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.
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.
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
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.
Former vc-backed ecommerce and travel founder. Ex-FAANG working on mobile OS, Growth, and Search
Social: https://threads.net/@that.map.guy.craig
Reachouts: [email protected]