Craig Campbell’s Past Maps Hits 300K Users
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- Craig Campbell turned down a VC blank‑check offer in 2022 to launch Past Maps, a historical‑map website, instead of an AI venture.
- Past Maps grew its monthly active users from about 20,000 to over 300,000 within three years.
- Past Maps charges a $9 weekly or $52 yearly subscription for deeper map access, reducing reliance on display advertising.
- Google Search results serve as Past Maps’ primary traffic driver, with SEO‑tagged map pages climbing rankings and attracting users.
- Craig Campbell uses a local AI agent that processes Gmail, filters spam, drafts replies, and automates refunds, cutting his daily customer‑service workload to roughly ten minutes.
- Craig Campbell is building a custom OCR system for old maps with modern LLMs because off‑the‑shelf OCR fails on curved and densely labeled map features.
- Craig Campbell says the subscription income matches his former mid‑level engineer salary at Facebook (Meta), supporting both him and his wife’s involvement in the business.
Why it matters: Campbell’s subscription‑based model proves niche web services can thrive without ad revenue, giving creators steady income while sidestepping Google’s ad‑tech monopoly, and shows AI tools can streamline operations—handling emails, refunds, and OCR development—without replacing human expertise, and while the site’s traffic is driven by Google Search SEO, the subscription model shields the business from volatile ad markets.
