Where we are going

Another company blog post that went long

One of the things they teach you in driving school is how to control a swerving car: to steer into the swerve. Phrased differently, the trick is to pick a distant point in the intended direction and steer gradually towards it. This helps to avoid over-reacting and jerking to the opposite direction, which often makes things worse.

Building a company is a lot like driving a swerving car. Frantic, stressful, and the wrong action–or no action–can be fatal. Building a startup company is more challenging still, because the experience is never predictable. Effective strategies like rapid iteration and a ‘no-rules’ mentality allow for growth in early stages, but become liabilities as a company matures and has less tolerance for major errors.

[MappedIn](mappedin.com)’s early days were a lot like the truck in the video. We would jump from task to task, putting out fires and hacking away at short-term deliverables. Periodically, we would talk to our customers and assess if we were on the right track. A major milestone was getting our first investor, [Esri Canada](esri.ca), which served as the distant goalpost for us – a direction to build towards. After more than 30 years of steady growth, they have become Canada’s largest supplier of outdoor geomatics software and the industry experts in GIS. We want to do the same, indoors, and we’re figuring out the details along the way. We also plan on getting there sooner!

It’s a lot clearer where we are going now. The indoor mapping and wayfinding market is growing rapidly, and businesses are eager to adopt and digitize their infrastructure. The challenge with indoor mapping though is that you cannot just scrap the internet for data, or drive a car through a mall to capture footage: private property, private data. The other challenge is that indoors changes much more quickly than outdoors, so even crowd sourcing would not be enough. The result would be an inaccurate map that people wouldn’t use. For indoors, you need the businesses involved. At MappedIn, we are building the software platform that links end user applications (directories, apps, websites, API) with the enterprise tools that get businesses involved and, in turn, create real value for them.

We are creating end-to-end solutions for retail, gaming, and education while building towards the ubiquitous indoor mapping platform for all. As other complementary technologies develop alongside us, such as indoor positioning, hyper-local marketing, and location based analytics, we are working hard to build the necessary mapping platform that will power them.

And we’re very excited to for what comes next. Onwards