Maptia — A beautiful way to tell stories about places.

Welcome, @jonnym1ller! First, I'd like to give you props for the beautiful photography on your blog. Well done. I'm curious how you're acquiring new users. You seem to do a lot of content marketing / blogging. Has that been an effective strategy?

This is an interesting product and there are plenty for proxies for startup demand in this market, like WordPress plugins, travel blogs, etc. Have you seen Derek Siver's WoodEgg yet? I think in the end, both Maptia + WoodEgg are trying to solve the same job to be done - help me better understand foreign countries and cultures. If you haven't yet, check out his post on how he started outsourcing the content for WoodEgg and the lessons he learned along the way: http://sivers.org/robust

Love the product @jonnym1ller, Tak from Techstars was telling me all about it when I met him in London.

@jonnym1ller It looks great, lovely design. Tak mentioned me to you as he thought their might be a possible overlap between our products when Foundbite is available on more platforms as it's all about exploring the world through photos + sound. (http://www.foundbite.co/7295803702)

Sure @jonnym1ller - best of luck with it all! I just read the untranslatable words post - so good. I'll look out for the book.

Thanks @rrhoover—that’s a great question, we’ve certainly adopted the blog-first approach which I know you've written about extensively and taken the build a community of 1000 true fans approach. Our content strategy was simply to make others/influencers look good (which we achieved mostly through long-form interviews) and to produce high quality, evergreen content (less frequently) which we felt was lacking in the travel space. A few of the Maptia posts did really well, in particular the 11 untranslatable words illustrations went viral (receiving over 2M views combined across the internet) which in turn resulted in our intern picking up a book deal with Random House... so that was definitely a success! However, we’re only a team of three and have been focused entirely on building a beautiful v.1 and creating compelling content (which has resulted in a lot of interest and signups) that we still have yet to figure out a means of keeping the business sustainable in the long run... so that remains the challenge for 2014 ;)

Hey folks—I'm Jonny and a cofounder at Maptia. We graduated from TechStars in 2012 and re-located our startup to Morocco in 2013. AMA ;)

Cheers James, Tak has been awesome and sending a lot of people in our direction! We just launched in October so it's still early days and there is so much which needs re-building/improving ;)

Thanks Andy—we have had over 10,000 hours of read time on our stories so far (since October) but in terms of generating revenue, instead of going for the premium travel/photo blog route (exposure.so are doing this very well) we think that the real opportunity lies in helping brands tell better stories. Many are realising that print and banner ads aren’t getting the ROI they once were and are rapidly turning to native or sponsored stories (eg. contently.com). I know of Derek’s work (loved this epic email he wrote http://bit.ly/1fZUeJC) and think that his guides will do extremely well as start-up hubs outside of the valley continue to pop up and entrepreneurs realise that they can work effectively from anywhere with an internet connection. I might actually reach out to Derek about contributing to an entrepreneurs guide to Morocco ;)

Hey @MendzappJames cheers! Foundbite looks awesome too and we do plan to intergrate audio and video in the future (you might also like this Geographical Jukebox post we wrote: blog.maptia.com/posts/geographical-jukebox). Perhaps we could reconnect a few months down the line once we've figured out our monetisation strategy ;)