This episode tells the story of ChronoCards – what it is and how its business case was built. Interestingly, its founder is both a self-taught software engineer and a business person. He reveals what worked for him when starting ChronoCards and some invaluable lessons he has picked up along the way – including how he deals with uncertainty.
About The Guest
The guest on this show is Mike Davlantes, the founder of ChronoCards. He is a GIS Analyst, a self-taught software developer, and a business person. His motivation to learn software development came from an urge to automate repetitive steps while performing GIS tasks. Mike didn’t want to keep clicking the same buttons over and over again while doing GIS. Later, he transformed his newly acquired skills to business – helping companies to develop geospatial software, freelancing, and consulting.
What Is ChronoCards?
ChronoCards was developed to help in managing GIS teams better. It is a cloud-based platform that provides activity logs, workflow documentation, and reporting tools for ArcGIS Pro. Similar to GitHub which logs and documents the activities of software engineers, ChronoCards logs and documents GIS analyses procedures allowing companies to retain geoprocessing workflows for later reference. With ChronoCards, teams can reconstruct the exact steps of how a task was done even if the particular person that did that task is not available.
How Does ChronoCards Compare To APRX Files History?
We know that geoprocessing history can be obtained from the aprx file of an ArcGIS Pro project. But the big challenge is that there could be thousands of operations to scroll through while trying to find the relevant geoprocessing pieces that you need.
Even after you find these pieces, it is still difficult to recreate a geospatial analysis if the exact steps were not recorded procedurally. ChronoCards solves this problem by adding context to the geoprocessing history.
In ChronoCards, you can filter the history logs by person who performed the analysis, and as well pick out just the time period that you know it was when they were performing a certain task. You can also filter down to the exact layers of a project and see the operations that were done on those layers. With these ways to filter the geoprocessing history, finding the relevant steps is easier and faster.
You will not be stuck scrolling through thousands of geoprocessing history. Rather, you can instantly pull the exact steps of performing a task, see what the inputs and outputs were, and the geoprocessing tools that were used.
Building Workflows with ChronoCards
Documenting workflows retains institutional knowledge that can be used as a company’s standard operating procedure.
Documented workflows contain all the steps for performing a task. People of varying expertise can use these workflows without the need of having to understand all the exact pieces that went into them. Onboarding new employees is also easier when there is a recorded workflow that can be used as a training document.
How Does ChronoCards Support Collaboration among Analysts?
Today, a substantial amount of GIS collaboration happens remotely. But even for the teams that work on-site, there is often a need to communicate the progress of a task among team members.
Usually, teams would have to await a response from the responsible team member. If the member is unable to respond due to whatever reason, it could mean stalling the progress on a project especially if that information is needed before the next part can begin.
In ChronoCards, this information is readily available on the web dashboard. Every team member can see what their colleagues have done at any time they need that information.
How Can ChronoCards Help To Inform Management Decisions?
Quantifying the amount of work done by a GIS team in an organization is difficult. Usually, it is not until there is an end product such as a map or a dashboard that one would have something tangible to report.
ChronoCards provides a way to quantify the actual day-to-day work that is done by a GIS team in a tangible way. Senior managers can use ChronoCards reports to help inform their decisions on whether the GIS team needs extra manpower, or whether a server can handle more web services. Additionally, being able to see when a server is busiest helps in managing downtime especially when maintenance or upgrades are required.
Uncertainty in Running a Business
People like to be in control. But there are things that are beyond our control, which invite a lot of uncertainty.
Running your own business comes with having to deal with a lot of uncertainty. As the founder of ChronoCards puts it,
“There is always a degree of uncertainty that comes with choosing not to work for someone else – and taking a paycheck.”
Factors that are out of our control such as a recession or climate change further exacerbate the uncertainty that a business face. As a person running a business, the first step to dealing with uncertainty is to accept the reality of uncertainty – getting comfortable with the thought that things are always going to change.
The next important step is exploring ways to adapt to changes that happen. There is no one who is immune to uncertainty. Rather, successful businesses have learned to live with it by continuously adapting to change.
What Are Some Of The Things You Should Do When Starting A Business?
Starting a business could be one of the most challenging parts of running a business, especially for people who have no prior experience.
There are businesses that failed in the starting phase despite having excellent ideas. One of the pitfalls for tech businesses is creating ‘cool’ features but which are not actually drivers of revenue. A business should go for the features that customers need. One way to know this is by talking to a lot of people before deciding to build something. Getting the insights of various stakeholders may save you a lot of hours building something that people think is cool but are not really willing to spend on it. These hours can be used to create something else of a higher impact instead.
Starting to market early also leverages a business for success. If possible, marketing should begin way before a business has developed a product. It doesn’t have to be a sales pitch every time, just telling the story of your journey may do much to set the stage for business. When you eventually have a product you will already have built some credibility with the audience you are targeting.
Knowing where to find your customers and using the right language can supercharge your success in business. A B2B (Business to Business) business would not market to the same audience as a B2C (Business to Consumer) business. If you are a B2B, it is helpful to place yourself strategically where you can meet the decision-makers in the businesses you are targeting. Showcasing in the conferences they attend is a good way to meet them. Various startup programs such as the ESRI startup program allow startups to showcase their product at ESRI conferences, increasing their chances of meeting the right people.
Packaging your product differently is an extremely important skill in any business. Depending on who you are talking to the messaging you use needs to change. The language to use when presenting a product to senior management is not the same as the one to use when talking to junior employees. Using the right packaging could mean more success in your business pitches.
Finally, keep in mind that starting a business is a journey – with a lot to learn from the process. Acknowledge that you will not have everything figured out at the start, but it gets better as you learn. When faced with uncertainty, it might help to try various things in a certain direction and evaluate the results. Keep doing the things that work and they will help drive you to success.
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In Conversation
From Patagonia Cartographer to Self-Taught Developer
Daniel: Mike, welcome to the podcast. Would you introduce yourself and describe how you got involved in GIS?
Mike: Thanks for having me. I’m Mike Davlantes, I live in western Colorado, and I started my career in GIS as a cartographer for an adventure race in Patagonia — they didn’t have a lot of detailed topographic maps for the areas the race was going through, so we’d go and map that. Then I worked as a GIS analyst for the naval facilities engineering command, the park service, and oil and gas. Along the way I taught myself software engineering, really because I got into it through Python scripting and a desire not to click the same thing 4,000 times. Since 2016 I’ve made a living doing geospatial software freelance and consulting.
Daniel: When you say self-taught — tutorials, books, YouTube? And have you ever wished you had a formal computer science background?
Mike: A lot of it was tutorials on the internet. I took one geoprocessing-with-Python class in college and that was the only official course I ever had. Otherwise it was knowing there was a problem I wanted to solve, knowing it was possible, looking at what other people had done, and pulling my hair out until I figured it out. Honestly, not even a little bit have I been lost — if you go into deep algorithmic efficiency stuff you can get lost, but for practical, boots-on-the-ground web development today, I rarely encounter something well over my head that would require actual college courses. And nobody has ever turned me down for not having that background — it’s been results-oriented. If you’re the only person who can script geospatial things on your team, that makes you valuable. You don’t have to be the best at it; you just have to be the person who’s there who can do it.
What ChronoCards Is
Daniel: Pitch me ChronoCards. What is it, and what does it do?
Mike: ChronoCards lets you manage GIS better by providing activity logs, workflow documentation, and reporting tools for ArcGIS Pro. There’s a hugely popular software engineering tool called GitHub that logs the things you do in code and lets you document them as you go. The deeper into software I dove, the more indispensable GitHub became — for collaborating and just for remembering what I did myself. I reflected back on my GIS analyst days and thought, if there was something like this for GIS, it would have saved me a lot of pain. There were no shortage of nights as an analyst sitting there wondering, how did I do this, why is it not working now when it used to work? ChronoCards is an ArcGIS Pro add-in that logs metadata about your team’s activity and streams it in real time to a web dashboard. Say you and I work on a project for a big client, you do the complex analysis, I do the data cleaning and layout — then you leave for your dream job in New Zealand. The client comes back wanting updates, and I’m left holding the bag. With ChronoCards I can pull up your exact steps, down to the individual parameter, with the comments you left me.
Making Thousands of Logs Useful
Daniel: You mentioned scrolling back through thousands of operations — thousands of logs aren’t always helpful. How do you log things in a way that actually is?
Mike: Thousands of operations is just too much information to find anything useful. What we do is add context — the aprx file, who was doing it, the time it happened — and let you filter by all of those. So on our example project, I know you left about a month after we started looking for these things, so I can filter down to that time, down to the exact project, even down to the exact layers from ArcGIS Online or portal or an enterprise geodatabase, and see just the operations that happened on those layers during that period. I’m not stuck scrolling through several thousand lines of geoprocessing history — I can find just the relevant pieces.
Daniel: Where is all this stored — self-hosted, the cloud?
Mike: Most of our customers are on the cloud version because onboarding is easy — you just install an ArcGIS Pro add-in, double-click it, link it, and you’re going in about three minutes. We also offer an on-prem version, which your IT department sets up. The advantage there is you own your own data in-house, and we can also log more granular data — if you change a pipe diameter from 6 inches to 12 inches, we could log that exact change, because your data is on your server and we’re not stuck maintaining sets of your data.
Turning Logs into Reproducible Workflows
Daniel: Can you document and create reproducible workflows based on what you’re logging?
Mike: Yes. As you go through the trial and error of GIS, banging out a bunch of different pieces of an analysis, you can after the fact pull the steps that worked out of your ChronoCards log and group them into an IPython notebook that you bring back into ArcGIS Pro and run as a Python script. You can annotate it and share it as a standard operating procedure or a training document. Going back to our example — if you’d recorded your analysis as you did it and then left, I could pick out your pieces, group them into a notebook, and run your exact analysis, even without fully understanding why each piece is there.
Daniel: Is there a dashboard, some visualization, or is it all just lines of log files?
Mike: Through the ChronoCards web app there’s a reporting dashboard that lets you slice and dice the logs and see progress over time — not just yours, but your whole team’s. If we started on August 1st and made 56 changes to a feature class, you can see how that dataset evolved, who worked in it and when, and which tools were applied. It’s almost like an automated log of the metadata, but at a very granular level.
Remote Teams and the “Big Brother” Objection
Daniel: Has remote work created the need for something like this?
Mike: The need definitely existed before — it was just highlighted by remote work, much like GitHub existed before we all went remote. ChronoCards started before the pandemic, but one of our first big inflection points was right when companies sent workers home. Apple’s mapping team does a lot of OpenStreetMap work, and we support OpenStreetMap — they sent their whole mapping team home and needed a way to manage people as they made edits. They signed up then, and that was our first big client. But you don’t have to be remote to see the benefit — if you’re in a meeting, whether you’ve finished an analysis might be my blocker for the day, and I can just look instead of waiting for you to get out of the meeting.
Daniel: What do people say when they push back on this?
Mike: One of the bigger objections from an analyst standpoint is that it seems a little “Big Brother-y.” But the log — being able to remember what you did and see what everyone else has done — is far more valuable than any perception of being watched. It’s similar to GitHub: someone could use it to say you took an hour off for lunch, or they could use it to see where the work is. Most people are professionals and mature enough to say, yes, I took an hour for lunch and then went back to work. And honestly, IT departments have far better tools for creeping on people on work machines than we ever would. From management, the objection is that they don’t need granular GIS progress — and that’s true to an extent; they don’t need “Mike did this GP operation yesterday.” But the trends — when work is getting done, server response times — are still useful at a high level.
Selling to Analysts Versus Management
Daniel: The product doesn’t change, but the messaging does. How do you pitch it to an analyst versus to management?
Mike: The analyst conversation is the easiest by far. Most analysts have all been there — pulling our hair out, very stressed, wondering “why does this not work now, I know I did this before, why didn’t I write it down.” It’s a hallmark of learning GIS. Once I explain it, the time savings and lack of frustration are readily apparent. Management is where I’m weakest — my background isn’t sales. But the benefits are clear; it’s a matter of communication. I talked to a lot of managers, and three big pain points came out. One was struggling to quantify their team’s impact in a way they could show their own managers — to say “GIS is maxed out, the server can’t handle more web maps.” ChronoCards lets you assign a tangible number to the work GIS is doing. The second was the time saved on documenting work, writing SOPs, and onboarding new employees — a senior analyst runs a watershed analysis, exports the documentation, and hands a new hire the exact steps. Management is quantitative, so the numbers and case studies translating time saved into dollars are really what sell it.
Living with Uncertainty
Daniel: You don’t have a business background. How did you know this would be a good business, and what was your motivation?
Mike: I’m flattered you call it profitable and successful — at no point did I ever really know, and it’s still difficult to say I know now. There’s always a degree of uncertainty that comes with not working for someone else and taking a paycheck, and a large part of it is just making peace with that. We have a stable base of customers, but as we enter a recession you have to adapt — or at least cross your fingers really hard that you can. I’m totally self-taught for business as well — subreddits about marketing and sales, YouTube videos. The biggest thing I’d say is you have to get really comfortable with a lot of uncertainty, because you’re flying in the dark. I’d never sold a B2B product to enterprise users, and learning the whole sales process was just as much to learn as programming.
What He’d Do Differently
Daniel: What would you do differently if you could go back?
Mike: I would definitely talk to more people before building anything. I built the initial version of ChronoCards over a weekend in reaction to a friend’s company — he ran a large geospatial data editing company and couldn’t see at a high level what his many editors were doing. I solved his problem in the first two or three weeks, then just kept tacking on features I thought would be cool. They are cool, but there wasn’t necessarily a business for them. I should have talked to more analysts who weren’t me, and more GIS managers, before building features that turn out to be neat but aren’t drivers of revenue or adoption. The other thing — start marketing far earlier than you think you need to. There was about a year between when I launched and when we started marketing in earnest, and that was a mistake. You should be marketing from day negative fifty, generating interest ahead of time, so when someone really interested shows up you can build features that solve their problem.
Daniel: What’s been the most effective marketing strategy?
Mike: LinkedIn outreach is pretty high up there in cost-to-payoff ratio. But in terms of the biggest clients we’ve won, conferences have been the biggest one. We’re in the Esri startup program — this is our third and last year — and they let us have a booth in the startup zone at Esri conferences. That presence has helped tremendously. Because we’re going for B2B and generally larger organizations, it’s hard to find the people you need to talk to, and it’s just more organic when they happen to see you and come over.
The Future: GitHub for GIS
Daniel: What does the future look like — what features can we expect?
Mike: Ultimately we’re moving towards being GitHub for GIS. Two big things. One is the ability to branch your data — to do a lot of editing on a feature class, keep track of those edits, and check branches in and out the way software engineers do with GitHub, where you can seamlessly merge and pick which changes get merged in. Esri has branch versioning, but it’s not quite as elegant as what software engineers are used to. That’s a longer-term plan because it involves more intimate access to your data. The second piece is logging changes that happen from within ArcGIS Online or a web map, because a lot of editing now happens in the browser, often by a less technical user — and supporting more devices, including mobile when you’re out doing field collection.
Daniel: Because you’re building on top of Esri — do you worry about Esri coming for your business?
Mike: Yes. I don’t have a good answer — that’s the honest answer. I’m kind of worried about it, but it’s not going to keep me up at night, because what can I do about it? People have told me they’re surprised this isn’t already in Esri, and honestly I’m surprised too. A lot of what we have is essentially geoprocessing history and edits, both of which Esri has behind the scenes — you could theoretically build your own in-house tools to rip those pieces and package them. So in a way Esri already has all the pieces, but what we do is package and present them in a way that’s more valuable and easier for the user. Packaging is extremely underrated and extremely important — people will pay for convenience.
Daniel: Where can people go to learn more or try it out?
Mike: Our website is chrono.cards — we snagged a fancy top-level domain because the regular one wasn’t available. We’re also on Twitter at @getchronocards and on LinkedIn.
