Why Grammarly is my favorite tech product
A perfect combination of intuitive design, powerful engineering, and robust business model/product strategy.
I once had a conversation with my friends where we discussed how technology has changed our lives. When we were kids, everything is manual/analog. The first cool technology I was aware of as a kid was this big blocky Nokia phone with a huge antenna.
As we were amazed by it, suddenly, my friend asked me, “What is the best product you have ever used? Why is that?”
The answer to that is difficult because there are a lot of great products available to us now. However, upon much contemplation, I came up with an answer: Grammarly, and I’d like to share the reason “why” with all of you here.
Note: This article refers to the product version on 14 June 2020.
How do I define the “best”/”favorite” product?
I believe a great product has to possess three things: well-designed, novel engineering, and a robust business model/product strategy. I will deep-dive on each of these points in the later section.
What is Grammarly?
Grammarly is a cross-platform tool that instantly enables users to check their written English. This includes grammar and spelling check, vocabulary enhancement, conciseness check, among many others.
What are the pain points it is trying to address?
There are a lot of pain points that Grammarly is trying to address. Below are three of them:
a. Users typically make mistakes when they write. Having someone/a tool that instantly helps users check our writing quality would help them avoid writing errors like typos or grammatical errors.
b. Users tend to follow the same patterns when they write. They are following the same structures and using the same words. Although there is nothing wrong with that, it dulls their writing.
c. Users mostly understand what they write. However, some users could not translate their thoughts into writing as easily. As a result, readers don’t understand the key message from users’ writings.
Why is it my favorite products: Intuitive design, powerful engineering, and robust business model/product strategy
Grammarly is my favorite tech products due to three things:
- Intuitive and simple design — Grammarly is designed so that users have a low learning curve (easily learned) and able to and efficient in solving pain points. Grammarly would simply highlight words that it thinks are incorrect/ineffective and suggest to users on how to fix it. Additionally, it does it in a simple red underline to show it to the user. It does not unnecessarily clutter the view/document users are editing. I typically use Grammarly to review my writing. Its design helped me to quickly and easily review my grammar mistakes in my writing in a few minutes (for a couple of pages document).
2. Powerful engineering — Grammarly, at its essence, is a grammar checking machine. The combinations of focusing on well-defined grammatical rules in English, Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and continuous user feedback allow Grammarly to provide high users satisfactions and relatively accurate results. It sets up basic English grammatical rules, combines it with NLP-based AI to learn how to understand and process human languages, and then train it using a corpus (large dataset of sentences & writings with the correct and incorrect use of grammars/language). Additionally, Grammarly also lets users give feedback on their quality by selecting “Ignore” on its suggestion. This can be used to continuously improving its machine accuracy.
3. Robust business model/product strategy — Two key product strategy decisions make Grammarly successful:
a. Focus on written English and grammatical errors — Instead of focusing as an all-powerful English correction company (i.e., focusing itself to also become a real-time, voice-based, multi-language examiner), Grammarly positioned its product first and foremost as an English writing grammar checker, and therefore it has been successful. Language processing is difficult to master as it requires context. A sentence has to be tied together with the previous sentences to provide context. This ability to connect sentences to create context is complex, even with the most advanced NLP AI. On the other hand, grammar follows a certain set of preset rules. This allows Grammarly to provide a reliable product.
b. Embed itself in many ecosystems — Grammarly decided to embed itself in many different products/ecosystem (i.e., Microsoft Outlook, mobile phone keyboards, browser extension app such as Gmail, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, stand-alone desktop app, even in Medium) rather than forcing users to stay in their ecosystem of products. This makes Grammarly easier to use and be able to ever-present and increase their use-cases for users. I found this decision to be very useful. This helps me to use Grammarly efficiently wherever and whenever I need it. Grammarly helped me to instantly check my writing quality as I write this article within the Google Chrome ecosystem. Imagine how inefficient it would be if Grammarly is not available as Google Chrome add-on. I would have to write my article in Medium, copy and paste everything to Grammarly desktop app, check the resulting quality, copy and paste it back to Medium, and then check the formatting in Medium.
Comparison to Similar Product
As a non-native English (speaker and) writer, my biggest objective in writing is to write a document/article with no grammatical errors with minimum effort and time. I will compare Grammarly with similar products with this perspective in mind.
There are numerous products similar to Grammarly available in the market. ProWritingAid is arguably an equally popular competitor to Grammarly. Grammarly’s design is simpler compared to ProWritingAid. ProWritingAid gives explanations behind its suggestions so that users could learn how to improve their writing. Although this feature is useful, I do not need it as a user (Remember my definition of a ‘user’ in the earlier paragraph).
Based on my limited grammatical error test, Grammarly also performs better than ProWritingAid. It identifies grammatical errors more accurately.
How to improve Grammarly?
Despite being my favorite product, Grammarly has some areas of improvement, especially in its business model.
On driving trials on premium features — Grammarly could more actively incentivize users to shift from free to premium users. Most free users will only know that Grammarly answers their basic needs, which is to fix their written grammatical errors. Grammarly could select users with usage high-frequency and enable select premium features for users to try for a period of time. This concept works well in gaming apps such as Mobile Legend to incentivize users to try out new heroes (features). Being able to try it out before making any commitment would increase users’ likelihood to purchase the hero (features).
On paid offerings—Grammarly pricing is considered expensive (with no refund) compared to its alternatives like ProWritingAid and WhiteSmoke. Although I believe it is reasonable to not provide any type of refund (some users might misused it and only activate this feature because they need it only for a short period of time), Grammarly can break down their features so users can access some premium features but not pay for the full premium price, for example, creating a free, standard, and premium features. However, this strategy will work only if there is a significant portion of users that would be willing to pay from “free” to “standard” features with minimum trade down from users in “premium” to “standard” segment.
The combination of intuitive design, powerful engineering, and robust business model/product strategy results in high ratings from multiple sources: 4.3 in Apple Store (23K ratings), 4.1 by Google Play Store (75K ratings), and 4 by PCMag. Grammarly is also valued at USD 1 Bn+ according to TechCrunch in October 2019.
