The people
What they build
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Working at Schema App
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On the TechTO & TechWaterloo stages
Martha van Berkel of Schema App presents Are you having fun?
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About
The company arrived at schema markup the long way. Martha van Berkel left 14 years at Cisco while on maternity leave to sell what her husband Mark was building — tools to help contractors show up online. Contractors did not want them. The second try was SEO coaching for small and mid-sized businesses, which turned into doing the work for them and made the company a marketing agency, at which point, she told the TechWaterloo stage, they asked whether they were having fun and concluded they were not. The one part they loved was schema markup, a technical corner of search optimization Google did not yet support the way they were doing it. They rewrote the entire website overnight and went to a conference pitching franchises on managing their brand for machines, to blank stares. In 2015 Google's handling of structured data came into line with theirs. Schema App now sells to enterprise marketing teams building content knowledge graphs.
Backers
Bootstrapped, funded partly by a severance from Cisco; no venture round disclosed.
Quick answers
What is schema markup?
Structured data added to a web page using the schema.org vocabulary, which tells a search engine what the page's contents actually are rather than leaving it to infer. Schema App builds and manages it at enterprise scale.
How many times did Schema App pivot?
Twice before finding the product — contractor web tools, then SEO coaching that became agency services — and van Berkel says the trigger each time was noticing they were not enjoying the work.
Who founded Schema App?
Martha van Berkel, its CEO, and her husband Mark van Berkel, who built the original technology. It operates out of Guelph, Ontario.