ProWritingAid’s Phenomenal Growth Story With Lisa Lepki

Yeah. So for for about eight years, I was working doing PR for an arts PR agency. So I worked with English National Ballet and Blue Mind group and all kinds of really big theater and dance and comedy companies. And I had just finished a big project when my friend Chris told me that he had just started this little software company, and I would help him a little bit with some of the early marketing messages and to build the first website and that sort of thing. He’s an old friend of mine. We met on a bus in Vietnam about in about 2001 or something like that. And he’s, he’s done a million different jobs. He’s one of those guys that is really imaginative and creative, and was in the middle of writing this book. But then he also has that sort of coding mind as well. And so he is this bridge between these two kinds of brains that that is kind of magical.

And so just to keep him, so then he was, he was doing a job, and broke his ankle and ended up having to stay in bed for ages, and so to keep himself busy, instead of just watching crap TV like the rest of us would, he just invented a little algorithm and some software to help him edit his own book and then put it online, and people started using it, and then became completely obsessed with all the different ways that computers can help writers find issues in their writing. Five years later…

Yeah, and I don’t even think he’s ever really taken a coding course. He just wanted to figure it out and taught himself. He can get super zeroed in and just figure anything out. Our whole company is really DIY. If you want something done, you figure out how to do it. If you want a blog for the company, you figure out how to build it and design it. We don’t really hire agencies. Everyone just figures it out.

Okay, so we have this amazing team of computational linguists. What those are is—they’re experts in the English language. It’s their job to figure out how language works and how every word works together. Then they use what they’ve learned to look at published writing compared to amateur writing. They look for the differences and common stats, and then they use that info from thousands of books to find things in your writing that are different from published work.

So, for example, in successful, traditionally published writing, people use passive voice in fewer than 50 out of 1,000 sentences. And just for anyone listening—passive voice is like, instead of saying “John threw the ball,” you say, “The ball was thrown by John.” It’s the same words, just different order. That’s easy for a computer to pick up and measure. So if you’ve written something and our software finds that you’re using it 200 times out of 1,000, for example, it flags that for you. It’ll say, “You’re probably doing this too much.” And then it shows you the sentences that are problematic so you can rewrite them to be more engaging. Readers can just absorb active voice better than passive.

Take that example and multiply it by 1,000. Our software has literally thousands of rules and suggestions. It’s like having a copy editor tap you on the shoulder saying, “Hey, how about this?” Maybe this sentence is overly complicated. Maybe you’ve used an adverb where a stronger verb would work better.

And we also include teaching around it—so if you get flagged for passive voice, there’s a video explaining why it matters, or a blog post to help you improve. The ultimate goal is to help you become a better writer while you’re editing your own work.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, we—because we’re all writers at heart—we’ve built everything around what we think would be useful for us as writers.

And so in your basic spelling and grammar checker, it just tells you, “You should fix this,” and you don’t get any of the understanding behind it, and you’re not really building your skills, you’re just finding mistakes. And a lot of the other grammar checkers in our sort of vertical are the same, whereas we really want to help all of our writers become the best writers that they can be.

And so whether they’re students and they’re trying to write good essays, then we try and include lots of content beyond just the copy editing side of things that our app does. But we also have a blog that has tons of information about how to write a good essay, or how to write really good content, or how to use it as a teacher, or how to use it at work, and that sort of side of things.

So we really try—and our biggest focus in marketing has been inbound marketing. We just try and create all of the things that we think would be useful for writers. And we just thought, if we build it, they will come. And they’ve come, for sure.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, eventually writers shouldn’t even need us. That would be great.

Yeah, no, that never happens. I mean, even though I know all of these rules off by heart—and I’ve talked, you know, for hours and hours and hours of my life about the importance of not using adverbs, for example—I’ll still write something, and when I go back and read my first draft, I’ll have made all of the same mistakes in it.

But then it highlights it, and then I can fix them, right? As opposed to having to go through them and starting from scratch.

Everybody needs to be a better writer. Even if you don’t want to be a writer, you still—you know, everybody that’s at work is writing emails all day and writing reports and doing, I don’t know, all kinds of things. Almost every part of work now involves some sort of writing. So the more you can improve your communication skills—even if it’s just to write email—then great. That just makes you sound smarter.

It didn’t exist back then, did it? It’s a whole new world.

Yeah, I think the main—the thing that makes us really different is that we really focus on learning, and it’s something that we’re trying to do even more of.

We now—as of about eight months ago—we now have videos and full courses right on the platform itself. So if you get a suggestion, then there’s a video of me or Chris or somebody else actually explaining it there. Yes, we’re really trying to build out that learning side of things.

But we’re also a really—we’re still a pretty small, nimble company. You know, as I was saying, we do everything ourselves. And so if opportunities come up, we can sort of jump on it, and we can really talk to other people in the writing community. Because the writing community online is—it’s huge. Writers love talking about writing, and they love writing about writing, and they love reading about writing, and they love building their skills.

And so I think the fact that we are all writers has just made that easier, as opposed to, you know, some of the bigger companies that have, you know, millions in investment. And they have to—you know, they have a lot more boxes to tick, whereas we can be pretty nimble and we can jump on pretty cool opportunities.

We’re at a million and a half now!

Yeah. I mean, I think part of the reason we’ve grown so much is that we have a really comprehensive free version of the software. And so a lot of those users are just free. And unlike some freemium versions of products that are all full of advertising and lock away all the best features—we don’t do any.

We had a bit of advertising in the beginning, and then we decided it didn’t really fit with our ethos. And so now we just—the only difference between free and a paid account is the free users are limited to 500 words at a time.

So if you’re just writing emails and that sort of thing, that’s fine. But if you’re writing anything that’s a bit more in depth, then it’s good to be able to look at your statistics over your full document or full report or full blog article—just to, because you can check for things like repetitiveness. If you’ve used the same phrase five times in your blog article—because readers clock that sort of thing.

So if you can look at it on a bigger picture, that makes a difference if you’re properly trying to do some good content.

And then the other thing that paid users can use is all of our add-ins. So we’ve got add-ins for Word and for Google Docs and for Chrome and Firefox and all the rest of them. But a lot of our growth has just been due to the fact that we have something really cool that people can use for free, and then they learn to love it, and they tell their friends.

And I mean, so much of it has just been our users championing us to other writers that they know.

Yeah, and we’ve really tried to—I mean, it’s a bit strange because we’re one of the least expensive softwares out there, but we’ve got the most features.

And we keep having this conversation about, like, should we increase our prices so that we’re in line with everyone else? Because if we’re the least expensive, will people then think that we have the lowest value, right?

But we don’t actually want to price ourselves out of accessibility for too many people. Like, we want this to be free. We want to be able to help as many writers as possible. And we want to make it accessible to as many people as we can.

And so yeah, we’re just—we’re just trying to keep the prices reasonable so that we can have as many people as possible.

I mean, there’s lots of tools that we use to run our team. We do all of our planning and editorial calendars on Trello. I just think Trello is a magical thing for trying to keep yourself organized in any sort of way.

We do all of our collaborative documents on Google Docs—which, you know, they’ve got some limitations—but if you’ve got lots of people going in and out, you don’t have the issue of multiple versions and things getting lost or anything. You’ve just got a link, and everybody works in the same one.

Tons of our users use Scrivener, which I personally don’t use, but we hear about it all the time—for people that are doing big projects, or even people that are running a lot of content. I think once you get your head around it—it’s quite a bit of a learning curve—but once you get your head around it, I think it’s really useful. And so we have an add-in for that as well.

But yeah, I mean, when it comes to writing, I think the most important thing is just a good writing platform that you feel comfortable in, and that makes sense for you—and then just to sit down and get the words out.

Yeah, exactly. And you can—we’ve got a Chrome extension so you can use it on almost any website. You can use it on Gmail, on all of those sorts of things, just to try and catch your errors before you push send.

Yeah, so initially we were talking about doing Spanish. We have a fairly unimpressive version in Spanish, but I think there’s probably a lot more that we can do in English before we start moving into other languages.

I just say that because people ask us all the time if we have German, and French, and Spanish, but I think there’s still a lot more that we can do in English and in our platform, and we still have all these different ideas that we want to do.

So in a lot of ways, I think we’ll probably just keep doing what we do. About half of our users are in the States and the other half are in other English-speaking countries around the world—you know, Australia, UK, Canada, Ireland. That’s probably the other half.

But we’ll probably just try and do more of what we’ve been doing, which is mostly inbound—creating really good content.

We just started, since March, doing a series of webinars—just free webinars. We just reached out to all these experts in our field and asked them if they would do some free training for us, and it’s actually worked really well for us.

So it’s given a lot of value to our existing users, but then it’s worked as a lead generation for lots of new users across social who come in and discover us because they want to learn how to query their manuscript, for example—might be a topic.

And then we’ll have another article around that, and so it all sort of feeds in together. And you know, it’s like I was saying—doing content that writers are looking for, and that adds some value and helps us build our profile and a bit of authority as experts in that field.