4 ms·

Always nice to see a newcomer tilting at the b2b status quo. How big is the b2b GIS market and what’s the sort of volume and median deal size? I’m completely

Always nice to see a newcomer tilting at the b2b status quo. How big is the b2b GIS market and what’s the sort of volume and median deal size? I’m completely guessing here but the big players must be: Government? No thanks! Disrupting government contracts must be the last thing on the list of things to conquer. You’ll win the prize eventually but they are the end game big boss that you get just after you get your SOC2 etc. Mining? Landing a big mining or mineral extraction contract seems like it could be a huge deal. There’s a lot of money in that industry (eg mining, ahem, oil) so I suspect they have their own in house cartogeniuses. Selling mapping software to mining corporations would be a bit like selling docker consulting to Google, I’m guessing. Agriculture? Small to medium ag would be a nice market to go after. Maybe even target one of the other ag b2bs rather than selling to ag directly. Exit via John Deere acquihire! Ecology? Academia? If Elsevier are anything to go by then there’s a fair bit of cash there to be spent on institutional software. Maybe you can do a deal with a whole University to provide felt licenses to all staff and students? On that last point, remember how Facebook started out by targeting college kids? Is there a business pattern for pushing gratis software tools to undergrads so that they then preach them to their new bosses as new hires once they graduate? It sounds so obvious but are there good examples of it other than school kids learning MS Office? “Hey I loved using Felt for my undergrad dissertation — let’s use it here, at my new mining job?!” Good luck, Felt!

jeffreyrogers 4y ago
I don't know how big the market is but there is at least one multibillion dollar company (ESRI) in the space. I think they have products targeted at most major industries. The US has at least two government agencies that are heavily involved in satellite imagery and they must contract out a lot of that work. I think it is getting easier to enter into the government contracting space. Anduril shows that you can get VC backing and scale fast if you have the right product.
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  > I think it is getting easier to enter into the government contracting space. Hahahaha no.
  - jeffreyrogers 4y ago
    I mean, I personally know people who have done it at the SBIR level and there is definitely more VC interest recently than say 10 years ago.
jschrf 4y ago
Energy (namely Oil and Gas production) contracts are huge in B2B GIS and offer the growth opportunities that execs love, but in my own opinion the most consistently profitable sector and also the one ripest for disruption is local and state governments in the USA. Imagine being a cash strapped county and paying 6 figures for a software license to a REST API and then having to become a tiny dev shop just to start delivering your generic pothole reporting app to web users.
egorfine 4y ago
> Government? No thanks! Disrupting government contracts must be the last thing Been there, done that. We have developed a similar product for WHO and ILO in Geneva: interactive maps with their data (tons of it). Put my own money into development based on their enthusiastic feedback among heads of departments. Well, enthusiastic feedback is all we've got. Two years is not enough to run the contract by legal and financial depts and nowhere even close to get any - any - signed paper.
itintheory 4y ago
> Is there a business pattern for pushing gratis software tools to undergrads so that they then preach them to their new bosses as new hires once they graduate? A generation of CS students learned to program in Java on Solaris machines subsidized by Sun.

jeffreyrogers 4y ago

I don't know how big the market is but there is at least one multibillion dollar company (ESRI) in the space. I think they have products targeted at most major industries. The US has at least two government agencies that are heavily involved in satellite imagery and they must contract out a lot of that work. I think it is getting easier to enter into the government contracting space. Anduril shows that you can get VC backing and scale fast if you have the right product.

thematrixturtle 4y ago
> I think it is getting easier to enter into the government contracting space. Hahahaha no.
- jeffreyrogers 4y ago
  I mean, I personally know people who have done it at the SBIR level and there is definitely more VC interest recently than say 10 years ago.

jschrf 4y ago

Energy (namely Oil and Gas production) contracts are huge in B2B GIS and offer the growth opportunities that execs love, but in my own opinion the most consistently profitable sector and also the one ripest for disruption is local and state governments in the USA. Imagine being a cash strapped county and paying 6 figures for a software license to a REST API and then having to become a tiny dev shop just to start delivering your generic pothole reporting app to web users.

egorfine 4y ago

> Government? No thanks! Disrupting government contracts must be the last thing Been there, done that. We have developed a similar product for WHO and ILO in Geneva: interactive maps with their data (tons of it). Put my own money into development based on their enthusiastic feedback among heads of departments. Well, enthusiastic feedback is all we've got. Two years is not enough to run the contract by legal and financial depts and nowhere even close to get any - any - signed paper.

itintheory 4y ago

> Is there a business pattern for pushing gratis software tools to undergrads so that they then preach them to their new bosses as new hires once they graduate? A generation of CS students learned to program in Java on Solaris machines subsidized by Sun.