Jeremy Weisz 15:55
So did the people from Adobe then move companies to Gusto? That’s what happened? Yeah. And so what made them finally decide at Gusto, to engage with you.
Martha van Berkel 16:09
So they worked with us at their previous company. So they we were already working with their previous company, and so they got to come in and just like, see it in action. And they were like, Oh my goodness. Like, we can’t believe how quick you can do and then, because it’s complex, like, we partner them with one of our experts that can so we kind of take customer success and professional services and mash them together. And so we also were just like, oh, like, something new comes up from Google. Great, let’s do it the next day. Let’s have it live the next day.
So again, sort of introducing that agility. And so they just, I guess they fell in love with the fact that, like, we just could get this work. And so when they ended up at Gusto, they’re like, this is a no brainer, like we’re doing, they did a ton of work. You can read it in the case study around sort of rethinking how they kind of develop their content plan and how they’re telling the Gusto story. And so we’re that kind of under-layer machine language, right, that’s explaining that to the search engine.
Jeremy Weisz 17:03
So how did they end up using it like, what would be an example of how they end up using it, maybe, to communicate differently, internally or externally?
Martha van Berkel 17:14
Yeah. So one of the examples I would use is sort of like we talked about content, sort of being like a big driver of traffic and visibility. And so when you write a piece of content, when you’re planning it, you’re often thinking of like, okay, well, who’s the author? What is the problem or challenge I’m going to talk about, if you’re a product company, you’re going to probably mention, sort of the product. You’re going to maybe even mention, or talk about one of your customers that’s doing it. And so what they did, sort of through their work was when they wrote those blogs, we sort of came up with a content structure that allowed us to understand where in the content they were going to mention their products or talk about the different customers.
And therefore our tools could then start picking up those things and putting that into the data that was called the Schema Markup, so that not only were they writing this like comprehensive, awesome customer story, but that this like underlying data layer, the schema markup was able to start articulating that. And one of the things that like when you start doing sort of the semantics, which is one of the things we wanted to highlight when we worked with them, is like being able to kind of really connect those dots with other parts of your website, so with the product page or with the customer page that you’re talking about the story. And so we were able to do that with them. And the other piece was, like they had a complex architecture.
So again, getting it to work became sort of not hard, like it was just something that we could do, sort of through our simple JavaScript integration. So for them, again, they were trying to kind of make something move quickly, lead the market, and do something complex, both in the architecture as well as complex and the story they were telling. And again, through sort of like the relationships that you can build dynamically at scale with our stuff, they were able to do that.
Jeremy Weisz 19:08
Martha, how would you define your company? Are you strictly SaaS, or are you consulting in SaaS? Consulting agency in SaaS? How would you, I don’t want to put you in a box or anything, but I’m going to try and put you in box. Yes, exactly.
Martha van Berkel 19:27
Yeah. So I would say, when we first started, people would consider us, so we consider it like a solution cell, so it’s software with high touch support. Now that the market’s more mature, you’re going to see us go way more fast, because there’s more kind of people knowing what they need to get done. But because of the complexity of building the knowledge graph, I think we’ll always have a lot of help on onboarding as well as sort of like, making sure the quality of the Knowledge Graph is good. But yeah, we’re a SaaS company with just a, like, a robust, high-touch support. So we don’t just do customer success, where we enable you in the tools. We also do some consulting to make sure that you’re getting the right return.
Jeremy Weisz 20:08
Yeah. How did your services or products evolve? Because I know you started this maybe 2013. So you’ve been doing this a while. What did it look like then? And what were some of the evolution pieces of your either service or product? Take me back.
Martha van Berkel 20:32
Oh, man, let’s go way back in the way. So my co-founder is my husband, Mark van Berkel. So he is a semantic technologist, so he has the really unique skill, and that he’s a developer who also has a master’s in semantic technology, who also has an MBA. And so back in 2013 he was, finishing his MBA, and he was like, There’s got to be a real-world application of the semantic technology, because he knew how powerful it was like, from a technology standpoint. And so 2013 he was still trying to do, like, Where, where, where can I kind of solve a problem that kind of relates, and it was in 2014 so at this point, I was done at Cisco. I had just become a mom.
Jeremy Weisz 21:14
And you were at Cisco for like, over a decade, right?
Martha van Berkel 21:18
I was there for 14 years. I was an intrapreneur, so I’m like, really good at, like, seeing opportunities, kind of getting early traction, selling people and ideas internally and externally. Like, that’s, that’s my skill. So he was, sort of, like, exploring, we came across this thing called Schema Markup, but, but in 2013 we actually turned into an agency. So we were basically had a product to teach small businesses how to manage their online presence, called online presence coach. We mostly have, we have that site, but we mostly exhibit testing these days and we basically had broken down like really complex tasks into something they could do in 15 minutes.
But we discovered very early on that these small businesses didn’t want to do that work, and so by accident, we became an agency doing the work for them. And at one point, it was September 2015, I’ll never forget it. And we’re sitting and we’re like, how did we end up quitting our enterprise jobs to, like, start an agency, like, we quit to start a product company. Like we want to create something that people used. And I was like, that’s it, like, we’re not doing this anymore. And we were just like, what are we passionate about? We were passionate about the product. We were passionate about. And so we had built, at this point, Schema App version one, which is our editor, and we were using it for these small businesses. Because Mark was like, oh, it’s way easier to build a tool than for me to, like, do this by hand. And it was like, great, we are going to just do this.
Jeremy Weisz 22:52
What did the first version do the Schema App Editor?
Martha van Berkel 22:57
It’s actually still here. So it’s actually, like, really awesome for generating semantic schema markup for a single page and but, like, still connecting the dots across your pages. So some of our earliest adopters are some, now, experts, sort of in this space as well. And we still have a version of the editor for like, pages that are more static and then we also use that same editor basically to do all the administration for our tools, like in-house. So that editor sort of still played an important role, but it was only good to do, like, it was only good to do, you only want to enter the information, and it’s static for like, 15 pages, and then it becomes unmanageable.
And so it was really in 2017 that were like, we need to do something that scales right. Because if we and we had customers calling us being like, we think you do this. And so we had a data feed at one point that we were able to convert at scale, but we want to have an interface. And so our Schema App Highlighter, we launched in 2018 and at this point, Google had something called the Google Data Highlighter. So people kind of knew something similar, but Google was divesting from it because it’s too hard to manage and so creating this awesome opportunity for us to kind of come into space. But 2015 and 2016 like we were not making any money, barely any money. I had had my second child at that point, and we can joke that in my revenue, you can tell when I went off, like I wasn’t selling.
So, like, you know, you can see, like, Oh, my son was born during that time, our revenue bottomed out. That makes sense. And so we were in that sort of initial struggle of just like, something’s got to change. And so 2016 when we fired our clients that we were doing SEO for, we really doubled down. And then we created this highlighter.
Jeremy Weisz 24:48
Really quickly, quick question about the editor part so, just so I can understand the editor, was it giving marking up where the issues were, and with someone actually, actually manually fix those, all the stuff that it was marking up? Is that what the editor did?
Martha van Berkel 25:05
No, no, the editors like just generating schema markup, so it’s generating that data explaining what’s on the page. So we would think of it as like a form, but it kind of forces you to do some things in a connected way, and then it would integrate with your website to automatically, so you’re using like, a staff product to kind of enter the data that’s on the page and sending it to your site. But again, the highlighter, the idea the highlighter is you actually, like dynamically highlight and map things on the page, and then it updates dynamically. So we used to joke like, do schema markup with more coffee breaks, because you’re not like, doing anything manually, right?
Jeremy Weisz 25:38
Then, would that basically make it more searchable for Google. Or what’s the old like, what is it actually the end result when that happens?
Martha van Berkel 25:48
Yeah. So people would get, like, these rich results. So they would basically get the beautiful, sort of like, more real estate in search, and then that would increase the number of clicks. So, click-through rate would increase as well as number of clicks, which then sort of drives, if you think of your funnel, right, you’re getting more clicks. You get more website on the website, then you’re looking to convert, and therefore you can get more business. So it would click-through rate off of search would often, I joke, 30 to, like, 300% increase. Like, it depends on the content and depends on the output.
But it was, sort of, again, sort of this idea of like, page by page, versus like at scale. And like you can’t do enterprise unless you’re, like, doing some stuff at scale. And so 2018 was really that, like, beginning of that journey. But what I was going to say was, and I’m reading Dan Martel’s buyback your time, which is, like, so interesting as a founder, because there’s so many things I’ve already done, but he makes the high the comment that, if you’re doing what you love, the results will come. And I think when we, when I think about 2016 in those early days, you know, we basically had a moment where, like, we don’t love what we’ve created, let’s double down on the thing that we’re really passionate about, and then results came, right? And I share that because I think anyone who sort of, even if you’re an individual contributor in a company like, I think it still really resonates as to, like, you know, when you’re doing that thing you love, it really just flies.
Jeremy Weisz 27:18
So 2017 you have a scheme, you kind of recreate the product, or you add on to it and schema highlighter, what happens next in the evolution of the product?
Martha van Berkel 27:28
So before I go to the product, like, so the market still, like, didn’t really embrace all this stuff, right? Like, we were still, like, under 20% of sites in the world were doing this. Like, most people were like, oh, that’s nice to do, but I don’t need to do it. And so it wasn’t until 2019 that, like, everyone was like, oh, I need to do this right. And Schema Markup’s, like I said, it’s been around since 2011 like, it’s not new, but it just like, wasn’t a priority. And I don’t think it was a priority. Like, we were seeing amazing results. Like, like I said, increased click through, rate increase lead, great visual kind of changes in search, but, like, but again, it’s really hard.
And so it was like, Am I really going to do the hard work in order to get that result? And most companies were like, No, I’m having a hard time doing the basic work. Like, I’m not going to try to do the hard work. And then we know what happened in 2019. So 2019 I was like, this, 2020, is going to be the year schema markup. Like, everyone’s going to do this, then we know what happens in 2020 but we did have a phenomenal year in 2020 because now digital play this huge role. And so we asked for our products when we measure results. And so we also, like after 2020 started developing our Schema Performance Analytics. So we have, like, an analytics platform that now allows us to, kind of help companies measure the impact to their business and look at it in lots of different ways.
In Enterprise, looking at by line of business is really important, because you have different stakeholders by line of business, you might want to look at it by, like strategic kind of area, again, looking at the website and proving that ROI right, being able to show that ROI. And so that’s really been, I’ll say, over the couple years, lots of other like, we integrate with lots of different things, but those were, like, the big changes. And then in August of this year, there was a big change. The Google basically took away what’s called the FAQ rich result. So this is a result where, like, you could put it on any page, like if you had a frequently asked questions on any type of page. And so companies loved it because it was very versatile, while still getting you a really big change in what the visualization of the search is.
So Google gave three days’ notice that they were going to take it away for everyone in the world, three days’ notice. And so imagine, if you’re a marketer, you’re like, cashing in on all these clicks, right, getting all these conversions, and three days later, boom, gone, and so many companies, not just our clients, but like Google, basically, like half how much traffic. Now, this wasn’t just a change in Schema Markup. This was because chatGPT and search generative experience, which is Google’s version of chatGPT and Bard were trying to test and get real estate and what do they do? They answer questions. And so it made sense that like, Well, Google is not going to give those question and answers that’s not going to go to the site. They want that to stay in search.
So this was a much bigger change. It wasn’t just a Schema Markup change. This was, I would say, like, a real hard evidence that, like, even though Mark and I in January of 2023, were, like, the world’s going to change quicker. And like, how are we thinking about this? This was sort of the moment where, like, we got to change now, like, there’s no more waiting. And so we basically, we had this semantic knowledge graph technology always underneath that’s the sort of, like, the foundation of who we were, and all of a sudden that was really relevant. And so, we clients saying, like, if you sell the business, like, we went through, like, all the emotions in August, and we chose to go on the offense. So we chose to look at this as an opportunity, an opportunity to kind of showcase that like we’re just not a SaaS platform that does this very specific SEO thing, but that we’re a SaaS platform that future proofs to your marketing team because of how we organize your marketing data.
And we basically spend all of well, I spoke at a lot of conferences that September, October, November, and I’m happy to report that not only are we continuing to get results for our clients, but our clients chose to continue to partner with us, like through this change, to help them future proof. And we even released a feature in November to kind of test like it sort of helped us further build out and disambiguate in the Knowledge Graph, and that is, in itself, helping get higher click through rate. So we sort of did the messaging, and then also, like provided new features that sort of, I would say, continue to reiterate that the Knowledge Graph is the foundation to performance and search, and it’s working. So it’s been a really kind of up and down, lots of change, but I’m just really excited. I think the changes in August were good news.
Jeremy Weisz 28:29
So when Google made those changes, did you have to make any changes within the software?
Martha van Berkel 32:16
No. So we made, we added this new feature at scale. So we had this feature before. It’s called linking entity, so it’s actually where you basically disambiguate. So let’s say I’ve written a blog and I’m talking about Java, and we want to be really clear that I’m talking about Java the programming language, not Java the country, or Java the coffee. And so it allows you, sort of, if we were to think of that Gusto example, where, I’m talking about this product, this product very specifically, and sort of, you’re linking to the URL on your website that’s talking to it, or I’m talking about this very specific HR topic, then you can actually say, like, this is what I’m what the page is about. And you actually link to a Google Knowledge Graph or wiki data, definition of what that thing is. And this is, again, just like again, making it absolutely clear to the machines on what it is that they need to understand. And so that feature, we just like, made it so it would work at scale, and that’s what we’ve been testing and seeing incredible results from.
Jeremy Weisz 33:19
What does the team look like at Schema App?
Martha van Berkel 33:22
Yeah. So we’re about 28 people across Canada. We’re primarily a Canadian team. So we went, I call flexible first, but we’re basically a virtual team in during Covid. And we have a lot of senior technologists, so people who know Symantec technology, and then any developer that joins us is doing it. We have a customer success team, about seven people, a small sales team that’s going to be growing a marketing team, and then our leadership team, yep.
Jeremy Weisz 33:51
I feel like you have to have a lot of technical people for what you do, what’s been a milestone. I know it seems like almost at heart, even though your engineer math are a salesperson, it seems that you like people selling. What was a milestone of a client for you in the company?
Martha van Berkel 34:08
Yeah, so when SAP became our client. So acronym was an agency actually, who was looking for the best in-class solution and brought us in to see if we could help solve their problem. And my co-founder was an SAP consultant, and prior to becoming an entrepreneur. And so when we signed that deal, it was a big deal, because it was like, wow, we are selling not only to, like a great company, like overall, but someone that, again, Mark had worked very, very closely with, and sort of, I would say, also really appreciated their technology and solution of what they do. And so that moment was just one of those moments.
And I try to remind my team, like, we work with a lot of Fortune 1000 companies, like really amazing companies globally. And I get us to take pause every once in a while, because it’s like, look at who we work with. We work with some of the largest healthcare organizations. We work with some of the largest banks. We work with some amazing technology innovators. And they choose to work with us because of our prowess and sort of what we do. And then I think also because our culture is to be transparent, honest, take ownership, do what we say we’re going to do. And so, like, SAP was a big deal for us, Cisco, I’m still coming for you. So, I’ll look forward to wearing…
Jeremy Weisz 34:09
Yeah. What are they waiting for? You’re with them for 14 years. Come on. What did you do for SAP?
Martha van Berkel 35:37
So SAP, similar to Gusto, like really complex architecture. And they also, like, had a lot of different websites. So when we first started working with them, I think there was 30, 40 websites that they had to optimize, and they have a very small SEO team, right? So I think when most of these enterprise, they don’t have giant teams who are responsible for doing this work. And so, it’s like one technical SEO. We partner with them to be able to do everything at scale, so we help their content be understood and found, to help them increase the number of leads that they’re getting in order to convert business.
Jeremy Weisz 36:12
When you go into these sites, just before you even work your magic, what mistakes do you see? What are common mistakes people are making with their content or their site?
Martha van Berkel 36:25
Yeah, so often we’re seeing just like, I’ll say, like, no data architecture on their pages, like they’re just sort of like, every marketing page is different. And if you think about like a user journey, like, if you’re looking through case studies, for example, you know, you’re looking for some type of structure as you go through and the machines are no different, right? Like they’re trying to do learning to say, like, what am I going to understand about these different pages? And so I think often it’s like, there’s sort of genius and having some structure and some sort of continuity, sort of through your content. I think the other piece is just like, basic things like performance, like you’ve got it, like people aren’t going to wait around for your page and content to load. And so how do you just, like, make sure that you’re continuing to be as quickly and fast as possible? Those would be two that jump to mine.
Jeremy Weisz 37:17
I love to hear some of your favorite tech or software that you maybe as a team user or use personally.
Martha van Berkel 37:26
Oh, with some of my favorite tech, that’s a good question. Like, I’m a big collaborator, right? So you’re right. Like, I do have a very technical background, but I sort of love collaborating. So I would say today, just like all the genius things you can do to kind of bring information together and collaborate. And it’s not like advanced tech, right? So it’s like, how do you pull people in a virtual world, to like, comment on Google Docs and like, interact and integrate there. So I would say, like more less than tech. I think it’s like more around collaboration. I do use chatGPT, and actually, Gemini. Last night I was playing with on Google to advance, like, admin tool, like admin tasks.
So I use it for a lot of job descriptions. I use it to a lot of research. I use it to, like, put teams together for my off-site. So I don’t have to, like, work that through. I have a shuffle and kind of reorganize things. Other tech, i don’t know, I do like things like Dong or sort of like, where you can record and share and tell stories. But again, this comes by my kind of sales product storytelling. As a CEO, and like, I am a sales CEO, like, I want to make sure everyone is having the opportunity to hear what dots I’m hearing and connecting, and especially I would say Dong while I use it to kind of give feedback and coach my sales team.
I love it for sharing customer stories with my product team so that they can hear, hey, like I had this conversation, and you know what we heard from those three customers, like they’re saying it in different words. Here go have a listen. And so I think that’s a really powerful way of, again, bringing the team together, bringing everyone to kind of hear it in their own words, and make their own interpretation and connect dots.
Jeremy Weisz 39:12
What about from a team perspective, like project management tools, or any other tech you use internally?
Martha van Berkel 39:20
Do I love them all? So we use teamwork in customer success? For project management, it does the job. Our CRMs, pipe drive like again, it does the job. I wouldn’t say I’m like, so excited about it that I would sort of like speak from the hills, but it does the job.
Jeremy Weisz 39:37
What about some of your favorite resources books wise? You mentioned Dan Martel’s book. What other books do you like that you’d recommend?
Martha van Berkel 39:48
So I really like The Hard Things About The Hard Things, sort of as a great leadership book around just like, anytime you have to fire someone, or like, you know, kind of. Reflecting on, I hired the wrong person and sort of like, again, changing mindset. So I’ve been doing a lot of work on just like, how do I look at things differently? That takes the emotion and stress out of it. So I love that book for that. There’s a book around The Ultimate Coach, which is, I don’t the author, escapes me, but he’s like, The Ultimate Coach, and he’s talking a lot about being, so, how are we showing up and being within and I would say, like, that’s been a superpower I’ve been developing this year on just, how are you showing up to your family?
Jeremy Weisz 40:37
Is that Alan Thompson and Amy Hardison, is that the one?
Martha van Berkel 40:40
Yeah, hard yeah, that’s the one. And Hardison is, is the gentleman who’s like, it’s his story, but it’s about, sort of, how do you show up? And I think, you know, especially as we think about how do we be great people, being great people is more than just being a leader, right? It’s about being a leader during the day and then showing up to your kids and the evening, or showing up to your partner, showing up to your friends in different ways. So I love that that was something you were really passionate about the beginning. And I would say, like, I try to imbue that into how I show up for my team at work, how I ask them to show up to our customers, so that we can also then be present to our families. Because I don’t see this as a sprint, right?
Like, if we see running companies as a sprint, like, well, I’ll burn out quick, right? And not just the founders, but also the members of the team. And so trying to let people know, like, there’s time to take care of yourself. There’s time to have a sick day if you’re not well, so that you can come back tomorrow and just rock it. And that comes from in 2019, sort of during our scaling years, I did get diagnosed with Lyme disease, and my brain stopped working, so I couldn’t remember names and words, and I talk for a living, right? Like that’s what I do, and it was a really good gift for me to say, oh, like I need to do it all. I need to be able to take care of myself, and have a company where we create space for people to take care of ourselves. So I can keep doing this, and so I look at most challenges as opportunities now. Because if I can look at me getting sick as good news, then I can look at anything as good news.
Jeremy Weisz 40:48
I know we have a few minutes, Martha, so I have one last question, but before I ask it, I just want to point people to schemaapp.com to learn more. And thanks for sharing the lessons, the journey. It’s pretty remarkable we’ve created, and the companies you help. The last question is about the health scare. You had a health scare. How did it help you reframe the way you look at challenges? And Lyme disease is also a tough thing to diagnose, and oftentimes it goes misdiagnosed. So I don’t know if you went for a long time without being diagnosed trying to figure out what the heck it was.
Martha van Berkel 43:01
I think I was just so about getting diagnosed. So I was very lucky. I have a very good friend who’s a very talented naturopath, and I think I just didn’t know I was sick. I thought I was just tired. I had two young kids. I was running a business, and so I had the gift of a friend being like, Martha, this isn’t normal. Like, like, let’s sort of dig deeper. And she was creative about or knew about tests I could get in the US that we can’t get in Canada. That helped me get a diagnosis I’m getting treatment was also very different, but I just kept asking questions, and the people showed up with answers and again, like, Lyme is one of those, like, it’s a really hard disease to both manage and figure out.
And I found the answers, and I found the doctors, and I found sort of the things that worked and it like, I don’t know, like it was, and it was just like, let’s just keep making progress, week over week, month over month, and let’s just keep making different choices that allow me to progress and keep doing the things. And I think now, like, whatever challenge you send me, it’s like, great. What’s that next thing we need to try? Who are the people we need to connect with and ask for help with? And like, they’re going to show up, the answers are going to show up, and the people are going to show up, and we’re going to get a chance to try again. And so to me, that’s I think, why? Like, I just not heard we just got to try again. We just got to keep that attitude of like, there’s answers out there, and things are it’s hope, maybe, like, I just always know that there’s going to be hope. There’s always going to be a next step.
Jeremy Weisz 44:34
Martha, I want to be the first one to thank you. Everyone, check out more episodes of the podcast. Check out schemaapp.com, and we’ll see everyone next time. Martha, thanks so much.
Martha van Berkel 44:43
Thanks to family.
