Why One Founder's 'Old School Web' Gamble Paid Off

In 2022, Craig Campbell made a notable departure from conventional wisdom, declining significant investor capital to launch, of all things, a website. This unconventional gamble is now demonstrably paying dividends.

Campbell consciously bypassed the substantial venture capital flowing into artificial intelligence to embark on a web-based venture.

Indeed, Campbell possessed the credentials to establish an AI company. A former engineer at Meta and a seasoned tech founder, he sold his previous enterprise—an e-commerce solution for Shopify users—in 2022, precisely as the AI boom gained momentum. "I had my prior VC investors breathing down my neck, going ‘start something else. We’ll write you a blank check,’" he recalls, yet he opted for a different path.

Entering the website business is generally not a popular pursuit, especially with the impending "Google Zero event horizon." Undeterred, Campbell cultivated his service, Past Maps, into a sustainable business, achieving this through the increasingly uncommon strategy of organic search.

Past Maps accurately reflects its name. The platform enables users to view historical maps of specific regions overlaid with contemporary maps, offering adjustable opacity for seamless transitions between views. While the maps themselves are sourced from public domains like the US Geological Survey, Campbell personally developed the interactive tools. His initial motivation was to aid his metal detection hobby by identifying modern-day locations of old structures and trails, thus pinpointing new sites for artifact hunting. After sharing his mapping tools with fellow enthusiasts on Reddit, the strong demand confirmed the viability of his newest tech venture.

One needn't be searching for literal gold to appreciate Past Maps. For those simply curious about their surroundings, it offers a unique form of discovery. For instance, it can illuminate historical geographical features, such as the original contours of the Duwamish River before its channelization for shipping. Campbell’s diverse clientele utilizes the platform for a wide array of purposes, from genealogy research to a daily user who tracks old oil wells. It functions as both a valuable research tool and a source of pure enjoyment.

The business has exhibited consistent growth. Campbell reports that active monthly users have escalated from an average of 20,000 to over 300,000 in its third year. The income generated sufficiently supports Campbell and his wife, who also contributes to the business. However, he admits to occasionally pondering the financial scale had he accepted those VC investments for an AI endeavor. "I’m making the same as when I was like, an E4 at Facebook, which is like a mid-level engineer."

"This is how the web is supposed to work. This is actually the old school web."

Past Maps' primary traffic source is Google Search results. Campbell quickly observed that Past Maps gained traction in search rankings when users sought historical information about places of personal interest, such as a grandmother's former church or abandoned mine sites in a specific county.

By meticulously tagging his maps and webpages in a manner comprehensible to Google, he witnessed a positive feedback loop emerge. "As I started exploding out this data and making it finally available to Google and giving it a place on the web, traffic just started to build."

"This is how the web is supposed to work. This is actually the old school web," he states. "It is alive and well, but only in these really, really small niches."

A web publisher from 10 or 15 years ago would likely have relied on display advertising for the bulk of their income. Past Maps offers a free account for basic use, but deeper engagement requires a $9 weekly pass or a $52 annual subscription. This subscription model shields Campbell from the volatility of fluctuating marketing budgets and the ad tech industry, which is largely controlled by Google—a company the DOJ ruled as an illegal monopoly in 2025.

Despite the narrative that AI is devouring the open web, Campbell has fully embraced AI tools to optimize his business operations. He notes that he previously spent one to two hours daily managing every service request personally, crafting detailed emails rather than sending templated responses or directing users to an FAQ. Now, a local agent model on his desktop handles front-line triage. This prescheduled task, which runs hourly (assuming his laptop is powered on) and accesses his Gmail, filters out spam and marketing messages, identifies urgent matters, and drafts responses. He estimates this has reduced his customer service time to approximately 10 minutes per day.

"I do sometimes have angry customers," Campbell acknowledges. "If they ask me for a refund, it cues up the refund and subscription cancellation request with Stripe. It does the whole thing, then it pings me." At this stage, he reviews the request, approves or denies it, and verifies the message before sending.

Campbell is also leveraging AI to develop an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool specifically designed for old maps. "Cartographers are assholes," Campbell jests, highlighting the particular challenges historical maps pose for existing OCR systems. These difficulties include labels that curve along features like rivers, inconsistent spacing, and sometimes crowded or overlapping text. Campbell discovered that off-the-shelf tools failed to accurately parse these maps. He found greater success with modern Large Language Models (LLMs) employing reasoning, though he clarifies it's not a simple matter of prompting an agent to "OCR these maps."

"You have to still bring that human spark into the mix."

Instead, he has found success in combining human experimental intuition with the capabilities of LLMs, rather than relying solely on the technology. "It still doesn’t bring like that human-level reasoning spark, and creativity, and being able to stitch together decades of using tools like this," he explains. "You have to still bring that human spark into the mix."

While Campbell deliberately stepped away from the supposed AI gold rush, his decision appears to have inadvertently crafted a successful online business model for the age of advanced AI. His trajectory suggests that starting with a personal passion, creating something genuinely useful, and sharing it with a like-minded community forms a robust foundation. Although Campbell’s day-to-day operations markedly differ from how a website would have been built and managed a decade ago, the elements that drive his business's current success remain profoundly human.