Esri have a serious moat. Their projection engine in particular is nigh on unapproachable in its capabilities. (Oracle tried for several years to build a competitor; they finally gave up and licensed Esri's PE).

Esri also have a vast array of products for many niche industries.

This product is cool, and I'm sure Felt have given careful consideration to how they plan to strategically differentiate from both Esri and open source solutions.

Most of Esri's core C/C++ tech is fairly beastly. Especially the PE and geoprocessing bits. Spent a lot of time in the Esri space with enterprise customers, worked for a deeply integrated platinum partner, spent time on the campus, blahblah.

Beating Esri is a lofty goal. Aside from the aforementioned core tech, they are extremely entrenched and scaled in basically all horizontals, and have verticals for each, plus a big partner network.

I think that in order to "beat" Esri, you'd have to beat them in all these different spaces, horizontally and vertically. There is some low hanging fruit there technically, IMHO, but the picture bigger is that it's going to take a ton of sales people over many years to actually disrupt.

I think a long-term technical strategy for a scrappy startup to be looked at as an "Esri-beater" would be to start with ArcGIS Online and build inroads from there. There are weak points there in the business response to the licensing evolution, the tech, and the UX/DX.

Just my 2c.

Yep. I worked for Esri for 17 years. The lead PE dev is a math/geography double major (master's in one, Ph.D. in the other, I think?) and a great C/C++ developer to boot.

I used to walk by his office and find large integrals on his whiteboard, or see him working on his latest project with Mathematica and his code editor.

Wow. 17 years is a long time. I would love to hear about your experiences some day.

Esri is an interesting company to me. Always been slightly fascinated by it. One of the older software companies and still privately owned. I spent a good chunk of my early career both aligning and competing with it.

My colleague and I ran into Jack once. Two random nobodies, visiting campus for obscure reasons, running into the main building to escape the random rain storm, and he opens the door to let us in.

Knew exactly why we were there, and asked us what we thought of AWAB before stating something to the effect of: "I don't know what we've been doing all these years. People don't want to buy our stuff and then have to learn to write code, they just want to make maps."

I'm convinced that's the key to the next world-eating web mapping company: stop forcing non-technical orgs to have to become technical orgs with technical staff just to solve simple spatial problems. It's orthogonal to their competencies and primary directives.

Easier said than done of course.

P.s. I know (of) who you are referring to btw, and he's somewhat of a legend, even outside Redlands.

For anyone interested, here's the sort of work Esri's PE team do on a regular basis: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/756bcae18d304a1eac140f1...

> ArcGIS Online ... weak points there

Phew is that a bit of an understatement. Where I work would love a proper competitor to it, so I definitely agree with your assessment as to the approach. Would be amazing to see Felt (or someone) tackle it.

> This product is cool, and I'm sure Felt have given careful consideration to how they plan to strategically differentiate from both Esri and open source solutions.

Datawrapper has done a nice job. This feels like that to me. Annotated maps, otherwise it’s easy enough to use mapbox or osm yourself to tell your own story.

Esri is mostly an entrenched monopoly. This just recently became parity with them,but if you're looking for gis development 75% are esri tech stacks.

Their CEO (username: hinting) commented on this post about Felt recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31587950

There's probably a use case / audience for this, but it's a child's toy compared to stuff like ArcGIS. This is not taking on ESRI at all.

$20m is also not that much, mapbox raised 10x that amount and still struggles to find customers.

I'd imagine the audiences are quite different in their needs. We focus on the real estate of data centers and I think see multiple angles.

We have sales people and analysts that just need to make a basic map, call out some data points, and make it look good. Feels like Felt is a great tool for that.

We have larger needs where we need to do more complex analysis and visualize the relationships of larger data sets geographically - that's what we're looking to ArcGIS for.

It's been a bit of a search to find an affordable tool for the first use case and am glad to see someone in the space doing it.

I think that's spot on.

Curious, is there anything else about your needs pushing you towards ArcGIS rather than, say, QGIS?

Could it be a case of not taking on ESRI at the high end, but instead going for the low end that likely has a lot more potential customers?

Wow, didn't know you could raise that much with what seems to be Mapbox + a custom raster layer (i.e. a literal afternoon project).

Wish you the best guys, this industry needs a lot of innovation.

"How long will it take you to implement this feature?" "Should just be an afternoon!" "It's been 6 months, are you done yet?" "There were some unforeseen challenges that I didn't expect but I should have it done by tomorrow!" repeat...

Every time you label someones project a "literal afternoon project" it's probably better to just reconsider and not do it.

Especially if it's a company with multiple employees that probably don't sit around and do nothing all day.

Getting Dropbox vibes from this one