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.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364154

Points: 9

# Comments: 1

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

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

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008732

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

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.

Will absolutely reach out to connect!

awesome project

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 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.

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!

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)

Thanks for the report and for checking out the site!

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

History is cool yo. And apparently lucrative - it currently makes ~$5000/mo and is slowly but surely growing through word of mouth

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.