Soupy (u/Soupy) - Readit News

Soupy commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025) · Posted by u/david927

crubier · 3 months ago

Awesome work. Just out of curiosity, where do you source the maps from? In france IGN has a ton of old maps

Soupy · 3 months ago

Around 90% of the maps currently on the site are from the US government (USGS). The last 10% are from public institutions and libraries and this is the newest segment that I'm actively working on growing. My hope is to flip this ratio with time.

I also have a few partnerships in the work with some private collections but those have proven trickier to actually get to a "yes". It also involves a lot of bespoke work to process and ingest each individual source so I'm not focusing as hard on this type of sourcing anymore.

Soupy commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025) · Posted by u/david927

xrendan · 3 months ago

I would absolutely love if you brought Canadian maps to this.

I work for Build Canada and I would love to see some maps from the fur trade and early exploration to tell stories.

If you want to chat my email is brendan at buildcanada.com

Soupy · 3 months ago

Hey Brendan! I also would love to add Canadian maps, it's been a huge request from my users and something I've been wanting to focus on all year. A big challenge I have in bringing the service to new regions is just data access, both to raw hi-res map imagery as well as to satellite, LiDAR, etc so this is on my todo list to begin digging into what the Canadian government offers. Brave new world for me

Will absolutely reach out to connect!

Soupy commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025) · Posted by u/david927

tim-fan · 3 months ago

Hey, cool to see!

I'm running a similar but smaller project (5k MAU), my oldest map is central London in 1561

https://onamap.me/maps/London1561/

I got into it because I was interested in the technical challenge of registering GPS to maps which are very warped compared to reality, like very old maps or illustrated tourist maps.

My home page is here for more: https://onamap.me/

I also came across this similar project a while ago:

https://www.verbeeld.be/2024/11/17/using-gps-in-the-year-156...

Good luck continuing to build out the project!

Soupy · 3 months ago

whoa this is wickedly cool! and yes, georeferencing these old maps is the bane of my existence right now

awesome project

Soupy commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025) · Posted by u/david927

Soupy · 3 months ago

"Google maps but for old maps": https://pastmaps.com

This is a solo startup that I've been working on for 2 years now. It's a labor of love and I'm very lucky and thankful that it's big enough to surprisingly pay all of our bills. Still constantly feeling FOMO over all of my startup buddies working with AI and LLMs while I plug away at old maps and GIS .

It gets ~80K MAUs and just slowly and consistently is growing organically through word of mouth through history focused communities. I'm currently playing with expanding the coverage internationally as I still only support the US which is a wickedly fun project.

Soupy commented on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2025) · Posted by u/whoishiring

Soupy · 4 months ago

Stoke | Bellevue, WA | ONSITE (hybrid)

Stoke is a 5-month-old startup (founded in Feb 2025 by insuretech veterans with $4B+ in previous exits across 2 bootstrapped companies) building real-time Voice AI agents to make insurance purchases easier, faster, and more affordable.

PROBLEM: Insurance is a critical product, and the current system is broken. Policies are the main shield between American households and financial ruin. At 5% of income, it’s the fourth largest household expense after housing, transportation, and food. The majority of people have insufficient coverage and are paying too much for it. This is primarily driven by human agents who frequently have insufficient expertise and are driven by ~$200B a year in perverse incentives. Customers eat the costs of all of this through higher premiums.

SOLUTION: AI agents that enable personalized, unbiased, expert product recommendations at scale and at a fraction of the cost. We can simultaneously raise the bar of service while stripping out unnecessary costs, delivering those savings directly back to consumers in the form of lower premiums.

TEAM: 5 engineers (ex-Facebook, NYT, ScaleAI, AssuranceIQ), growing fast.

HIRING: Founding principal engineers/leaders with expertise in distributed systems, infra, real-time pipelines, agentic AI.

TASK: Shape architecture (AWS, Kafka, Python, Kubernetes, WebRTC); scale for 1000s of concurrent calls under 400ms latency; mentor as we hit 50+ engineers; directly help families save on premiums.

YOU: Obsess over reliable code, solve tough problems, ship fast, explain concepts clearly, learn quickly.

PERKS: Competitive salary/equity, full benefits, top tools, encouraged recharge time, quarterly retreats (hackathon + vacation).

Email Kyle Moseley: kyle@stoke.com with resume and why Stoke.

Soupy commented on Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users? · Posted by u/amanchanda

Soupy · 7 months ago

I also run a small B2C company (https://pastmaps.com). Here's what worked for me:

First 1000 users: daily manually done reddit posts. Very time-consuming and annoying, but it gets the job done. Just make sure the content drives users back to the site and is actually relevant, interesting, and valuable

Next 100K users: programmatic long-tail SEO. obviously this is unique to my own product, but I realized that people were organically already searching for the data contained within the maps I host. By focusing on organizing that data and making it understandable to Google, I started a traffic flywheel that's paid off massively.

I'm now exploring programmatic social media marketing as the next lever for the next 1M users as it directly drives even further benefits on the SEO side

One last thought - whatever growth channel you pick should really align with the product you are building. Some products are a great fit for SEO, others not. Some are awesome for Tiktok/Reels, others not. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution.

Good luck!

Soupy commented on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell · Posted by u/cvbox

nicbou · a year ago

What do you make money from? Map sales?

Soupy · a year ago

It's currently 60% premium subscriptions to unlock advanced features (LiDAR layers for example) and then 40% for more traditional physical map print sales. I didn't intend to get into the physical ecommerce world with this but customers kept asking over and over again for ways to purchase the maps for display so I finally gave in last year. Figuring out the supply chain, shipping, graphics design process, etc has been a bit of a lift but fun to do. We have 2.2M unique product variants available so that's also been a bit fun to wrangle!

Soupy commented on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell · Posted by u/cvbox

seanconaty · a year ago

I love this site. I love browsing David Rumsey's map collection and I know that they have a georeferenceing feature, but I haven't used it.

Soupy · a year ago

I also love David Rumsey's collection! Check out the rumsey map center at Stanford if you ever find yourself in the area, it's ridiculously cool

Pastmaps was really born out of my desire for more advanced features, layers, and tools on rumsey's site and I'm hoping I can eventually deliver on that vision (spoilers: I'm definitely not there yet)

Soupy commented on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell · Posted by u/cvbox

saomcomrad56 · a year ago

Do you have any old maps for Panama? Perhaps the canal zone?

Soupy · a year ago

Soon! I currently only have coverage for the US but I am expanding globally in Q1 2025. Just not enough hours in the day

Soupy commented on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell · Posted by u/cvbox

registeredcorn · a year ago

At a guess, you probably have a very large base of genealogists on there!

Old maps are incredibly useful for genealogy because it helps you do lots of stuff. Say someone lived on "House #3 Country Road" in (county), but County Road no longer exists, and all that can be found is a brief description of "County Road is now Main Street, Bank Avenue, and Church Road" It would serve as a vital clue as to where their ancestors house used to be (or may still be!)

It also helps to give a better narrative of how the community has expanded and changed over the years. Instead of just, "It was probably all forest land, then farm land, then suburbs or something?" Instead you can see stuff like if there were spikes/declines in populations in response to various events (gold rush, mining, factory work, railroads, war, highways bringing/diverting traffic, and so on). They can also show how the land may have changed from environmental factors (mud slides, earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes). Maybe you're from a "Military family" but never knew why, only to find out that a Military Depot opened up 2 minutes from their house just as great-grandpa turned 18.

In a real sense, it describes not just the family and where they lived, but the type of place they knew, and community they grew up in. It hints at how they saw and experienced things over the years. "But why did great-great-grandpa insist on moving his entire family? He had lived in that beautiful house his entire life! Ah. They put the railroad 6 inches from his backdoor!"

Soupy · a year ago

You hit the nail on the head - my primary use-case is genealogy research!