Fresh on the heels of the launch of Yext Rep last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, Yext just signed up its first major distribution partner. Superpages will make an online, co-branded Dashboard which includes Yext Rep available to its 300,000 local business advertisers across the country. The Superpages Dashboard will roll out in the coming weeks.
Yext Rep is a way for local merchants to manage their reputations online. In one central place, it shows them how to claim their business on sites like Yelp, Citysearch, Foursquare, Twitter, or Facebook, and what consumers are saying about them on the Web. All of this gets shown in a feed, along with local advertising data from Yext’s main pay-per-call advertising product, Yext Listings. With the new Dashboard, Yext Rep and Yext Listings are treated as enterprise apps for small businesses, and Superpages now also has an app in the Dashboard for managing Superpages ads, which can also be added to the main feed.
“Our vision is to ultimately be the UI for all local businesses,” says Yext CEO Howard Lerman. In fact, one of the tabs on the Dashboard is a Store where businesses can add different apps. Yext Rep is free, but Yext Listings, Superpages, and email marketing tool iContact are available for a monthly subscription. Yext wants to create a platform for simple business apps targeted at local merchants. It is pursuing very much a Salesforce model, where business owners can pick and choose whichever apps they want to use, and then the resulting data gets published as events to their feed, much in the way Salesforce Chatter is attempting to mix CRM and other enterprise data along with Twitter streams for mid-tier and larger businesses. Salesforce Chatter has its own Chatter Exchange for third-party apps, but Yext is going after smaller, local businesses which a much simpler product. Lerman is modeling his store more after iTunes: a central place where local business can find and buy all of their online business apps.
Yext is working on other apps as well, such as a Yext Sites, all targeted at local businesses. Yext Rep is the free anchor app which Lerman hopes will entice small businesses to sign up and expose them to all the other apps in the Dashboard. “We woud allow a competitive reputation management product into the platform,” he says. Yext collects a commission on every paid app sold, and distribution partners such as Superpages also get a cut of the revenues for apps purchased by their customers through the co-branded sites.
Below is a video of the Yext Rep launch demo at Disrupt
