Chan Yerneni wasn’t browsing on Acquire.com just looking to buy a business—he was looking for a way out of the corporate grind.
A seasoned product marketer with over a decade in tech, Chan had begun his entrepreneurial journey as the co-founder of LFG Digital School in Hyderabad, India. He’d later transitioned into the Toronto tech scene holding key roles at several major businesses.
However, the longer Chan stayed in corporate, the more trapped he felt in a cycle of meetings, bureaucracy, and decisions driven by shareholder interests rather than real innovation.
After years of climbing the ranks, he’d realized that he wasn’t building something of his own—he was building someone else’s vision. That’s when he knew it was time to take control of his future.
Chan’s search ended when he found an AI-powered grading SaaS tool called EssayGrader. It was small but was bringing in $8,000 a month. The founder had built something valuable but wasn’t interested in growing it further. Chan saw his opening. Three days later, the deal was done.
But launching a tech startup from scratch meant stepping into the unknown—untested ideas, unpredictable customer demand, and the risk of spending years building something that might never take off.
In spite of the risks, in just a year, Chan took EssayGrader from a niche side-project to a thriving EdTech platform used by over 100,000 teachers. Along the way, he had to learn everything—SEO, marketing, hiring and managing people, and scaling a SaaS business—all while resisting the pressure to raise venture capital.
“People underestimate how long it takes to start something from scratch”, Chan says. “Going from zero to one is way harder than going from one to ten. This business had a real product-market fit, and I knew I could scale it”.
This is the story of how he did it, why he bet on acquisition instead of building from scratch, and what founders can learn from his unconventional path to success.
Building a Real-World School For His First Startup
Chan’s path to entrepreneurship began with a school in India. Coming from a long line of educators in India, he co-founded a private school for low-middle-class children in Southern India once he left university. Over two years, he helped scale the school to 700 students.
It was an ambitious and deeply personal project, but it also revealed to young Chan the harsh realities of running a brick-and-mortar business. Scaling required significant infrastructure, operations were costly, and growth was constrained by the physical limitations of school buildings. Chan could see that working in the growing tech industry, he could build businesses unhindered by physical limits.
After a little over two years, Chan sold LFG to a strategic investor and moved to Canada to pursue a master’s in Technology Entrepreneurship at the University of Waterloo. He initially planned to work in the corporate world for just a few years before launching his own venture. But those few years stretched into a decade while he built a career in enterprise tech, holding key roles at major firms like OpenText and Ricoh Canada.
At Ricoh, he managed a $13 million software portfolio, overseeing enterprise content management, robotic process automation, and go-to-market strategies. Later, at OpenText, he took on an even bigger challenge—leading product marketing for a one billion dollar Content Services division, where he crafted strategies to position enterprise software in a competitive market.
On paper, it was an impressive trajectory. But deep down, Chan felt something was missing. The longer he stayed in corporate, the harder it became to walk away. Finally, with a baby on the way, he realized that if he didn’t take the leap into entrepreneurship then, he might never. He quit his six-figure job with just two weeks’ notice, placing all his bets on his new project, EssayGrader.
“I told myself that I’m going to work in the corporate world for two to three years, but then it ended up becoming a decade,” he says. “I got so scared by the end of it that I quit my job by giving two weeks’ notice. I told them that’s it.”
Scaling by Listening to Teachers
At the time of purchase, EssayGrader had about 400 users, most of them individual teachers. The product allowed teachers to upload entire classes’ worth of essays and generate detailed feedback and grading in under two minutes.
Overnight, Chan had become both a first-time founder and a full-time dad, juggling late-night feedings with growth strategies.
“I had two babies,” he jokes. “One was crying at night, the other needed me to build a marketing strategy.”
Chan saw two massive opportunities with EssayGrader: first, improving the product to deliver more value, and second, expanding beyond individual users to entire school districts.
The first step? Talking to customers.
“I spent the first year personally handling every customer interaction”, he said. “I probably spoke with over a thousand teachers. I wanted to understand their pain points firsthand”.
Teachers loved the product, but they needed more than just essay grading. They wanted AI detection to combat plagiarism, performance analytics to track student progress, and deeper integrations with learning management systems like Google Classroom and Canvas.
Chan along with his CTO and a small team of developers got to work, reinvesting every dollar of revenue back into the platform to implement the features teachers were asking for.
“We took a product that was good and made it indispensable”, he said.
Why EdTech is Extremely Easy to Market
Unlike other SaaS businesses that rely on paid ads to scale, EssayGrader grew largely through word-of-mouth. Teachers who loved the tool recommended it to colleagues, and those colleagues brought it into their schools.
“Our teachers are our best salespeople”, Chan says. “When they see how much time it saves them, they start telling everyone about it.”
This organic growth opened the door to enterprise deals, expanding EssayGrader from individual subscriptions to school-wide and district-level contracts. Today, it’s used by over 100,000 educators across the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia.
The revenue followed. From the original $8,000 per month, EssayGrader now generates over five times more and Chan believes they’re just getting started.
Why Chan Chose Freedom Over Venture Capital
Unlike his first business, where outside funding was necessary to cover physical infrastructure costs, Chan made the deliberate choice to bootstrap EssayGrader.
“We had private equity firms and VCs reach out last year”, he said. “But we turned them down. We didn’t want to be distracted by investor demands. We wanted to build the best possible product for teachers”.
Bootstrapping also forced them to stay lean and efficient. Every hire was strategic. Every dollar spent had to generate value.
“I had made more money as a student working at Subway than I made in 2024 at EssayGrader, but it was also the most fulfilling year because there was a real need for my business and teachers loved the product. ”
Reflecting on his journey, Chan offers a few key takeaways for aspiring founders:
First, buy, don’t build. Starting from scratch is hard. If you can find a business with product-market fit, scaling is much easier. “Acquire.com saved me years of trial and error”, he said. “I tell everyone to start by looking there.”
Then, he suggests you talk to your customers. The best product decisions come from real user feedback. “The features that made the biggest difference weren’t things I thought of,” he says. “They were things teachers asked for”.
Lastly, take the leap. There’s never a perfect time to quit your job and go all-in on a business. “I quit with a baby on the way. If I can do it, anyone can”.
If there’s one lesson from Chan’s journey, it’s that taking the leap is never easy—but it’s always worth it, as long as you have the proper emotional support around you.
“You need to have a supportive ecosystem like around your family, your spouse, your parents. Otherwise, it’s very, very hard, especially if you have a family. Becoming an entrepreneur is hard if you do not have a supportive ecosystem around you.”
