.99 per month. Once they generated enough revenue and became considerably profitable, they were able to afford and self-fund a freemium plan.

This expedited consumer acquisition because everyone likes free stuff.

But that wasn’t the only benefit. There was another strategic reason behind their free version: it would act as a logical upsell path for their premium version.

The idea was to get us habituated to the benefits of the free product, and gradually, we could be nudged into purchasing the premium model. To accomplish this, Grammarly restricted some important features like style recommendations, plagiarism detection, and advanced grammar checks.

We can’t complain because their regular freemium services are already so compelling and noticeably better than Microsoft’s or Google’s. We could only imagine what the premium version was like unless we bought it.

In a nutshell, Grammarly used profitable niches like education (universities) to fund its growth before building out a freemium business to rapidly expand.

Later in 2016, after seeing the success with their MS plugins, Grammarly decided to create a free chrome extension. This allowed their little grammar gadget to sit at the bottom-right corner on pretty much any webpage ready to flash that red line under our English.

See what I mean? (Screenshot by author)

And that about brings us to now. At this point, if you don’t at least know what Grammarly is or does, then I have one question for you: How’s the rock you’re living under? Cozy?

Attracting consumers is only half the equation, you gotta make ‘em stay, too.

That’s where brand loyalty comes in. Grammarly consistently tries to build a relationship with their user, and by consistent, I mean every week.