A Really Big Idea: Yext Brain

I am utterly fascinated when someone forms a monster Company based on a big idea--sometimes even an almost out of this world idea--and soon after it becomes a household word. These are the real life stories that make you want to shake your head in disbelief.

Think about it.

In 1998 two Stanford graduates had an idea to program something they called a search engine. They named it Google. In 2004 a Harvard sophomore had a notion to improve on MySpace. He called it "The Facebook." In 1994 a Wall Street VP started an online retailer to sell books. It's now known as Amazon.com. These successes seemingly happen out of nowhere, and most people try to make sense of it by reading about it in books or movies while wishing they had invested in them, or started working for them during the 'early days'. I believe that there are people who are hardwired for that kind of success, and I absolutely love watching them succeed.

Here's another story which is still being written and could potentially be bigger than even Apple or Amazon in my view.

In 2000 a sophomore history student from Duke named Howard Lerman and a couple of his classmates started a humorous website that got featured on The Daily Show. They sold it in 2001 for $150,000. Next, they founded a software company that consulted in .NET programming. They sold it for $7 Million in 2005. Then they teamed up with a veteran in the gym industry to form a lead gen website called GymTicket.com. That business has since morphed into the largest, publicly traded digital knowledge management company in the world known as Yext which is now attracting some of the best engineering and sales talent in the online marketing space.

Digital Knowledge Management is a very new, and largely untapped aspect of online marketing. Lay consumers have mostly never heard of it, but those of us in the online industry know the immense business opportunity and potential of its power. In a word, it's a huge new market. Just think about how many location-based businesses there are in the world. Then think that every one of them needs Digital Knowledge Management.

Yext's core offering is a data synchronization tool called 'Knowledge Manager.' The Knowledge Manager ensures that a business' key information--it's name, address, phone number and hundreds of other data points--are in perfect synchronization across the internet. Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and AOL interpret business data as 'more accurate' when this information is synchronized from publisher to publisher and reward accuracy with greater search engine visibility. Accurate listings are more likely to appear higher on the search results page.

A secondary Yext offering is 'review management'. As businesses get more recent, 5-star reviews this also improves their visibility. Both knowledge management and review management are incredibly time consuming tasks, and Yext has virtually automated the process with a drag and drop interface. It's really slick. Businesses love it.

These two core offerings in and of themselves would be enough to support a billion dollar company but there's more.

Not to be outdone by their prior accomplishments, Howard Lerman and his team have another idea which, in my view is a total game changer. They've developed new software based on their already successful 'Knowledge Manager' which is positioned to disrupt the way business websites serve content on the web. It's called Yext Brain, Yext Think, and Yext Pages, and I believe it's got the potential to be the next basis for content management-- think 'Wordpress on steroids'.

What makes Yext's new Brain, Think and Pages software different from all of the other content management systems is how it handles data (the content), how the data interacts with search engines and voice enabled devices (like Alexa), and how easy it is to use. Admittedly, I am not a programmer and I might be oversimplifying a bit, but here goes.

Most content management systems like Wordpress rely on a database to store content written in a computer language called MySQL. The MySQL database lays out the website data in columns and rows, like an excel spreadsheet, that is later retrieved and reassembled into the webpages we see. The columns might be arranged to contain the webpage address, the images used on the page, the name of the page, and the text content on the page. The rows (also known as tuples) would include all of the data that relates to the specific page arranged neatly in the columns. This type of database is known as a "relational database" because each bit of information relates to another. These kinds of databases have been around a long time and are considered a standard, easy to implement solution.

The problem with "relational databases" like MySQL is that as the website gets large, so does the database. This slows down the engine that runs the website. It can be especially troublesome when a business has many locations, and all of various information about those locations needs to be stored (and sometimes repeated) in separate tuples. If you manage a large Wordpress website, you know what I mean. It's incredibly time consuming and onerous to manage.

Recently there is a new language that can live within a MySQL database called JSON. JSON is an easy language for humans to write and machines to read. Also, a few years ago a consortium of Search Engine Companies made up of Google, Bing and Yahoo began to write the schema of 'all things known'. They call it Schema.org which would became the basis for how JSON could structure everything on the web. Soon JSON morphed into JSON-LD (Linked Data).

Then Google began to heavily support Schema.org in order to make sense of everything online. This is the new language that powers mission critical functions like Google Assistant and Voice Search.

Howard Lerman and his team at Yext have harnassed the power of this new database language (JSON) to create a scalable content management system built on the Yext Brain. Within Brain everything on your website is easily interpreted by the search engines, written by humans, and is lightening fast. What's more, the system is voice search (Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa) ready with a drop and drag interface. Heck, you could even start a voice search engine of your own if you wanted to. In fact you can. It's called "Yext Think".

There's even rumblings that one day you might be able to directly inject your website content into Google via this database. That's not so far fetched when you consider today Amazon Alexa is already accepting a Yext feed for business data, and Yext is feeding business data into Google My Business through the GMB API.

One of the first adopters of the Yext Brain is Morgan Stanley. They will be putting Yext to work in order to manage their 15,000 advisor websites. This is a major announcement and validation of the software.

"A sophisticated digital presence is an absolutely critical component of a potential clients' shopping process," said Naureen Hassan, Chief Digital Officer for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. "In fact, 62%* of respondents to a recent survey said that online information is influential to who they hire as a Financial Advisor."

The next chapter of this real life story will most certainly be written in 2019. I can't wait to read it.

--Gary Steel consults clients on Online Marketing and Advertising, and is Google Search, Display, Video Analytics, Yext, and Acquisio Certified. If your business could use some improved online visibility drop me a line. If you like what you've read here, I hope you will 'like' and 'share' this post, and follow me on LinkedIn.