Tom MacWright on Shutting down Placemark

Tom MacWright on Shutting down Placemark

From Software Sessions by Jeremy Jung

February 6, 2025 · 1h 2m

About this episode

Tom MacWright discusses the challenges of running his solo geospatial business, Placemark, and the decision to shut it down.

Tom MacWright is a prolific contributor in the geospatial open source community. He made geojson.io , Mapbox Studio, and was the lead developer on the OpenStreetMap editor. He's currently on the team at Val Town . In 2021 he bootstrapped a solo business and created the Placemark mapping application. He acquired customers and found steady growth but after spending two years on the project he decided it was financially unsustainable. He open sourced the code and shut down the business. In this interview Tom speaks candidly about why geospatial is difficult, chasing technical rabbit holes, the mental impact of bootstrapping, and his struggles to grow a customer base. If you're interested in geospatial or the good and bad of running a solo business I think you'll enjoy this conversation with Tom. Related Links Tom's blog Placemark Play Placemark GitHub Placemark archive geojson.io Valtown Datawrapper (Visualization tool) Geospatial Companies mentioned Mapbox ArcGIS QGIS Carto -- Transcript You can help correct transcripts on GitHub . [00:00:00] Introduction Jeremy: Today I'm talking to Tom MacWright. He worked at Mapbox as a, a very early employee. He's had a lot of experience in the…

People in this episode

Host: Jeremy

Guest: Tom MacWright

Topics covered

  • geospatial
  • open source
  • bootstrapping
  • solo business

Keywords

  • mapping application
  • customer base
  • financial sustainability

Mentioned in this episode

Products: Mapbox Studio, OpenStreetMap, Mapbox, Placemark, leaflet, mapnik, Tile Mill, geojson.io, OpenStreetMap editor

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