STARTUP STAGE: Textomap creates interactive maps from location-based text

What is your 30-second pitch to investors? 

For travel businesses and creators, generating and displaying interactive maps that add value and provide their audience with a better browsing experience of itineraries or articles is often tedious, time-consuming and expensive. That’s where Textomap, an artificial intelligence-powered service, comes in. Textomap turns location-based text into smart, interactive maps in seconds, saving users hundreds of hours. Users can effortlessly create, customize, share and embed maps into their websites, enhancing their audience’s experience with interactive guides, relevant data and affiliate links. 

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup. 

Business: Textomap helps businesses, organizations and individuals who need to visualize and display location-based content to better engage their audience with more context and data. We’re providing users with a unique ability. We’re making maps accessible and a natural part of content creation and exploration. We’re already providing services to businesses and creators from the travel, real estate, event planning and news sectors. 

Technology: Our technology is what makes us special. We’ve developed our capabilities, which have yet to be reproduced by competitors. We’re not just a skin for ChatGPT or other AI models. We’re enabling users to create maps from their original content and not an AI database, which is limited. 

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company. 

Strengths:

• Unique abilities to create maps from original content.
• Generate maps with 100+ locations in seconds.
• Intuitive user experience with no onboarding (two clicks to make a map).
• The easiest way to create maps on mobile.
• Generating maps in the same tab as the content you’re creating/browsing.
• Map and text are connected and interact with each other.
• Easily integrate third-party databases to generate content.
• Support 11 major languages, making Textomap available to 3 billion users. 

Weakness

We’re providing a high level of accuracy, but there is still room for improvement. We’re focusing on that with the helpful feedback from our users. 

Opportunities

Travel blogs are one of the four major high-traffic categories on the internet, and travel blogs make up nearly 1 in 5 new blogs. Furthermore, the travel agency industry is anticipated to grow at a 2.3% CAGR from 2021 to 2028. The opportunity to provide businesses, creators and influencers with the ability to implement maps into their websites and other outlets is huge. 

Threats

While we’ve still not met a competitor that matches our capabilities and user experience, there are other competitors trying to offer AI-generating mapping services.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

After much research and feedback from our users, we identified the customer pain points as follows:

• Creating interactive maps for every piece of content requires adding locations manually or via spreadsheets (which are also created manually). This results in each map taking hours to create and is therefore unsustainable. Customers would either make a screenshot of a map of the general area or skip showing maps altogether.
• Maps are standalone, they have no connection to the text and don’t interact with it in any way. The value added in this case to the audience is limited. Both the creator and their audience need to constantly switch from the map to the content side.
• Creating maps on mobile is nearly impossible or clumsy at best. Products that provide apps for creating maps focus on the traveler. Google stopped supporting the My Maps app.
• Free tools are very limited with a poor design and user experience. Many paid tools focus on providing complex geoinformation and therefore have a high learning curve and can be very expensive for high-traffic websites. 

So you’ve got the product, now how will you get lots of customers? 

Over 30,000 maps have been created with Textomap. We already have 3,000 signed-up users with many paying customers. We’re currently growing organically and fine-tuning our product market fit. We’re focusing on SEO for each potential market sector along with being active on the different platforms where our customers interact.

We’re getting great attention and media coverage from many bloggers, online directories and also large tech news outlets like Hackernoon and the biggest German tech magazine “CT.” We’ll also invest in advertising on platforms where we can reach the niches we’re targeting. 

Tell us what process you’ve gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market. 

We worked on Textomap from the need for maps to be more accessible for both travelers looking for information and inspiration and also to those who are creating and providing the content. We launched an MVP (minimum viable product) last year which was free and open to the public. We received great feedback from people in the travel sector and launched a paid subscription so users could start creating and embedding maps into their websites and content. As for market size, together with hundreds of thousands of travel businesses and creators, we’re also providing solutions to our customers from the education, real estate, event planning and news media sectors. We’ve also been contacted by a very large company with a substantial market hold to see where we can cooperate. 

How and when will you make money? 

We’re already making revenue with an expected ARR (annual recurring revenue) of €2,000 from subscriptions, along with revenue from ads that we display for our free plan users. 

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Dana Raijman, CEO and CTO, is a software engineer with more than 20 years of experience working on large-scale projects for international companies. Dario Raijman, CPO, is a product designer and art director with 15 years of experience designing award-winning products used by millions in the beauty, advertising, e-commerce and education sectors.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

As a Berlin-based company with a female CEO, we’re open to all who want to be a part of our journey. With Textomap, we are all about accessibility as we support 11 major languages, and we’re enabling anyone to create maps easily. A great example of that is a small all-girls elementary school in Colombia using Textomap to educate students. 

What’s been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Since our background is in product development and design, the most challenging parts have been the business, bureaucratic and marketing aspects. 

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact – so why are you going to be one of the lucky ones?

We’re not competing with large online travel agencies but providing an innovative tool for agencies and creators to provide more value to their audience and compete. 

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

We see Textomap becoming the go-to tool for map creation for many users. We also have plans to make maps more accessible for travelers to plan trips and explore content. We’re also focusing on integrating with third parties that our users use like WordPress. 

What is your end game (going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)?

We’re focusing on growing Textomap and are open to acquisition opportunities.