Soupy

https://pastmaps.com

This is my side project turned solo bootstrapped startup that I've been working on over the past 2.5 years. Pastmaps has been solely a US-focused platform since it's initial launch but I'm currently working on launching to the UK and Ireland within the next week. If all goes as planned then I should have a first wave of 30K fully digitized, hi-res, and fully georeferenced 1800s ordnance maps available soon to help folks discover the history all around them.

I'm likely going to need to start building out my own global LiDAR dataset next though. My coverage for the US is quite stellar thanks to the data provided by the USGS' 3DEP program but I'm way out of touch with what's available and possible in the EU. It's gonna be a challenge but I'm excited to dive in.

I'm OCR-ing 200K+ historical maps (or at least trying). For example: https://www.threads.com/@that.map.guy.craig/post/DXA59AylJng...

This has only really become possible within the last 3 months and I'm still shocked at how good some of the new models are at tasks like this.

I'm not a crazy person, promise. I run https://pastmaps.com as a solo bootstrapped founder and this data is so valuable to my customers. It's been a dream of mine to do this as part of my map digitization pipeline and I'm so excited for the product experiences this is going to unlock.

So much to build, so little time

I've decided to open source cmux - a small minimal set of shell commands geared towards Claude Code to help manage the worktree lifecycle, especially when building with 5-10 parallel agents across multiple features. I've been using this for the past few months and have experienced a monstrous increase in output and my ability to keep proper context.

Free, open source, MIT-licensed, with simplicity as a core tenant.

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.

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

Will absolutely reach out to connect!

whoa this is wickedly cool! and yes, georeferencing these old maps is the bane of my existence right now

awesome project

"Google maps but for old maps": https://pastmaps.com

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.

Stoke | Bellevue, WA | ONSITE (hybrid)

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.

TEAM: 5 engineers (ex-Facebook, NYT, ScaleAI, AssuranceIQ), growing fast.

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.

YOU: Obsess over reliable code, solve tough problems, ship fast, explain concepts clearly, learn quickly.

PERKS: Competitive salary/equity, full benefits, top tools, encouraged recharge time, quarterly retreats (hackathon + vacation).

Email Kyle Moseley: kyle@stoke.com with resume and why Stoke.

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.

Good luck!

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 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)

Soon! I currently only have coverage for the US but I am expanding globally in Q1 2025. Just not enough hours in the day

You hit the nail on the head - my primary use-case is genealogy research!

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!

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?

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

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

https://pastmaps.com

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.

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!

Oh hey that's me! I sell maps on the internet - https://pastmaps.com

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)

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

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!

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

Amazing, just bookmarked this!

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

https://pastmaps.com

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

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

amazing comments and callouts, thank you! I actually tried to load the raw image data blobs as a layer into MapLibre but couldn't figure out a way to do it and finally capitulated and did the "bad" move of re-encoding just to get the initial interactive map collection out the door for folks. It sounds like this is in fact possible but I missed something. I'll take a look at the Image and Canvas sources, thanks!

Re the webmercator reprojection - yea it's gnarly that I'm doing it clientside but it's exactly because I'm working towards the ability to layer them interactively on top of eachother (as well as on various basemaps). My projection code is also only half-working at the moment and it's where I'm currently spending my time next week. I'm trying to avoid building pipelines to re-encode the geotiffs as long as I can since there's 10+TB of them in my backend so this is why you're seeing me doing this clientside instead. This is a solo project so I need to be really picky where I spend my time so I can keep moving the ball forward

I'll join those 2 communities, thank you! Been crazy hard to find folks who are deep in this stuff so most of my learning has been through endless googling down deep dark corners of the web for the past 2 months

that's essentially the route that Mapbox went down and they've even invented an entire mbtiles file format that essentially is just a sqlite db for doing these kinds of queries on the server

it's the "status quo" approach today in the industry, but it has some downsides still especially for smaller builders (ie me):

1. i'd have to run a separate tile server to take in the tile requests and convert them to "sql" requests (or mbtile requests) under the hood, and I'm just not a fan of more moving parts 2. I'd have to take my 10+ TB (and growing) of geotiffs and process them all into mbtiles which is a huge compute and walltime cost 3. the resulting mbtiles end up being similar in size at best, but at worst far larger than the original geotiffs so it balloons up the hosting and egress costs in exchange for faster requests. this is a great compression optimization breakdown for geotiffs that dives into this if you're interested - https://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2015/02/geotiff-compression-f...

anyways, I'm sure ted has his own thoughts as well but this is at least what I've taken away from this space after diving into it with fresh eyes in the past few months