Geospatial Makers Start Building!
The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote Sensing, earth observation and digital geographyShow Notes
Geospatial Product Swiss Army Knife 1. The "Build It and They Won't Come" Trap We have all seen it: a talented geospatial professional spends months—perhaps years—perfecting a technically sophisticated web map or a niche data service, only to release it to a deafening silence. In our industry, the "build it and they will come" philosophy is a fast track to zero traction. Precision is the enemy of progress when it is applied to the wrong problem. Daniel and Stella Blake Kelly explored a remedy for this pattern. Stella—a New Zealand-born, Sydney-based strategist and founder of the consultancy Cartisan—didn’t start with a master plan. She "fell into" the industry after being inspired by a lecturer with bright blue hair and a passion for GIS that rivaled a Lego builder’s creativity. Today, she helps organizations move from "making things" to "building products that matter" using a framework she calls the Product Swiss Army Knife. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. The 7-Step Framework: More Than Just a Map Many geospatial experts suffer from a technology-first bias, prioritizing data accuracy over strategic utility. To counter this, Stella advocates for a disciplined, seven-tool toolkit designed to bridge the gap between GIS and Product Design:
Vision: Establish a clear statement of what you are building and why it needs to exist. User Needs: Move beyond assumptions to identify real users and their specific friction points. Market & Context: Analyze the existing ecosystem (competitors, data, and workflows) to find your gap. Features: Ruthlessly prioritize "must-haves" to define a lean Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Prototypes & User Flows: Map out the user’s journey through the service before writing a line of code. Proof of Concept: Create a tangible, working version to prove the technical and market logic. Launch & Learn: Release early to gather real-world data and iterate based on evidence.
This structure forces builders to treat the "spatial" element as a solution rather than the entire product. To illustrate User Needs (Tool #2), Stella suggests using formal User Stories to step out of the technical mindset: "As a solar panel marketer, I want to find potential customers with enough roof surface area so that I can reach out to them and provide an accurate quote." By grounding the project in a specific human problem, the developer stops building for themselves and starts building for the market. As Stella notes: "The thing about the product Swiss Army knife... is that it can be applied to almost any situation where there is an end consumer, where somebody is going to use the thing, the service that you make." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. The "200 Tools" Strategy: Programmatic Market Validation Daniel shared an unconventional approach to product discovery that serves as a masterclass in Market Context (Tool #3). Leveraging AI, he has built nearly 200 simple geospatial tools—such as a "Roof Area Calculator"—not as final products, but as a "sandbox" for discovery. This is Programmatic Market Validation. Instead of starting with a complex SaaS model, Daniel uses these micro-tools to find "winners" via organic search traffic. By observing where the internet already has unsolved spatial queries, he lets the market dictate which products deserve a full-scale build. In this new landscape, the barrier to entry has shifted: the competitive advantage is no longer "coding ability"—it is strategic experimentation. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. Not All Traffic is Equal: The High-Value Keyword Insight One of the most surprising takeaways from this experimentation is the direct link between specific geospatial problems and commercial value. A general GIS data tool might get thousands of views, but a "Roof Area Calculator" generates significantly higher programmati
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