Seven Years of Building Atlist
Seven years ago today, Steve and I started building Atlist, which now feels like a lifetime ago now.
Seven years ago, I remember how excited we were, bright eyed and bushy tailed. There had to be a better way to create and share maps on the web, and we knew it. We had so many ideas of how the future might look for us. Building wasn’t easy, actually far from it. We struggled, and endured many pains trying to establish Atlist as a tool worth your time. A life lesson on endurance.
In the first few years, along with excitement there was genuine fear. As the technical lead, I was maintaining the full technical stack of the app, pretty much solo for half a decade. If the app went down at 3am, I was working to fix it at 3:01am. It was beyond stressful. I attribute some of my (now) grey hairs to that period of my life. In those early years we were constantly worried Atlist would fail. A year had passed, and Atlist had a few dozen users making maps and sharing them with their friends. Another year passed, and there were a few hundred people creating maps for their businesses and events. Now seven years later, over a quarter of a million people have tried our tool, and are building genuinely valuable maps to improve their workflows.
Atlist has become a huge part of my life. We’ve redesigned the product more times than I can count, rewritten large portions of the codebase, migrated infrastructure, demolished features we sunk months of time into, all because it just didn’t feel right. Making maps is supposed to be easy, but making a product easy to use takes a monumental amount of effort. We’ve talked to tens of thousands people, all who were building incredible things with our tool.
Building Atlist had periods of explosive momentum, and long stretches that felt painfully slow. That’s the funny thing about working on the same thing for a long time… on the outside, everyone sees the end result, the feature launches, and the polished UI. On the inside, it’s years of countless microscopic decisions layered on top of each other, improvements, tough lessons, experiments, bugs, support, and lots of undo’s. Moments of big confidence, and moments of crippling doubt.
Most products don’t survive seven years, let alone seven months. So today, I mostly just feel grateful. I’m grateful to the customers who trusted us enough to try our tool, and stuck with it for all these years. I’m grateful to the people that sent us feedback, good and bad. I’m grateful to everyone that reported bugs, and there were lots. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that software products are never really "finished", they evolve alongside the people building them. I’m most grateful to our incredible team, Steve and Mike. The Atlist we’re building today is very different from the Atlist we had originally dreamed about, and honestly, that’s a good thing. Over time, we started focusing differently. Focusing more on durability, and sustainability. We made the product simpler, faster, easier to understand, and hopefully a joy to use.
The internet tends to celebrate speed above all… launch sooner, grow faster, raise more, ship now. But in a world moving all too fast, it’s deeply rewarding being able to focus on the same thing year after year. Refine with intention, earning trust slowly, and building software that people genuinely rely on.
Seven years in, and we’ve barely even started. Even after seven years, there are rough edges to smooth out and many more improvements to make. Today isn’t about our roadmap, it’s about appreciating the journey so far.
If you tried Atlist, supported it, shared it, played with it, even stumbled on it— Thank you.