RE aerial maps - SEO goggle edition
I spent a bit of time recently hacking on the mapbox api for the aerial amenities map idea. The good news: I was able to generate an image of a map with a couple of arbitrarily placed images (see appendix at the bottom). The less good news: it's quite obvious that it'll take more than a couple days' effort to put together even an MVP workflow. So I decided to spend a bit more time to validate demand before proceeding with more work. The following is a rough log of the process.
dusting off the seo goggles
One easy way to pre-validate demand is using SEO and marketing tools. I stuck with the basics: ahref's cheapest plan ($30/mo as of this writing) + free tier of SimilarWeb's browser extension.
First shot was just googling "retail logo maps." ahrefs' extension showed this to be pretty unpromising:
Top results were tangential companies in real estate e.g. a data seller called lightbox, or general map making software e.g. maptive.
One of ahrefs' suggestions was commercial real estate mapping software, so I check that next. A bit better: KD ("keyword difficulty") is low @ 2/10, though monthly search volume is only 60. I rolled through a couple more suggestions, but mostly the same theme: low difficulty, low volume.
However, I did find a pure play competitor called REBLIE.
REBLIE quick dive
REBLIE was the only result I found that focused on the exact same use case: map generation for real estate offering memorandums. The founder is a commercial real estate broker, which lends some support for the demand for this use case. In addition to amenities mapping, they also resell premium demographics / crime data from Applied Geographic Solutions.
Pricing page has their base plan at $59 / month. They don't seem to have invested a lot in inbound traffic: ahrefs and similarweb both bench it at about 1k visits / mo. ahrefs only found two ads, so there isn't much in the way of paid traffic either.
Let's assume the product + demand are there to at least hit "standard" b2b benchmarks: ~1% visit to trial conversion, ~50% trial to paid conversion, ~4% monthly churn. At 1k visits per month, that means steady state is ~125 paying customers, or $7.3k MRR @ avg $59/month.
TODO or not TODO?
Let's get one thing out of the way: this isn't enough to be a standalone business. I don't see this hitting e.g. $1MM ARR by itself. But if we treat it as either a neat lil side project or a beachhead into something bigger (e.g. general mapping or a real estate vertical suite) then it could be worth doing.
Let's say the hurdle for that is $150k ARR. Using the same assumptions + business model as REBLIE, I'd have to 1.5x - 2x the inbound traffic to meet the threshold. Is that doable? Certainly seems so. REBLIE has barely tried and they already get 1k/mo inbound. Plus, inbound web is not the only possible channel. Brokers are common targets for cold outreach because (1) they have their contact info public, and (2) they basically have to pick up the phone. ahrefs also shows a potential long tail of keywords where traffic can be built.
Another note: in the previous post, I guessed at a per-map pricing model. $50/map @ 8-10 maps a year would yield a lower MRR than the above, so that would be a worse model unless the maps got a lot more expensive.
So, all this being said... I probably would not jump straight back into building the software. But is it enough to, say, throw up a landing page to collect emails and validate more assumptions? Maybe. At the very least, it would give me more practice with writing copy + driving traffic.
appendix
Image generated with one-off template + robots from robohash.org
