A spelling mistake in a Tamil poem, posted on Instagram, caught too late. That one moment started everything.
TL;DR
We built GoTamil because Tamil writers have been on their own for too long.
- English has Grammarly, Hemingway, ProWritingAid, and dozens more
- Tamil, spoken by 300 million people, had basic spell checkers that haven't changed since 2008
- No grammar checking. No AI. No tool that understands sandhi rules or catches confusable characters like ல vs. ழ vs. ள
- We built GoTamil to close that gap. Built from the ground up for Tamil.
It started with a poem
Back in 2020, during COVID, I was writing Tamil poetry and posting it on Instagram.
The process was simple. Write with pen and paper. Type it up in Google Docs. Create an image. Post it.
What wasn't simple was what happened next. I'd upload the image, share it with my followers, and then notice a spelling mistake. After posting. Every time.
Google Docs has a Tamil spell checker. It catches the obvious typos. But it misses grammar, sandhi violations, and the difference between ல and ழ and ள, three characters that look similar but change meaning entirely.
And it definitely doesn't tell you why something is wrong.
So I'd proofread manually. Read it once. Read it twice. Post it. Find the error later. That cycle kept repeating.
At some point, the frustration became a question: why?
English has dozens of writing tools. Grammarly alone has over 30 million users. ProWritingAid, Hemingway, LanguageTool, QuillBot. The list goes on. Each one polished, AI-powered, constantly improving.
Tamil? Nothing. Not a single comprehensive writing tool. For a language spoken by 300 million people across India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, and diaspora communities worldwide.
That question sat in my head for years.
The question that wouldn't go away
I'm not a developer. My background is in Physics. I work as an organic growth strategist. Coding was never part of my life. Not in school, not in college, not in my career.
But the question kept coming back. Why doesn't Tamil have a Grammarly? Why do Tamil writers have to proofread manually when English writers have 20+ AI-powered tools to choose from?
It wasn't a business idea at first. It was genuine frustration from someone who writes Tamil and couldn't find a tool that worked.
Then AI tools evolved. Claude released Artifacts. Gemini launched Canvas. Suddenly, you could build a working application from a prompt, without knowing how a compiler works. I saw people on LinkedIn building tools every day using these AI platforms, and the thought shifted from "why doesn't this exist" to "why don't I just build it?"
Building the first version
In June 2024, I sat down on a weekend and opened Gemini Canvas. No IDE. No terminal. No idea what files a compiler needs or how code gets deployed.
I typed a prompt describing a Tamil proofreading tool and hit enter.
What came back was rough. But it worked. You could paste Tamil text, and it would flag spelling errors.
That was the MVP. Built entirely inside Gemini Canvas, from prompts alone.
The next challenge was getting it on a domain. I didn't know how deployment worked, so I went back to Gemini and asked: "I have this application, I need to publish it on a domain, what are the steps?"
It generated the files. I compiled them (learning what compiling meant in the process), hit a wall of errors, went back and forth fixing them, and eventually got it live.
It was scrappy. It had bugs. Some features didn't work properly.
But it was live, on a real domain, doing something no other tool on the internet did: checking Tamil grammar with AI.
I know how people find things on the internet. That's what I do for a living. So I optimized GoTamil for search from day one. Within two weeks, organic traffic started coming in.
By the end of the first month, daily users crossed 100. Within two months, monthly visits hit 5,000. Average session time was 5 to 10 minutes. People weren't just checking it out. They were using it.
Strangers offered to pay
The MVP had one restriction: a 2,000 character limit. Not because of a business model. Because I was running the entire platform on free API credits from Google's AI models, and I didn't want them running out.
Then something happened that I didn't expect.
People started reaching out through the contact form. Not with bug reports. With requests. "I want the Pro version. When is it coming?" and "I'll pay. I need to use this more."
These weren't friends or colleagues. My friends didn't even know I was building this. These were strangers who found GoTamil through Google search, used it, hit the character limit, and wanted more.
I got on Google Meet calls with some of them. Journalists on deadline who needed their Tamil checked fast. Professors who wanted to verify student submissions. Content creators whose audience would notice every error. Government officers writing official Tamil documents.
Their urgency was real. "Can you build it in a week?" one of them asked.
That was the validation. Not a survey. Not a landing page with an email signup. Real people, offering real money, for something I built on weekends out of personal frustration.
Why Tamil specifically
Tamil isn't English with a different script. It's a structurally different language with unique complexity that generic tools can't handle.
Sandhi rules (புணர்ச்சி). When Tamil words combine, they transform. The rules are numerous, context-dependent, and easy to get wrong. Even native speakers trip on sandhi. No English grammar tool has ever heard of it.
Confusable characters. ல vs. ழ vs. ள. ந vs. ன vs. ண. These characters look similar on screen, sound similar to non-native speakers, and mean completely different things. Get them wrong and your sentence says something you didn't intend.
Agglutinative morphology. Tamil builds meaning by stacking suffixes. A single Tamil word can carry the information of an entire English phrase. That means word boundaries, spell checking, and grammar detection all work fundamentally differently than in English.
The formal/colloquial split. Written Tamil (செந்தமிழ்) and spoken Tamil (கொச்சைத்தமிழ்) follow different grammar rules. A tool that only knows one produces wrong suggestions for the other.
These aren't edge cases. They're the core of Tamil writing. And no tool before GoTamil handled them.
Building it properly
Once the validation came, I rebuilt GoTamil from scratch. Not a patched MVP. A proper platform.
The Pro version was built entirely on weekends. Monday to Friday, I'm at my full-time job. Saturdays and Sundays, I block the day and build.
Claude Code for the frontend and UI. Codex for the backend logic and database. Both AI tools, working in tandem, with a non-technical founder directing what to build and why.
The first three months cost almost nothing. Free hosting tiers. Free database tiers. Free API credits with a fallback chain across multiple Gemini models so users never hit a wall. When one model's free tier ran out by noon, the system automatically switched to the next one. No interruption for the user.
People ask how I balance a full-time job and building a product. Clarity. Tamil writers need this. They tell me every week through the contact form. And I'm a Tamil writer myself.
The problem was mine before it was theirs.
Where we are now
GoTamil launched its Pro version 15 days ago. In those 15 days, we reached 4-digit revenue. Every rupee of operational cost is covered by paying customers. We're profitable from day one.
10,000+ writers use GoTamil every month. We process over 300,000 Tamil words daily. Journalists, professors, students, government officers, content creators, and diaspora Tamil speakers across India, Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, the Middle East, and beyond.
The platform does what I wished existed when I was posting Tamil poetry on Instagram:
- Grammar checking that understands Tamil. Sandhi rules, verb forms, agreement patterns. Every correction explains why, so you learn as you write.
- Spell checking that catches confusable characters, context-dependent errors, and more than just typos.
- Smart transliteration. Type "vanakkam" and see வணக்கம். No keyboard switching. No special app.
- Voice typing that handles Tamil accents and dialects.
- OCR that reads handwritten Tamil notes and gives you editable text. Even messy handwriting. Images auto-deleted after processing.
- Document import and export. Bring in your .docx files. Export as PDF with proper Tamil font rendering.
One tool. The entire Tamil writing journey. Free to start.
Why this matters beyond us
What we're building matters beyond GoTamil.
Tamil is the official language of Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka, and Singapore. Spoken by hundreds of millions of people across the world. A language with a living literary tradition, thriving on social media, in newsrooms, in classrooms, in government offices.
And until recently, when a Tamil writer needed to check their grammar, they were on their own.
The tools existed for English. They didn't exist for Tamil. Abandonment, plain and simple.
We built GoTamil because Tamil writers shouldn't have to choose between writing in their language and writing correctly. Those should be the same thing. Tamil writers have been on their own for too long. That's changing.
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