Let me try to understand this:

1. "pay per action" is paying for a qualified lead, as opposed to a raw lead (which could be anything, e.g. even a wrong number).

2. Doing it with phone calls (as opposed to clicks on online ads, or emails etc), because that is how many businesses and their customers contact each other. e.g. gyms, vets, car repairs.

3. Doing it for local businesses.

The technical achievement of speech recognition is significant. I like his point that because the speech is interpreted relative to a specific business type, the domain is highly specialized, and so the task of recognizing the particular terms of that domain is much easier. I've been impressed by automatic speech recognition for telephone directory lookup - for me, it works 90% of the time; and that's out of the whole phone book, not restricted to a domain. I guess this is an example of "speech recognition" is still not good enough in general, but it's good enough in specific roles.

The next step after "pay per action" would be "pay per sale", which Google can do when you use both their adwords and their payment facility (I don't know how well that's working).

Anyone care to correct my misunderstandings, or elaborate on these points?

I was at TC50 and it's impossible to overstate how dominant this guy's presence was during his demo. No one could believe their eyes or ears that here was this amazing, large, profitable company doing something everyone wants and no one had ever heard of them. I would have offered them money on the spot.

Interesting article on a veterinary site in which one person accuses Yext of ripping her off while a few others tout pretty impressive ROI from using it.

http://news.vin.com/VINNews.aspx?articleId=13851

"Dr. Randy Wiltshire reported in a VIN discussion that he’d used YextVets for six months, and during that time, was directed 67 new clients from the site, for which he paid Yext a total $2,345 in advertising fees. Those clients, in turn, spent $9,100 in his practice."

So if he paid $2,345 for 67 calls, Yext was charging him $35/call. That's a pretty nifty digit.

The real news here seems to be that a company with $20M in revenue (yext) was allowed to pitch at TC50.

I'm really surprised that they managed to grow so big and stay so low profile for so long.

nice to see they treat their engineers well (open plan offices) ~ http://www.yext.com/recruiting/engineers/

i dont get it ... how do they help the businesses with the junk calls with transcribing and categorizing them? it seems to me that those junk-callers call anyway.