Textio

Snyder describes co-founding Textio with her husband, Jensen Harris, whose user experience background complemented her work in language and statistical modeling. She says their trust and distinct strengths helped them build together, though their relationship made some investors hesitant at first.

Textio began with a Kickstarter predictor, which showed that language and presentation could predict project outcomes. The founders focused the broader idea of augmented writing on job posts, where Snyder had relevant relationships and companies had both recruiting challenges and performance data. That focus helped Textio prove value in a specific market while building toward its wider vision.

A 2016 rebrand changed both Textio’s visual identity and how the team described its product. Snyder says customers cared more about outcomes, such as filling jobs two weeks faster or bringing 23% more women into engineering pipelines, than ease of use alone.

Textio first sold individual seats for about $59 a month, but enterprise customers could share a few seats instead of adopting the product broadly. The company shifted to a flat fee based on open jobs, allowing unlimited users and encouraging wider use. Snyder says revenue rose after the change and customers no longer had to limit access.

Early press coverage focused heavily on bias, while Textio’s broader ambition was to improve workplace writing. The team expanded its story to include writing and company culture, using examples such as Amazon job posts being 33 times more likely to contain “wickedly.” Snyder says the broader framing helped establish augmented writing as the category Textio wanted to build.