Mapping the Future: Innovating Indoor Navigation

Welcome to another episode of the SaaScast, the show that flips the traditional podcast format on its head. Here we have one simple rule, and that's one question, one answer from some of the biggest names in the SaaS world. And today we're thrilled to have the founder of Maftin, the SaaS-based platform that helps malls, offices, stadiums and even retailers build indoor mapping solutions for any use case. And here's some members that are really hard to ignore. Their solution boasts an astonishing 1.3 billion square feet. That's been mapped across 13,000 venues and in over 45 countries around the world. They're just getting started, and I'm sure you're curious to know more, as am I. Hongwei, it's an honor to have you with us. Can you share a little bit more about yourself and your company to kick things off?

Yeah, sure, jason. Thanks so much for having me. It's a real honor to be here. Hongwei, later one of the founders of Maftin. I was a UW grad when I started this 12 years ago, just for fun, and I didn't think I'd still be here and I didn't think I know this much about indoor maps and all sorts of how malls work, how the Super Bowl works. We knew what Rihanna was going to do for the halftime show this year before.

I went else.

That's incredible. So I love as much as building the business and building my team, just getting to know our customers and learning about the world that way.

That's incredible, and it's no easy feat building a business that supports multiple industries and so I know it's from malls, the stadiums, office, and of course, each of these venues has e-centricities in different layouts, but also in different uses for them, in different purposes, and so how does your solution adapt to these various use cases, and are there any unexpected challenges or delightful surprises that you may have found as we're building it out to address a wider market?

Yeah, wider markets rather.

So I think, first of all, we're not experts in all those industries. What we are experts in at MAPTIN is indoor mapping and, specifically, tools and workflows. The original bet at MAPTIN was it's about tooling. We realized that our first four customers just happened to be the local mall, the local school, the local hospital, a casino Totally unrelated and they asked us to build apps, websites, directories also super unrelated. The thing that was underlying all of it, though, was a PDF floor plan with scribbles on it, because everything was wrong, and customer would say hey, I want my website updated with your mapping app, but can you please Photoshop this? Because this is what's really going on, and we realized well, surely every building could have this problem, and who are the people in every building? Who's doing the scribbling? And what if we build tools for all of them so they don't have to scribble anymore? What if we built a word processor for MAPTIN, which is really what MAPTIN is today?

What we didn't expect, but I'm really grateful has happened since, is well, now there's all these other companies that are doing desk reservation software or security monitoring, where IoT in buildings, or PropTech more broadly, logistics applications and warehouses, like you name it.

There's a really cool part of ours that's doing like 3D triangulation using sound of gunshot events in big stadiums, and the commonality for them with respect to MAPTIN is, well, they really wish they didn't have to deal with those PDFs the scribbles on them either, and so all these other people are now realizing I could release an API for this. Outdoors it would be Google Maps, indoors what is it? And so we had MAPTIN. Our approach is who are the partners that we should be working with? We should make it a no-brainer for them to integrate us and to trust that we're going to be the best at this part of their user experience and the workflows behind it that enable the state of the up-to-date. So it was an internal bet early, because we hated photoshopping scribbled PDFs. That turned out to be actually the most important part of our company.

That's incredible. Thanks so much for sharing how you're able to adapt and pivot across venues and industries. That's not an easy thing for any SaaS company to master and you guys have definitely done that. You're well in your way with Series A and over 100 employees now, and so, yeah, want to thank you for your time today. Hulway, thanks for being on SaaScast, and we're rooting you on for your next big round of growth and I can't wait to see what you unlock.

Yeah, I'm still struggling every day, so I appreciate the goodwill and hopefully it all go well.