MapBrief™

Last year I ran into the always-incisive Will Cadell and we immediately started discussing a favorite hallway-track topic:  how to effectively sell Geo.

ME:  “If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t even bother with the web but just sell PDF maps to the Oil & Gas industry with big red arrows that said ‘Drill Here’.  At least with a PDF they know exactly what they are buying.”

WILL:   “They are not buying the PDF; they are buying the arrow.”

Cue An Epiphany.

We in tech love latching on to metrics: map a billion points in your browser, access petabytes of imagery using a shiny new platform, etc. etc.

But so little conversation about the arrows our customers actually want. 

Instead, we jam a billion points into their browser and wish them luck in finding whatever answer we thought they were looking for.  Sure, it is better than the old days when we actually handed customers hard drives of data with an invoice (!), but not by much.

To torture a different analogy, the customer is looking for a needle and we respond by trying to sell them a bigger haystack.

I get it: each client’s arrows and needles are too unique to build a business that can truly “scale”.   Or maybe AI will soon bequeath us an All-Purpose Answer Machine.  In the meantime, perhaps our time is best spent not heads-down grinding on the latest GPU-accelerated ways to push more data at our end-users but maybe circling back in a quiet moment and asking “wait, what was your original question?”

— Brian Timoney