GoKawiilis a senior reviewer with over a decade of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview.
Craig Campbell walked away from the river of investor money flowing into AI to create, of all things, a website.
Sure, Campbell probably could have started an AI company. He’s a former engineer at Meta and an experienced tech founder who in 2022 sold his last venture — an e-commerce tool for businesses that use Shopify — right as the AI boom was booming. “I had my prior VC investors breathing down my neck, going ‘start something else. We’ll write you a blank check.’” He had other ideas.
People generally aren’t rushing to get into the website business, what with the Google Zero event horizon approaching. Campbell was undeterred and has grown his service — Past Maps — into a sustainable business. And he’s managed it in an increasingly unlikely way: via organic search.
Past Maps is true to its name. The site lets you view historical maps of a particular region with a modern-day map overlaid. You can adjust the opacity to fade between the two views. The maps come from publicly available sources like the US Geological Survey, but the tools to allow people to explore them in this way were developed by Campbell. He built them to help inform his metal detection hobby — by pinpointing the modern-day locations of old structures and trails, he’d identify new places to go looking for artifacts. He started sharing his map tooling on Reddit with other metal detection enthusiasts and found that other people wanted to get their hands on what he’d created. With that, his newest tech venture was charted.
You don’t have to be looking for literal gold to enjoy Past Maps. For someone who’s just curious about what’s around them, it’s its own kind of treasure trove. I’ve used it to help grasp things like the shape of the Duwamish River before it was straightened out to help ships move through the waterway. Campbell’s customers use it for a wide range of reasons — from genealogy research to a daily user who maps old oil wells. It’s a research tool, but it’s also just plain fun.
Watch the Duwamish River in the lower portion of the frame go from squiggly to straight and back again.
The growth trajectory has been steady. Campbell says traffic has grown from an average of 20,000 active users a month to now over 300,000 a month in year three. The income is good enough to sustain Campbell and his wife, who also helps with the business. But he can’t help but think about what the money might have been like if he had taken those VC investments to work on AI. “I’m making the same as when I was like, an E4 at Facebook, which is like a mid-level engineer.”
“This is how the web is supposed to work. This is actually the old school web.”
Past Maps’ biggest source of traffic is Google Search results. Campbell found early on that Past Maps was rising through the ranks of search when people went looking for historical information about locations of interest to them — a church their grandmother attended, or abandoned mine sites in a particular county.
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