22 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 57.0 ms ] thread
Great idea, and seems to be solving a problem. Not to be a jerk though, this is not a $10k MRR business, it's a business with $10k of Monthly Revenue. Unless I'm completely misunderstanding what's going on, there is no subscription, and therefore nothing recurring about the revenue.
I guess there are hundreds of these sites. I know of Mapiful since before.

https://www.mapiful.com/

Printmycity is just another copycat, right?

The link in the article that points to your website is broken.
(comment deleted)
yes, updated the link

thks for pointing out the error

Great Idea, but there is so many alternatives right?
Its a pretty neat service, but I'm a bit underwhelmed by the feature-set .. seems like something that could be whipped up in a few hours using OSM's API, with most of the code being the glues/shims to get in on the e-commerce transaction with between OSM->Printer.

It'd be cool to be able to submit key points of interests - e.g. ("Grandma's home", "School", "Our Home", "Grocery Store", etc.) would be good to have, for example, for us parents who want to teach our kids to get around their environment.

One wonders why the OSM folks don't do this ...

>Its a pretty neat service, but I'm a bit underwhelmed by the feature-set .

The post is about business, not tech. You have perfectly highlighted the gist: number of features don't matter for a business to be successful. The main feature does.

As an anecdote, many years ago I briefly had a very profitable business, where the product was a rectangle with rounded corners. 15 minutes in Inkscape earned me a decent amount of money. Not a lot of features, but somehow market still wanted it.

The fact of it being profitable in spite of a lack of sophistication is valid.

But the other point is that this service seems to be a clone of maplify - meaning its fair game for yet another copy, albeit with the features I mentioned. That's business, after all...

Oh, look, another company printing OpenStreetMap posters. Oh look, no attribution too.
I'm very annoyed by not attributing the contributors, especially on commercial use.

It's also a joke he designed anything himself. I've seen this exact style of poster for more than 5 years in random shops and ecommerce stores. I wouldn't be surprised if his entire process is outsourced to some generic mapmaking service since they all seem to look exactly the same.

Can someone tell me what the most educational part of this post was? I couldn't seem to find one interesting takeaway.
The takeaway is indie business is real.