You don’t have to be a big organization to create a business or side hustle around your geospatial skills. If you are looking for examples and ideas … this episode is for you.
If you enjoyed this episode check out “Geospatial Side hustles”
https://mapscaping.com/podcast/geospatial-side-hustles/
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In Conversation
Why This Episode
This episode is a little different — there’s no guest in the studio, just me. Today I want to shine some light on side hustles for people like us, small businesses that people like us can start. All too often the geospatial industry is focused on the short hit: military applications, insurance use cases, business-to-business use cases. We talk about creating value as something big businesses do for other big businesses. In this episode I want to focus on your business ideas — the side hustles you’ve created or the opportunities you see.
I’ve crowdsourced ideas from Twitter and added a few of my own. Bear in mind these are ideas, not recipes for success. There’s no guarantee. The great thing about ideas is they’re free — you can give them all away and still have more than enough for yourself. Maybe we need to see a bunch of bad ideas before we can recognise a good one.
Geoguessr: From Side Project to Thriving Business
I posted on Twitter asking “who’s got a map-related side hustle?” and it was great to see what people were up to. Someone wrote in: “I got obsessed with Around the World in 80 Days, discovered there wasn’t a nice detailed dataset charting the route described in the book, so I made one.” This might sound ridiculous — but let me introduce you to Geoguessr.
Geoguessr today has a Twitter following of about 20,000, a subreddit with 40,000 people, Discord servers, Facebook groups, Instagram pages, a store, Twitch streams, gift cards, multiple languages, iOS and Android apps. It’s enormous. But when I check the Wayback Machine, the first snapshot from 2013 shows the website pretty much sucked — a Google Street View image, a little box on the right that said “click the map to place your guess,” and that was it.
Today, according to Ubersuggest, that site gets 370,000 organic visits a month — and that estimate is significantly low, because the same tool consistently underestimates Mapscaping’s traffic by 4x. We don’t know how much money this makes, but if you can afford dedicated iOS and Android apps, money is changing hands. The point: when someone shows up and says “I made a dataset charting the route from Around the World in 80 Days,” we have no idea what that will turn into.
Side Hustles Worth Studying
A few other things showed up in that Twitter thread. Web shops selling print-on-demand clothing based on satellite imagery — sportswear, towels, t-shirts, pillowcases. Dan Ford made a Map Projections for Babies book and ran a successful Kickstarter for it. Someone designing maps for other people’s board games. Someone starting a newsletter focused on agriculture and Earth observation.
What all these projects have in common is that they’re made by people like us — trying new things, sharing their work, not waiting for permission. My guess is none of them have a business degree or learned how to publish books or design board games at school. They just saw an opportunity and took it.
The Email Newsletter Opportunity
I think a newsletter business is a brilliant idea. I saw one the other day called Payload — payloadspace.com. Listen to how specific this is: “We write a daily newsletter covering the business and policy of space.” And the pinned tweet from September 2021: “We are happy to announce we have raised $650,000 in seed funding from a list of email addresses.”
That’s amazing. The beautiful thing about email is the scalability — the cost of writing the email is the same whether it goes to one person or a hundred million. Where are the email newsletters for the geospatial industry? Imagine how many other industries you could start one for. Where’s the newsletter for geospatial Python enthusiasts? It’s pretty cheap to start — Ghost, Mailchimp, ConvertKit all have free tiers. You could monetise through advertising, your own products, or affiliate marketing. If anyone listening wants to start a geospatial newsletter, please get in touch.
The Mushroom Map: A Business Built on a Map
You might be thinking: “I just want to make maps. Is there a business in making maps?” I went looking and found one. I won’t share the URL because it’s about a very specific type of mushroom — some might call it magical. But the lesson generalises.
In Denmark there’s a whole culture of foraging for wild mushrooms. On Amazon there are thousands of foraging books, special foraging bags, recipes everywhere. YouTube has videos with hundreds of thousands of views devoted to finding mushrooms. There’s a lot of content about how to look for mushrooms — but what’s missing is a map of where the mushrooms are. If you’re a pirate hunting buried treasure, which would you prefer: a book called How to Look for Buried Treasure, or the map of where the treasure is?
This particular mushroom map works like this: it matches dates and coordinates with historical growth records and habitat data — land cover, elevation, soil acidity, weather — then trains a statistical model on the conditions in which this mushroom thrives, then runs live predictions globally. It uses Copernicus land cover for Europe, CEC’s 30 m Landsat/RapidEye-derived layer for North America, SRTM elevation, and publicly available growth records. Six euros gets you a season pass with a 10-day forecast and satellite view.
You don’t have to look past the specific mushroom. Look at what’s been built using tools you understand and data you can access. And the same idea works for wild asparagus, wild truffles ($4,000/lb), wild ginseng ($17,000 for a single root) — none of which have a map yet. Why not? Because someone like you hasn’t made it.
The Smoky Mountains Fall Foliage Map
SmokyMountains.com is a cabin rental company. They’ve built a fall foliage prediction map — a simple US map with a date slider that shows you predicted leaf-colour change from “no change” through “minimal,” “patchy,” “partial,” “near peak,” “peak,” and “past peak.”
The map looks straightforward, but the business behind it is remarkable. That web page has a higher authority ranking than the entire domain. It has nearly 32,000 pages linking to it from 3,321 unique domains. According to Ubersuggest it gets 52,000 visits a month — and that’s underestimated. That’s free organic traffic to a cabin rental business. Imagine paying a dollar a click for it.
The Wayback Machine shows the map first appeared in 2014 — the underlying data may have changed, but the map hasn’t. It’s been driving traffic for almost a decade. My guess is they could have paid $20–30k to have it built and it’d still have been a bargain.
People like us can make maps like this. There must be a hiking company or tourism office that needs a map-based tool predicting peak wildflower bloom. There must be a bird-watching company that needs a tool predicting bird migration based on food availability. There must be a photography organisation that needs the same.
Selling Accountability, Not Information
Udemy is an online course marketplace. Search for “geospatial Python” and you get 2,478 results. Even if only half are relevant, that’s over a thousand courses. The vast majority of people who start online courses never finish them. Maybe they got what they needed and left, but more likely they got stuck and no one was there to help.
The course I’m looking at right now is 18 euros — “Learn to write Python scripts for ArcGIS, QGIS, Postgres and other geospatial software.” 1,284 students enrolled, 358 rated it. You can’t build accountability into an 18-euro course.
Here’s the opportunity: take a course like this, complete it, then write to the creator: “Let’s work together. Employ me as a tutor. We create a private Discord or Facebook group. Raise the course price to 100 euros. Two days a week I’ll be in the community helping, coaching, mentoring, giving students accountability.” When I went to university this was my job — I took intro to GIS, then the next semester I was the tutor for it.
Information on how to programme in Python is a commodity — it’s everywhere. No one has a monopoly on it. What isn’t a commodity online is accountability. It won’t be for everyone — you’ll price some students out — but it could be for someone. A certain percentage of students will pay more to make sure they actually achieve the goal they were promised.
Street View for the Places It Doesn’t Reach
Over Christmas my family and I went on our first ski holiday. When we were trying to find a beginner-friendly place, it would have been helpful to use something like Google Street View to check out the runs. But Street View doesn’t cover ski fields. I wonder if ski fields would pay someone like us to put a 360-degree camera on a drone, fly the runs, and upload to Street View. Same for campgrounds — for several years we’ve driven from Denmark to Croatia to camp, and Street View for campgrounds would help us pick the right site.
It’s a half-baked idea. I haven’t found other companies offering this service. There are platforms that help you upload to Street View; some let you add a logo. A reasonable 360-degree camera is a couple of hundred dollars. Google hosts the imagery for free. It seems like a good deal for everyone — and once you’ve done one project, you have a very public portfolio to point to.
Closing Thoughts: Make Something Worth Talking About
You can use the skills you have to make children’s books, design a clothing brand, sell wall art, build an email media company, create online map-based quizzes and games, sell a subscription product that helps people pick mushrooms or wildflowers, create map-based content that drives millions of views, or help people learn online. Or you can do none of these things — and it might just be comforting to know you have options, that you’re not stuck.
I don’t see what you see. I’m not going where you’re going. No one is. You’ll see opportunities nobody else will. Once you have an idea, you’re going to hit a few problems. There’s no road map — you’ll have to make it up. You’ll have to give yourself permission to try and fail and try again. And if you build it, they will not come — marketing is really hard.
There’s an alternative to doing all the marketing yourself: make something so good that people will talk about it. To do that you have to be very specific about who the thing is for and what it’s for. With this podcast I sometimes wonder if I made a mistake being too broad — “a podcast for the geospatial community.” Three years in, maybe I should have made a geospatial Python podcast, or one specifically for geospatial data scientists. Maybe I should have. Or maybe that’s an opportunity for you.
