$20m in funding means they have a serious business case - it sounds like to take down ESRI and the rest of GIS?
Does anyone on the team watch HN? Mind chipping in a thought?
Does anyone on the team watch HN? Mind chipping in a thought?
Esri also have a vast array of products for many niche industries.
This product is cool, and I'm sure Felt have given careful consideration to how they plan to strategically differentiate from both Esri and open source solutions.
Beating Esri is a lofty goal. Aside from the aforementioned core tech, they are extremely entrenched and scaled in basically all horizontals, and have verticals for each, plus a big partner network.
I think that in order to "beat" Esri, you'd have to beat them in all these different spaces, horizontally and vertically. There is some low hanging fruit there technically, IMHO, but the picture bigger is that it's going to take a ton of sales people over many years to actually disrupt.
I think a long-term technical strategy for a scrappy startup to be looked at as an "Esri-beater" would be to start with ArcGIS Online and build inroads from there. There are weak points there in the business response to the licensing evolution, the tech, and the UX/DX.
Just my 2c.
I used to walk by his office and find large integrals on his whiteboard, or see him working on his latest project with Mathematica and his code editor.
Esri is an interesting company to me. Always been slightly fascinated by it. One of the older software companies and still privately owned. I spent a good chunk of my early career both aligning and competing with it.
My colleague and I ran into Jack once. Two random nobodies, visiting campus for obscure reasons, running into the main building to escape the random rain storm, and he opens the door to let us in.
Knew exactly why we were there, and asked us what we thought of AWAB before stating something to the effect of: "I don't know what we've been doing all these years. People don't want to buy our stuff and then have to learn to write code, they just want to make maps."
I'm convinced that's the key to the next world-eating web mapping company: stop forcing non-technical orgs to have to become technical orgs with technical staff just to solve simple spatial problems. It's orthogonal to their competencies and primary directives.
Easier said than done of course.
P.s. I know (of) who you are referring to btw, and he's somewhat of a legend, even outside Redlands.
Phew is that a bit of an understatement. Where I work would love a proper competitor to it, so I definitely agree with your assessment as to the approach. Would be amazing to see Felt (or someone) tackle it.
Datawrapper has done a nice job. This feels like that to me. Annotated maps, otherwise it’s easy enough to use mapbox or osm yourself to tell your own story.
$20m is also not that much, mapbox raised 10x that amount and still struggles to find customers.
We have sales people and analysts that just need to make a basic map, call out some data points, and make it look good. Feels like Felt is a great tool for that.
We have larger needs where we need to do more complex analysis and visualize the relationships of larger data sets geographically - that's what we're looking to ArcGIS for.
It's been a bit of a search to find an affordable tool for the first use case and am glad to see someone in the space doing it.
Curious, is there anything else about your needs pushing you towards ArcGIS rather than, say, QGIS?
Wish you the best guys, this industry needs a lot of innovation.
Especially if it's a company with multiple employees that probably don't sit around and do nothing all day.