Opinion
Max Litvin believes Grammarly's $13 billion valuation is conservative
“I still think it's a conservative, it's conservative one.”
Opinion
Max Litvin claims Grammarly has no direct competitors in an untouched market
“So I wouldn't say that there are any kind of direct competitors at this point. And I'm not too worried about competition, frankly, because it's just such a new field that most of the market is just untouched by anybody.”
Assertion Supported
Grammarly publicly disclosed its $13 billion funding valuation
“So we raised at thirteen billion valuation, and we disclosed that valuation.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Grammarly research shows improved writing habits transfer to users' spoken communication
“When we do user research, we notice that people who use Grammarly repeatedly adopt patterns of communication, more effective patterns of communication, translated to non-written communication as well. So for example, if Grammarly keeps suggesting that you don'…”
Insight
Grammarly relied on paid marketing early for rapid messaging feedback loops
“We relied on paid early on quite a bit because it's a very quick feedback loop. You design an ad, you send it or kind of put it in the system and then you get back resolve like within hours. And it tells you if the message resonates, if there is a market for t…”
Disclosure
Grammarly's cloud processing costs are comparable to its entire company payroll
“I would say it's comparable. Hosting costs are like, even though we don't host much of the data, like we're not like Dropbox where we store files but the processing is quite expensive”
Disclosure
Grammarly does not monetize its tens of millions of free users
“We have tens of millions of free users who are not paying us anything. And we're not, we don't monetize them in any way at all. Cause we don't sell user data. We don't show ads. We don't do any of that. So basically all the free users are not monetized until t…”
Opinion
Max Litvin does not view Hemingway Editor as a Grammarly competitor
“They do something that's similar and something that's basically part of what we do, and a number of people use both products simultaneously, so we don't view them as a competitor because they don't take business from us,”
Disclosure
Grammarly shifted its flagship product to an OS-level integration in 2021
“We just recently switched over to our flagship product being operating system level integration.
So it works similarly to Chrome plugin, except it integrates with all the apps, not just web apps.
so that's that was a big switchover that happened in December.
…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Grammarly was already profitable when it hired outside CEO Brad Hoover
“We were making good revenue and being profitable at the time already. But the company was still very small.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Grammarly's co-founders spent nearly $1 million of personal savings before launching
“I think it was close to a million.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Grammarly's first version produced approximately 50% false positives
“And the result was probably half of it was real issues and half of it was false positives.”
Assertion Supported
Grammarly charged approximately $95 per year for its initial product
“We charged, I think, 90 dollars a year, something like that. Yeah. Yeah, or a hundred. Yeah, I think 95 dollars a year.”
Disclosure
Grammarly focused purely on consumers after B2B sales lagged early on
“We launched two parallel streams. One to consumers and one to businesses educational institutions, publishers basic companies, consulting companies, and the consumer channel took off. Like, it grew exponentially from basically week one. And enterprise or B to …”
Disclosure
Grammarly raised its first $120 million without disclosing its valuation
“Yeah, that was yeah, that was 120 and we didn't disclose valuation at the time.”
Assertion Supported
Blackboard acquired Max Litvin's plagiarism detection startup MyDropbox in 2007
“My company was my Dropbox. Not to be confused with Dropbox. It was a plagiarism detection company, and it was bought by Blackboard in 2007.”
