This is a solo startup that I've been working on for 2 years now. It's a labor of love and I'm very lucky and thankful that it's big enough to surprisingly pay all of our bills. Still constantly feeling FOMO over all of my startup buddies working with AI and LLMs while I plug away at old maps and GIS .
It gets ~80K MAUs and just slowly and consistently is growing organically through word of mouth through history focused communities. I'm currently playing with expanding the coverage internationally as I still only support the US which is a wickedly fun project.
I got into it because I was interested in the technical challenge of registering GPS to maps which are very warped compared to reality, like very old maps or illustrated tourist maps.
Hey Brendan! I also would love to add Canadian maps, it's been a huge request from my users and something I've been wanting to focus on all year. A big challenge I have in bringing the service to new regions is just data access, both to raw hi-res map imagery as well as to satellite, LiDAR, etc so this is on my todo list to begin digging into what the Canadian government offers. Brave new world for me
Nice project! The National Library of Scotland has a nifty tool focused mainly on the UK and Ireland that does something similar (with a paid print service attached):
https://maps.nls.uk/geo/find/marker/
Really cool! I built the website for an antique maps dealer (Dat Narrenschip) when I was 15 or so and fell in love with antique maps. It's still up and running but now on Shopify.
Over the years I experimented a bit with leaflet.js and thought of overlaying maps too so you can navigate maps through time, but quickly realized it was super difficult. Kudos for setting this up!
If you want to expand to other regions, or chat, or get access to high-res scans, let me know. I think plenty of old maps sellers would love to sell their maps this way.
Have you looked into speaking with the various SHPOs in each US State/Territory?
I've worked with several of them a fair bit and they have a ton of old maps hidden internally. Especially for small, specific areas of the state, like historical districts.
That's nice! I have some GIS data of my country it was pretty detailed, it may be outdated now, but covered a good amount of administrative details. If you are extending and need some data on Bangladesh, I can send you
That is awesome. Of course you can bolt LLMs on to any product, I'm thinking AI reviews of (historical) local businesses to give it that google maps feel.
Around 90% of the maps currently on the site are from the US government (USGS). The last 10% are from public institutions and libraries and this is the newest segment that I'm actively working on growing. My hope is to flip this ratio with time.
I also have a few partnerships in the work with some private collections but those have proven trickier to actually get to a "yes". It also involves a lot of bespoke work to process and ingest each individual source so I'm not focusing as hard on this type of sourcing anymore.
Stoke is a 5-month-old startup (founded in Feb 2025 by insuretech veterans with $4B+ in previous exits across 2 bootstrapped companies) building real-time Voice AI agents to make insurance purchases easier, faster, and more affordable.
PROBLEM: Insurance is a critical product, and the current system is broken. Policies are the main shield between American households and financial ruin. At 5% of income, it’s the fourth largest household expense after housing, transportation, and food. The majority of people have insufficient coverage and are paying too much for it. This is primarily driven by human agents who frequently have insufficient expertise and are driven by ~$200B a year in perverse incentives. Customers eat the costs of all of this through higher premiums.
SOLUTION: AI agents that enable personalized, unbiased, expert product recommendations at scale and at a fraction of the cost. We can simultaneously raise the bar of service while stripping out unnecessary costs, delivering those savings directly back to consumers in the form of lower premiums.
HIRING: Founding principal engineers/leaders with expertise in distributed systems, infra, real-time pipelines, agentic AI.
TASK: Shape architecture (AWS, Kafka, Python, Kubernetes, WebRTC); scale for 1000s of concurrent calls under 400ms latency; mentor as we hit 50+ engineers; directly help families save on premiums.
I also run a small B2C company (https://pastmaps.com). Here's what worked for me:
First 1000 users: daily manually done reddit posts. Very time-consuming and annoying, but it gets the job done. Just make sure the content drives users back to the site and is actually relevant, interesting, and valuable
Next 100K users: programmatic long-tail SEO. obviously this is unique to my own product, but I realized that people were organically already searching for the data contained within the maps I host. By focusing on organizing that data and making it understandable to Google, I started a traffic flywheel that's paid off massively.
I'm now exploring programmatic social media marketing as the next lever for the next 1M users as it directly drives even further benefits on the SEO side
One last thought - whatever growth channel you pick should really align with the product you are building. Some products are a great fit for SEO, others not. Some are awesome for Tiktok/Reels, others not. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution.
I run https://pastmaps.com as a lil' solo bootstrapped labor of love. Think Google Maps, but for OLD maps. It has 185K+ fully georeferenced high-res maps covering all of America, as well as satellite, LiDAR, and 3D layers to enable exploration through space and time.
History is cool yo. And apparently lucrative - it currently makes ~$5000/mo and is slowly but surely growing through word of mouth
At a guess, you probably have a very large base of genealogists on there!
Old maps are incredibly useful for genealogy because it helps you do lots of stuff. Say someone lived on "House #3 Country Road" in (county), but County Road no longer exists, and all that can be found is a brief description of "County Road is now Main Street, Bank Avenue, and Church Road" It would serve as a vital clue as to where their ancestors house used to be (or may still be!)
It also helps to give a better narrative of how the community has expanded and changed over the years. Instead of just, "It was probably all forest land, then farm land, then suburbs or something?" Instead you can see stuff like if there were spikes/declines in populations in response to various events (gold rush, mining, factory work, railroads, war, highways bringing/diverting traffic, and so on). They can also show how the land may have changed from environmental factors (mud slides, earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes). Maybe you're from a "Military family" but never knew why, only to find out that a Military Depot opened up 2 minutes from their house just as great-grandpa turned 18.
In a real sense, it describes not just the family and where they lived, but the type of place they knew, and community they grew up in. It hints at how they saw and experienced things over the years. "But why did great-great-grandpa insist on moving his entire family? He had lived in that beautiful house his entire life! Ah. They put the railroad 6 inches from his backdoor!"
No but I love that shop! I actually introduced myself to the owner there and told him about how I also run an online map shop and he got immediately super duper weird. Lol. Cut-throat business I guess?
I also love David Rumsey's collection! Check out the rumsey map center at Stanford if you ever find yourself in the area, it's ridiculously cool
Pastmaps was really born out of my desire for more advanced features, layers, and tools on rumsey's site and I'm hoping I can eventually deliver on that vision (spoilers: I'm definitely not there yet)
Vast majority are currently from the USGS, but this is going to wildly shift and diversify soon as I've been working to bring a wider variety of sources. The next wave is coming mainly from public library systems from all across the globe (my background is in search so I literally am running a map crawler)
I stand on the shoulders of these giants that have done amazing work to digitize the paper maps and I mainly am hoping to just aid in the ease of discoverability and exploration of these assets
Possible minor bug: I searched for "New York, NY, USA" and it showed 41 maps of only Staten Island. I had to search for "Manhattan, New York, NY, USA" to get the maps I was looking for.
Thank you! It's actually a bit embarassing but my search uses the central lat,lng returned from Google's places API and then finds all intersecting maps. It's just not the right approach for a broad place based search. I'm in the process of integrating full geometry data globally from https://overturemaps.org/ as I type to fix this across the board and to use the definitive boundary geometry for the under-the-hood map lookups
Thanks for the report and for checking out the site!
It's currently 60% premium subscriptions to unlock advanced features (LiDAR layers for example) and then 40% for more traditional physical map print sales. I didn't intend to get into the physical ecommerce world with this but customers kept asking over and over again for ways to purchase the maps for display so I finally gave in last year. Figuring out the supply chain, shipping, graphics design process, etc has been a bit of a lift but fun to do. We have 2.2M unique product variants available so that's also been a bit fun to wrangle!
I'm building Pastmaps - striving to eventually be the world's largest online collection of old maps, aerials, and photos all packaged into a public historical research platform that's as easy to use as Google Maps. This has been a labor of love now for about a year, but I still have a huge mountain to climb to realize the full vision. Give it a try and give me your harsh criticisms - that's the greatest gift you could give me!
Even in it's current state, it's being used by geneologists, urban explorers, search & rescue teams, real estate developers, government agencies, etc. The number of exploding use-cases continues to astound me and keeps me motivated to continue.
Excellent! When reading Galois' coroner's report, I was happy to be able to find an old Paris map online that showed roughly where he had been the day of his duel and the route the farmer who found him would've taken to the hospital.
Just be careful in countries like Japan where old maps sometimes are used illegally to discriminate based on caste (tracing ancestry of workers/candidates to discriminate against ones coming from certain historically lower caste areas of towns and cities). You might catch negative attention if your tool makes it easy to reference these maps
Wow this is super cool! I've hacked together some equivalent for small projects. Curious if these are hosted as tiles that can be referenced by third-party servers?
For context I'm working on an app called 3DStreet[1]. It's mostly used by planners for future projects, but I've been excited about the possibility of helping to visualize the past too.
I also have been building and offering my own UI on top of the USGS collection of maps (among others in the public domain) at https://pastmaps.com if anyone else finds the existing UIs frustrating like I do. This is a labor of love and something I'm continuing to chip away at and make better and better with time
Interestingly enough, I ended up discovering some incorrect data in their system as part of my ingestion process 4 months ago and directly worked with the USGS to both report the pipeline errors causing bad output and they were incredibly prompt and open to collaborating on identifying the issue and proper fix (roughly a 2 week turnaround from original report to correction). I honestly wonder if this 1700+ update to the ESRI collection is a direct result of that work because the numbers do roughly align so that would be exciting!
After selling my last startup in 2022 and being very burned out I decided to lean deeper into my own hobby - metal detecting. This lead to me building out a lot of cool tooling around historical maps to help me find better areas to detect and I slowly began to realize that there were many other hobbyists and enthusiasts who also were interested in the maps and tools I was building. So Pastmaps was born
The traffic and server costs started snowballing in the past year so I added the ability to buy physical prints of any of the maps in the collection and this has also started to take off. It's only ramen-profitable for now so don't go thinking that this is hugely successful by any means but it's growing on its own so I'm excited to see how big it can get.
Next up is also adding some premium tooling and features that many of my members have been begging me for so fingers crossed!
Love it. The core point that I actually took away is driving home the fact that maps are not infallible and this goes against common sense for most people. I don't know if it truly led to WWI, but faulty maps have definitely caused endless problems throughout history. Look at Bermuda - the lack of this island on maps (or inprecise positioning) from the 14th-19th century has directly caused 350+ shipwrecks littering its shores. And countries didn't share updated positioning data/maps for centuries because it was a strategic advantage to horde it. Cool now, horrifying back then.
Even today, official US govn topo maps are constantly rectified and reprinted as new surveys and aerials are taken into account and we realize errors were made. You can actually explore the differences in the reprints via https://pastmaps.com/explore if you're curious about it (for full transparency, Pastmaps is my own project)
Been working on this as a new way to find, explore, and view old historical maps and aerials of my area. Still heavily in development but have been surprised by some early traffic stats (1-2K organic uniques / mo and growing 200%+ m/m right now)
Hoping to add in more advanced map tooling within the next week or 2, including new basemap options, 3d terrain view, and then a proper search box which I've been pushing off for far too long
That's really cool! Just wanted to share the following site as the city of Toronto created something similar a few months ago https://map.toronto.ca/torontomaps/
This is really cool, makes me nostalgic for a lot of time georeferencing random maps from the library of congress or from municipal archives etc.
In that same vein, you could add a feature where users could contribute georeferenced map files for community review and approval--I think that would really increase your scalability. I see you have an email for that currently.
I love love love this direction. And yea, I have a basic email but I really think a super simple upload and maybe even dead-easy georeference tool for folks to contribute data is a no-brainer! I'm bumping this up on my backlog, thank you!
Amazing, can't wait to see where you end up! Let me know if you need a hand too. I love web mapping projects--I got into programming through QGIS/leaflet on the way to a couple degrees in GIS and urban planning.
I love it!
A suggestion for much further down the line: a timeline on the map which composites many maps from a similar time period so you can see them all stitched together (somewhat like how https://skyvector.com/ stitches together multiple sectional charts into a continuous map, though I know it can't be as seamless).
Or you could attempt to run some extra processing steps to warp the map to match the background map's projection.
Those are both big undertakings, though.
Very doable, these are called mosaics in the GIS world and it's actually not that crazy to do
Really love this suggestion, I could see it making map exploration far easier since now you just need to explore by year instead of by map and by year (reducing dimensionality by 1!). Thank you, I'm going to chew on this a bit more but I really think there's something here
Yea I used to use this site quite a bit but it is clunky as all hell. I found myself cobbling together my own tools or stitching 3-5 different resources together over time for my research and this eventually just led to me starting work on Pastmaps. I'm hoping I can build something far more comprehensive, modern, and intuitive
Damn, for a second I thought this was like weedmaps but for linguini (which would be an awesome site) and then I looked a bit closer. Still cool though!
I actually think that's a great idea! I considered doing it as part of my ingestion pipeline when starting out but honestly got a bit overwhelmed with all the options so put it on my backburner. Maybe I should take another look. I think it would be an awesome way to enable even more crisp zooming
Been a firefox user since 2020 after switching from Chrome and haven't looked back. The only thing that I find myself missing is native casting support so that's the last piece that sometimes forces me to open up Chrome
This is a solo startup that I've been working on for 2 years now. It's a labor of love and I'm very lucky and thankful that it's big enough to surprisingly pay all of our bills. Still constantly feeling FOMO over all of my startup buddies working with AI and LLMs while I plug away at old maps and GIS .
It gets ~80K MAUs and just slowly and consistently is growing organically through word of mouth through history focused communities. I'm currently playing with expanding the coverage internationally as I still only support the US which is a wickedly fun project.