EssayGrader.ai

01The full story

Chanakya Yerneni — Chan — spent about a decade in corporate product and product marketing roles, most recently as a senior product marketing manager at OpenText. He wanted out, had a spreadsheet full of business ideas, and no idea where to start with any of them. So he skipped the starting part. He registered on Acquire.com, the marketplace formerly called MicroAcquire, and spent roughly 90 days going through listings, eventually looking at 25 to 30 businesses. He had just under $200,000 of savings he was willing to gamble, on the reasoning that losing it would not change his lifestyle. He looked at e-commerce and walked away — the expertise required is supply chain and he did not have it. SaaS felt native because that is where his career had been. Then he found EssayGrader.ai, listed by an engineer who worked at GitLab and had built it as a side project. It graded student essays with AI, for teachers. Chan had been a teacher in a previous life, and he knew exactly what he was looking at: the people who take grading home on weekends, skip dinner, order pizza for the family. He bought it in February 2024 for $125,000, all cash, at about 2x revenue — slightly more than the seller asked — when it was doing $5,000 a month. From seeing the listing to running the business was about three weeks. Then he did one thing: he turned on chat support, roughly 90 to 120 days after taking over, and talked to three or four hundred teachers himself until he nearly burned out. Every feature built since came from one of those conversations. A year later the business was doing about $80,000 a month, roughly a million dollars in recurring revenue. He had privately expected $30,000 or $40,000. He is 37 and says he should have done this at 28.