How one founder’s bet on the ‘old school network’ pays off

Craig Campbell stepped away from the river of investor money flowing into artificial intelligence to create, of all things, a website.

Sure, Campbell could probably start an AI company. He’s a former Meta engineer and experienced tech founder, and sold his latest project in 2022 — an e-commerce tool for businesses using Shopify — just as the AI ​​boom was booming. “I upset my previous venture capital investors, and I decided to start something else. We’ll write you a blank check.” And he had other ideas.

People in general are not in a hurry to get into business on the Internet, with what Google’s event horizon is zero Approaching. Campbell was not deterred and increased his service – Past maps – To sustainable business. And he managed it in an increasingly unlikely way: via organic search.

The previous maps are true to their name. The site allows you to view historical maps of a specific area along with a modern-day map. You can adjust the opacity to fade between the two views. The maps come from publicly available sources such as the US Geological Survey, but the tools that allow people to explore them in this way were developed by Campbell. He built it to help further his metal detecting hobby – by identifying modern locations of ancient structures and passageways, he would identify new places to go to look for artifacts. He started sharing his map tools on Reddit with other metal detecting enthusiasts, and found that other people wanted to get their hands on what he created. Thus, his latest technical project was planned.

You don’t have to search for literal gold to enjoy the previous maps. For someone who is just curious about their surroundings, it is a treasure of its own. I’ve used it to help understand things like what the Duwamish River looked like before it was straightened to help ships move through the waterway. Campbell’s clients use it for a wide range of reasons — from genealogy research to the everyday user mapping old oil wells. It’s a research tool, but it’s also just fun.

The growth trajectory was steady. Campbell says traffic increased from an average of 20,000 monthly active users to more than 300,000 monthly users in year three. The income is good enough to support Campbell and his wife, who also helps with the business. But he can’t help but think about what the money would have been like had he taken those venture capital investments to work on AI. “I’m doing the same thing I did when I was like an E4 at Facebook, which is like a mid-level engineer.”

The biggest source of traffic in the previous maps is Google search results. Campbell discovered early on that Past Maps was moving up the search ranks when people went looking for historical information about sites of interest to them — a church their grandmother attended, or abandoned mine sites in a particular county.

By marking his maps and web pages in a way that Google understood, he saw the cycle start to improve. “When I started publishing this data and finally making it available to Google and giving it a place on the web, the traffic just started to snowball.”

“This is the way the Internet is supposed to work,” he says. “This is really the old-school network.” “It’s alive and well, but only in these really small areas.”

A legacy web publisher of 10 or 15 years ago probably relied on display ads for the bulk of their revenue. You can sign up for a free Past Maps account, but going deeper requires a $9 weekly pass or $52 a year for an annual subscription. Subscriptions protect Campbell from the whims of fluctuating marketing budgets and an ad tech industry largely controlled by Google – Which the Justice Department ruled to be an illegal monopoly in 2025.

While AI may be eating the open web alive, Campbell has fully embraced AI tools to help run businesses. Campbell says he spent an hour or two a day handling each service request himself, writing lengthy emails instead of sending out a response form and FAQ. Now, it allows a local agent to handle the sorting process on the front lines on his desktop. His pre-scheduled task runs once an hour — assuming his laptop is turned on — and he has access to his Gmail. He filters out spam and marketing messages, identifies things that need his attention, and drafts a response. This has reduced customer service time to about 10, he says minutes day.

“Sometimes I have angry customers,” Campbell says. “If they ask me for a refund, it signals my refund request and opt-out with Stripe. It does the whole thing, then alerts me.” At that point, he reviews the request, approves or rejects it, and verifies the message before pressing send.

Campbell is also using artificial intelligence to help create an OCR — optical character recognition — tool that will work with older maps. “Cartographers are assholes,” Campbell joked. Historical maps present a particular challenge to current OCR systems. Labels will curve along features such as rivers, use inconsistent spacing, and are sometimes crowded on top of each other. Campbell found that tools available on the market may fail to analyze these maps. He’s had more success with recent master’s students using heuristics, but it’s not as simple as getting an agent to “OCR these maps,” he says.

Instead, he has found success in combining the human sense of experimentation with the capabilities of LLM, rather than relying solely on the tool. “It still doesn’t bring the spark of thought and creativity and ability to bring together decades of using tools like this on a human level,” he says. “You still have to bring that human spark into the mix.”

Campbell may have steered clear of the supposed AI gold rush, but in doing so he appears to have created a recipe for a successful online business in the age of cloudcode and AI abstracts. When you start with something you’re passionate about, make something useful and share it with other people like you, it turns out to be a very good foundation. Campbell’s day-to-day lifestyle looks very different from how you built and ran a website 10 years ago, but the things that make the business successful today are very human.