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Looking for cofounder

5 points by scottdw2 ↗ HN
I'm looking for a cofounder to help me disrupt the GIS industry. I'm looking to create the 280 slides of GIS.

The goal would be to apply to YC for the winter session. Anybody here interested?

5 comments

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vitovito
Hi, I graduated college with an undergraduate degree in Geography, specializing in GIS. My professional background is software development, and a few years back I transitioned into user experience design.

I'm wondering what, specifically, you're looking to "revolutionize." ESRI's suite is ugly, complicated and crash-prone compared to, say, Manifold, but Manifold has little traction in the market. It's like Word and OpenOffice.

GIS is a super-broad product category that support everything from photogrammetry to spatial analysis (think demographics, computing safety of bike paths, lines of sight for signage) across both vector and raster data with arbitrary reference points (did you know that most geographic data sets aren't globally georeferenced?).

Making a web-based clone of Powerpoint as an excuse to reinvent Objective C and Cocoa in JavaScript is comparatively easy. Your statement makes me skeptical that you know anything about the market at all.

stray
Well to be fair, revolutionizing a broad product category sometimes means introducing a technically inferior product that is usable by a wider range of people.

ESRI's stuff is just horrible. I've consistently used ArcGIS as an example of a bad user experience for the past decade. So I support anyone seeking to ease that particular pain point.

scottdw2
That's the problem. The GIS market is too broad. The ESRI products ate inaccessible to most people. They cost too much, and are too difficult to use. Precisely because they are targeting professional cartographers.

Raster algebra isn't something normal people need.

I don't want to create a product for highly trained cartographers. I want to create a product for me (someone who wants to create simple information graphics).

stray
Possibly... Are you a fellow developer or a suit?
revorad
In another life, I would have been interested, but I'm too busy with other stuff right now. I endured the pain of ArcGIS for a few years in my last job.

I don't know what specific problems you are looking to address first, but have a good read of the ESRI forums. They are a treasure trove of business ideas. You might also be able to get your first users there by solving their ArcGIS problems.