{"id":1204,"date":"2026-05-30T21:33:38","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T21:33:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=1204"},"modified":"2026-05-30T21:33:38","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T21:33:38","slug":"past-maps-website-google-zero-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=1204","title":{"rendered":"How one founder\u2019s bet on \u2018the old school web\u2019 is paying off"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Craig Campbell walked away from the river of investor money flowing into AI to create, of all things, a website.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sure, Campbell probably could have started an AI company. He\u2019s a former engineer at Meta and an experienced tech founder who in 2022 sold his last venture \u2014 an e-commerce tool for businesses that use Shopify \u2014 right as the AI boom was booming. \u201cI had my prior VC investors breathing down my neck, going \u2018start something else. We\u2019ll write you a blank check.\u2019\u201d He had other ideas.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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People generally aren\u2019t rushing to get into the website business, what with the Google Zero event horizon<\/a> approaching. Campbell was undeterred and has grown his service \u2014 Past Maps<\/a> \u2014 into a sustainable business. And he\u2019s managed it in an increasingly unlikely way: via organic search.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Past Maps is true to its name. The site lets you view historical maps of a particular region with a modern-day map overlaid. You can adjust the opacity to fade between the two views. The maps come from publicly available sources like the US Geological Survey, but the tools to allow people to explore them in this way were developed by Campbell. He built them to help inform his metal detection hobby \u2014 by pinpointing the modern-day locations of old structures and trails, he\u2019d identify new places to go looking for artifacts. He started sharing his map tooling on Reddit with other metal detection enthusiasts and found that other people wanted to get their hands on what he\u2019d created. With that, his newest tech venture was charted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You don\u2019t have to be looking for literal gold to enjoy Past Maps. For someone who\u2019s just curious about what\u2019s around them, it\u2019s its own kind of treasure trove. I\u2019ve used it to help grasp things like the shape of the Duwamish River before it was straightened out to help ships move through the waterway. Campbell\u2019s customers use it for a wide range of reasons \u2014 from genealogy research to a daily user who maps old oil wells. It\u2019s a research tool, but it\u2019s also just plain fun.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Watch<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Watch the Duwamish River in the lower portion of the frame go from squiggly to straight and back again.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The growth trajectory has been steady. Campbell says traffic has grown from an average of 20,000 active users a month to now over 300,000 a month in year three. The income is good enough to sustain Campbell and his wife, who also helps with the business. But he can\u2019t help but think about what the money might have been like if he had taken those VC investments to work on AI. \u201cI\u2019m making the same as when I was like, an E4 at Facebook, which is like a mid-level engineer.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThis is how the web is supposed to work. This is actually the old school web.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Past Maps\u2019 biggest source of traffic is Google Search results. Campbell found early on that Past Maps was rising through the ranks of search when people went looking for historical information about locations of interest to them \u2014 a church their grandmother attended, or abandoned mine sites in a particular county.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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By tagging his maps and webpages in a way that Google understands, he saw a cycle start to pick up. \u201cAs I started exploding out this data and making it finally available to Google and giving it a place on the web, traffic just started to build.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThis is how the web is supposed to work. This is actually the old school web,\u201d he says. \u201cIt is alive and well, but only in these really, really small niches.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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An old school web publisher of 10 or 15 years ago likely would have relied on display advertising for the bulk of their revenue. You can dabble with a free Past Maps account, but going deeper requires a $9 weekly pass or $52 per year for an annual subscription. Subscriptions protect Campbell from the whims of fluctuating marketing budgets and an ad tech industry largely controlled by Google \u2014 which the DOJ ruled as an illegal monopoly in 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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While AI may be eating the open web alive, Campbell has fully embraced AI tools to help run the business. Campbell says that he used to spend one or two hours a day handling every service request himself, writing lengthy emails rather than sending a form response and an FAQ. Now, he lets a local agent model on his desktop to handle the front-line triage. Its prescheduled task runs once an hour \u2014 assuming his laptop is powered on \u2014 and has access to his Gmail. It weeds out spam and marketing messages, identifies the things that need his attention, and drafts a response. He says this has cut down his customer service time to about 10 minutes <\/em>a day.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI do sometimes have angry customers,\u201d Campbell says. \u201cIf they ask me for a refund, it cues up the refund and subscription cancellation request with Stripe. It does the whole thing, then it pings me.\u201d At that point, he looks over the request, approves or denies it, and checks the message before hitting send.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Campbell is also using AI to help build an OCR tool \u2014 Optical Character Recognition \u2014 that will work with old maps. \u201cCartographers are assholes,\u201d Campbell jokes. Historical maps are a particular challenge for existing OCR systems. Labels will curve along features like rivers, use inconsistent spacing, and are sometimes crowded in on top of each other. Campbell found that off-the-shelf tools would fail to parse these maps. He found more success with modern LLMs using reasoning, but it\u2019s not a simple matter of prompting an agent to \u201cOCR these maps,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cYou have to still bring that human spark into the mix.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Instead, he\u2019s found success in combining a human sensibility for experimentation with the LLM\u2019s capabilities, rather than relying solely on the tool. \u201cIt still doesn\u2019t bring like that human-level reasoning spark, and creativity, and being able to stitch together decades of using tools like this,\u201d he says. \u201cYou have to still bring that human spark into the mix.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Campbell may have walked away from a supposed AI gold rush, but in doing so it seems he created a recipe for a successful business online in the age of Claude Code and AI summaries. When you start with something you\u2019re passionate about, make something that\u2019s useful, and share it with other people like you, that turns out to be a pretty good foundation. Campbell\u2019s day-to-day looks awfully different from the way you\u2019d build and run a website 10 years ago, but the things that have made the business a success today are thoroughly human.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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