In this interview series by Website Planet, I talk to executives from the best digital companies, who share their stories, tips and perspectives on what it really takes to create a successful website and online business. A deep dive into decades of hands-on experience and technical expertise to learn untold truths and practical advice that will immediately help you build and grow your website.
Petr Sloup is the Chief Technology Officer of MapTiler, a mapping platform that has grown from a one-man project into a company with over 50 employees and clients like Oracle, NASA, Siemens, and Cisco. Before MapTiler, Sloup has covered development roles at Klokan Technologies, MagicWare and The Moravian Library.
To start, tell us briefly about you. What is your current role at your company, and what are the measurable achievements you are most proud of?
I’m the CTO of MapTiler and the Head of R&D. My role now is focused on harnessing the best technologies and having an eye on the future. I specialize in web front-end development and interactive geospatial applications.
Recently I have been pushing the company to make difficult things easy for our customers, such as making complex weather data available on web maps. MapTiler now offers the smooth animation of wind or rainfall radar data using WebGL. And it is very easy for our customers to simply add this to the maps they are sharing.
What pain point(s) do you solve for your customers? What was the “aha Moment” that led to the idea? Can you share that story with us?
MapTiler was initially a tool for turning scans of paper maps and aerial imagery into digital map tiles that could be easily shared on the web. A solution to the increasingly difficult problem of putting your maps on the web in a way that allows you to control how they look, and without your users’ data being commercialized.
We wanted to put our customers in control of their maps, providing them with a service they could easily add their own data and completely customize the look and feel of the base maps underneath.
What do you think makes your company stand out? What are you most proud of?
We have achieved really incredible things by building maps with worldwide coverage, including our own satellite map. Our maps are now seen by more than 350 million people every month. And we have done this as a bootstrapped company with no external investors. It is the strength of our service that enables us to invest in better data, development, and innovation for the future.
From your experience, what are the most important things to build a highly successful website and online business? Please explain each in detail.
First, look how others do it. Focus on those who are successful and try to analyze why they are successful. Don’t try to copy them because you’ll only ever be behind; just get as much inspiration as possible.
Second, analyze the market. Get to know your potential customers, talk to them, and ask them what they really want and what they miss too.
Third, put together your USPs (Unique Selling Propositions). Your idea should have some strengths compared to other solutions. Then, take these strengths and focus mainly on them. With all of this in your head create a plan. If some parts of your business work, invest more in them. If some parts are failing for some time, be prepared to stop it, it’s a relief eventually.
If there were one part of the website development process you would have spent 50% more time on, what would it be and why? What made you realize the importance of this step?
User Experience (UX) design. While we’ve always strived for a good user experience, dedicating even more time to UX research and testing early on would have helped us avoid or delay redesigns. We realized this while interviewing our customers about their experience before they subscribed to the service.
A newcomer’s perception is crucial as they haven’t had time to figure out how to work around the quirks and issues that experienced users have.
What’s the one key lesson you’ve learned about building a website and business that you wish you knew when you started? What’s the story behind this realization?
Never dream or think small. While building your website and business, imagine your final destination and plan the phases to get there gradually. It’s OK to go slowly, but it’s definitely good to know where you are heading.
I think we have done this well at MapTiler. From the very beginning, we aimed for the global market with all kinds of customers. The obstacles that occurred during the building phase then didn’t cause too much pain to overcome because they were expected.
In your opinion, which aspect of running a website tends to be most underestimated? Can you explain or give an example?
Website structure is often overlooked, or more precisely, not revisited after the initial design. Websites grow with new product ranges, rebranding exercises and other business changes. It is important to revise the website structure to make sure that it still makes sense for user navigation, SEO, efficient crawling, and internal linking opportunities.
What are the most common mistakes you have seen people making when building their website and online business? What can be done to avoid those errors?
Settling for generic maps that don’t align with your brand or purpose. Many mapping solutions are designed for broad consumer use, leading to cluttered maps filled with irrelevant information or even ads for competitors.
Our focus is on empowering businesses with maps that are tailored to their specific needs. We offer endless customization options, so you can control the information displayed, language used, and even brand the map with your company’s colors and logo. This creates a seamless, professional experience that reinforces your brand identity and enhances user engagement.
What strategy has been particularly effective in growing your website audience this year?
We are constantly improving our SEO but an overhaul of our documentation has definitely improved the quality of the traffic our website is getting. Now we want to focus on making the pricing clear and understandable by anyone.
Based on your experiences, what trends and technologies are currently underestimated or overlooked, but can significantly impact your industry? How are you going to adapt?
Augmented reality is often dismissed as a gimmick, but in the mapping industry, it has great potential to be an entirely new way of visualizing spatial information. We are keeping up with the latest hardware and software and providing a very easy way to display maps in AR devices. Our flexible approach means that we are not tying ourselves to a particular piece of hardware, and our AR maps work with both Apple and Android devices, as well as all the major headsets.
With over 13 years of experience in SEO and managing content websites, he has coordinated over 5000 product reviews and interviews with the biggest names in eCommerce, web hosting, cybersecurity, SaaS, AI, and online marketing, to provide newbies and experts with untapped, actionable insights from the top experts in the industry on how to build and grow websites.
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