The Hidden Cost of Google Maps for Your Business | Rick Myers & Rob Yoegel, Stadia Maps

Today, most location APIs don't serve developers anymore. They serve advertisers. They track your end users, lock you into opic pricing and treat maps as an ad product. Maps built the opposite. Clean APIs, transparent pricing, human support, and zero tracking. And now they are bringing two Lenode veterans to scale that mission. And today we have with us Rick Myers, head of support and success and Robel, head of growth at CDM maps. Rob, Rick, it's great to have you both on the show after a long time. >> Great to see you again, Swap. >> Yeah, great to see you, Swap and thanks for having us. Appreciate it. >> It's my pleasure and honor. Uh, of course, there is so much to talk about there. So much to talk about your own journey, what you folks have been doing. Rick, we used to talk about, you know, the whole gold standard you folks set up there. And of course Rob you did a lot of great work all the case studies and all the excellent stories that were there. So I am kind of confused where to start with stereo with your journey. So I would actually start kind of mix of both uh which is more or less like um what you folks have been up to till this point and why you chose Stadia Maps. >> Sure. Yeah I'll I'll go first swap. Um I um after the uh Lunard acquisition uh I sp stayed with Okami for a few years and I I worked in uh support and success um and uh left about um about a year ago about a little bit more than a year ago now. And um I took a little time off to kind of figure out what I wanted to do. Um you and I just uh you we probably remember I had been there almost 15 years. So I I really wanted to explore what the next thing was for me and uh Luke, one of the Stadium Maps co-founders reached out because Stadium Maps uh is a customer of Lenode and Okami and we used to work pretty closely together. Um and uh mentioned, you know, hey, can we get on a call? Can we chat? Can we talk? And uh it didn't take very long for him to convince me with just the values that Stadia has and their mission and the fit um from what my experience was with what they wanted to do that um this sounded like it could be the the next best step for me. >> Yeah. Very similar journey uh uh as Rick's very similar to very similar journey to Rick's. the uh time frame is a little bit uh compressed. I only spent about five years at Lenode and Okami um but was introduced to Stadium apps while I was there. They were actually um when I was the senior director of marketing at Lenode. I was responsible for telling our customer stories in our craft of code series which you're very familiar with swap and um Luke was Luke and Ian were the first story that I was asked to tell the first craft of code that we ever did at Lenode. So that's when I was first introduced to uh Luke and Ian. Um as I mentioned I spent about five years total at Lenode and Okami. Um when I left Okami I went into health tech. I was a marketer uh senior marketer in the health tech industry for about a year and a half. And again, very similar to Rick, um Luke gave me phoned me up and asked me to, you know, consider helping Stadium apps in a growth capacity. Uh and that includes creating content, creating wonderful stories of Stadium Maps customers and uh just lead the primarily organic growth channels that we have right now at Stadium Maps. And that's where I'm at. when it comes to map uh what was the original vision of creating maps you know what is the idea you the idea is hey I know people want to go from A to B how do we monetize it how can we track them how we can spy on them or the whole idea was how to simplify it so they don't have to open a map they get real time data to traffic all the thing so if I ask you is how would you define a stadia map today >> great question. Uh the map the maps world, if you look into like the digital mapping world and the uh locations um industry is really big. Like there's a lot of people in it. Um and they do uh they they roughly fit into a couple of different categories. But what was missing at least from my perspective from the outside looking in when I joined Stadia was um a a platform. So a location services platform that that gave developers choice and gave them uh a good experience to do all the things that they would need to do from a location's perspective. So maps, routing, um even stuff like uh time zones and elevation like these are things that you can find you can piece together across the internet um across providers but is really hard to find in a platform. And then when you find it in a platform, uh they're focused on um uh they're when you find it in a platform, they're focused on um uh selling you ads or selling things or selling your private selling your data. Um, and there's there's an open there's a big there's a big open um opportunity there for a a maps locations provider who doesn't care who doesn't care to sell your your uh sell you up the river in terms of your privacy or data etc etc. The other really cool thing is um it's a we used to have a lot of this and we have less of this now which is the for developers by developers um uh platform. you you see less of that and you're seeing even less of it now that um Agentic AI is is taking over and it's much more um accessible to create um to create these things which on one hand is really good and on the other hand when you're trying to build something that is secure respectful of your users has great user experience and really good at what it does you you want to use those tools but you also want the um the backing of a company that's been there for 10 years and has been doing this for 10 years professionally to run your business on top of. >> Very well said. Uh Rob, do you want to add anything to that? >> Anything I would add would just be seconding what Rick said. You know, there there are providers out there that um do one or two things, you know, extremely well. Um when you look at stadium maps, we do um a lot of things well. We have a platform where depending on what your location needs are, you could very likely find it on our platform. Uh so I think that that's first and foremost. Uh I think the whole concept that Rick mentioned of support which is why you know I'm sure one of the biggest reasons why Rick joined the company because it has you know very similar uh very similar thoughts and beliefs around how support should be handled than Lenode did. So I think that that's you know super important. And then I think when you get to the bigger providers and you start thinking about the sharing of consumer data and the how those companies and how those location API platforms make money um you know that's something that's not been part of stadium apps since its founding. It's not in our DNA and you know it's it's it's super exciting to be you know to be in that and be part of that journey as we try to scale uh you know stadium apps. Now when we look at maps uh it's not as crowded space as you know the other spaces are but at the same time it is crowded in a way what maps can do but it is market is mostly dominated by two big players it all depends mostly I mean we use maps mostly when we drive around and most of times you also a lot of automakers are actually just sticking to one which is some are building their own uh in this space can you talk about the market of stadium apps who is actually using because in front we see infotainment system we see the map that Ford or whatever car offered but behind the scene it could be whatever API there so can you talk about the market that is there for stadium maps right now >> yeah we don't um so we don't have a a mapping product and that's on purpose right you can't go to download the stadium maps um app and and navigate from one place to another bread and butter our bread and butter is providing the infrastructure for other people to build that and that world one of the other things uh like bouncing back to what you were saying a few minutes go swap about like why this was interesting to me and Rob personally. Um, maps are fascinating and incredible and location uh stuff is really really interesting. I would challenge uh you and your listeners and watchers to uh just one day count how many times you look at a map in a day. Um, you probably think it's one, it's like 20. It's so many more. And there's so many more opportunities uh to provide um to provide those services for developers uh to empower them to do very specific things or very wide ranging things. So on stadium maps you could build a mapping application. We have lots of customers that build a mapping application. But you can also build a specific mapping application for something like uh golf carts in your community or for uh trucking uh to um to figure out very specific logistics problems or uh hospitality to figure out how to navigate around a hotel um complex or something like that. And that's just one segment of what Stadium Maps does, which is that the mapping um which is our mapping product set. Um, even in that even in that product line, there's a million problems to solve and and we try to be the best at uh giving developers the tools to be able to solve them uh for all these problems we haven't even thought of. >> Yeah, swap. I think when you when you talk about who is using stadium apps, I think again let's go back to the Lenode days. Lenode customers were a wide range of of users, you know, from, you know, home homebound developers who were just working on their own, not homebound, I'm sorry, from developers working on their uh their individual projects that they wanted to do maybe outside of work, you know, to, you know, we call them hobbyists and enthusiasts, right? All the way through to, you know, enterprise businesses. You know there there's so much green field from a location API platform like stadium maps where you could be a hobbyist developer working on a side project. You could be working for a large organization and you know we used to call it Lenode you know it used to be like take Lenode to work where you signed up as a as a hobbyist enthusiast to try the platform and then when you realized it could do all the things that some of the you know larger players use that you're spending tons of money to do then you take that and start using it on a project at work. Maybe it's a smaller project, maybe it's a bigger project. So I think the range of customers could go from anywhere from the hobbyist enthusiast to a startup, you know, all the way through to an enterprise business who wants to do something at scale but doesn't want to pay the exorbitant costs that are associated with some location API platforms as well as the data issues that we you know the data and the uh customer data issues that we talked about earlier. talk a bit about uh the whole uh map market that a lot a lot of people are not aware of and what a stadium map does behind the scene. How we generate maps, how every mapping company or every location services company generates this map is really generates our our map tiles, generates our location data, generates our address data, our address databases. uh all that stuff is a really fascinating problem and it's actually kind of the secret sauce of any location um services company. So um the the world has many open data sets that uh lots of people are aware of. Um there are very there are closed data sets, there are proprietary data sets and um our special saucer kind of our magic is taking all of those and putting them together and providing um like uh simplified dduplicated accurate location information to to our customers and um on the behalf of their customers as well. In terms of AI, I think the place where that's happening the most in the like and this isn't specific to stadium maps but more to the the industry is um uh where we're seeing that is around um missing data or incorrect data sources. So AI is being used more in like the raw data sources than it is being used in like the APIs that we're providing to customers. Um there's it's it's an incredible pro I mean it's it's one of the world's biggest data sets. It's one of the world's biggest data problems and it's constantly moving. Um whether it's address data or if you just think about, you know, new construction or stuff gets to torn down, stuff that's there yesterday and not there um tomorrow. Uh that's a really hard problem. And things like satellite imagery can help there. things like um uh all of the uh communitydriven stuff that we use um uh people you know using people to do that uh is the traditional way but there's also AI AI empowered or AI enabled stuff coming to market or coming to um coming to fruition that is making the raw data sources more accurate which in turn lets us give our users um uh better APIs more accurate APIs um in the long run. >> Can you also talk about of course there's open street maps also is there uh what is the what is the role of openness open source open sequia maps? >> Yeah we contribute a bunch to um we can contribute back to our data sources and to our um uh and to the data um providers like open street map uh open addresses a bunch of other um uh um open source projects and open data projects. Um, so that that's where we contribute the most. We also provide um some open-source uh APIs and SDKs that uh folks can use and learn from. They can be used with um uh with Stadium apps or in some cases without. We're also part of a couple of uh consortiums uh and working groups that provide um uh standards and libraries for um uh for using maps on the web and and in mobile. Map Libre is the big one that um one of our co-founders actually helped co-found and sits on the board of um and uh they provide um like I said open standards as well as um help define open standards as well as uh some open open libraries that lots and lots of people use with and without stadia maps uh tile data and location data. >> Excellent. Uh thank you. Now let's talk about uh how are you Rick and of course Rob you are going to further help stadium maps. What is going to be your roles at the company? >> Yeah one of the really cool things um like Rob was saying a bit ago is uh we walked into something that is going really well. So uh it's already a value at stadium apps um in line with that um our our developer first uh methodology and and mindset to provide humanpowered great fast accurate support. Um uh and we've been doing that stadium has been doing that was doing that long before uh I showed up. What I want to help is to scale that. So as we uh grow the business and as we uh get more customers and we get more uh products in our product line uh obviously support scales with that. Um and scaling support while keeping the spirit of uh support and the core values that we have set at both a support at a support level is also as well as um at a stadium apps level. Um that's what I hope to really help with. Um, in addition to that, I would love to what what Rob and I are both doing is just helping grow the business as a whole. So, not only um are we taking some of what we learned at Lenode and elsewhere to help just grow a startup, right? Cuz that that's um uh something that we've done before. But we're also trying to at the same time learn the lessons of um what we got right, but I think most importantly for both Rob and I, what we got wrong about scaling um and apply those lessons at the same time and and hopefully uh we can do both and it doesn't get out of whack. >> You mentioned Rick, you know, the things that you learned at Lenode. Can you talk about what are some of the lessons that you learned at Lenode that you feel can be incorporated or brought to stadium maps? At the same time, this can be tricky. Some mistakes that you made at Lenode where you're like, "Hey, I want to not repeat them." I was going to say one area that really quickly comes to mind and I think it's really the kind of the one of the core things of reasons why I wanted to be part of Stadium Maps is just the uh the knowledge across teams. Um even though stadium apps is a super small team um one of the things that I loved working doing at Lenode was working with the success and the support team on discovering customers who we could tell stories about. You know working on the product team working with the product team to understand our product better so we can put better technical documentation out and better content out there that's accurate and discoverable. So really just working I hate to use the political term but working across the aisle. you know, when you think of somebody in marketing or somebody in growth, you know, it's, you know, you you sit in your little silo and you sit in your little bubble. And, you know, I'd never want to do that inside of an organization. In my career, I've sometimes been stuck in those areas. But, you know, now I feel like I have, you know, the ears of our co-founders. I have support and success. I have product engineering. You know, there are so many ways to collaborate inside of Stadia Maps. And I think that you know from a lessons learned at Lenode the reason why we were successful at Lenode at least in the five years that I was there and maybe the two plus years I was there before the acquisition was just because of that because of the collaboration uh that we had inside the organization. >> One of the things that gets really hard uh as you scale uh and and this is a this is this is obvious but it it gets harder to um to communicate. it gets harder to stay in touch and uh that I mean that from two angles and one is internally and one is externally. I think that uh Lenode uh Okami to this day does an awesome job um knowing their customer and being very personable and close to the customer. Um being able to uh reach a real human um is is uh it was important it was important a few years ago. It was important many years ago. uh we're replacing people with uh we're replacing humans with uh computers and it's even more important now because people don't love that um uh within within reason. So staying close to the customer um obviously becomes a harder problem as as you scale and I really want to drive that home because I think it's one of the things one of the really special parts of Stadia that um we can have uh we're empowered right now to have a great relationship with our customers and I never I never want to lose that one-on-one connection. Um I and at on the same token exter internally um as you scale it gets harder to um to stay a small company um uh metaphorically, right? And I think that we learned a lot of lessons growing so rapidly at Lenode where we saw things break, right? And we saw oh well that used to happen just because we knew that because that person was in the room, right? or because we said that in a Slack channel or because um you know we saw somebody by a water cooler and uh remote work has changed that obviously and and things are different but I think that um when you scale uh an organization from 10 to 150 or whatever like you see those things break and I make no promises that I'll that we'll do it better the second time but I will make promises that will at least um we'll go into those problems with a little bit more information than we did the first time. >> When it comes to this specific market, talk about the role of developers that you folks see and how you would as you also said developers they don't like marketing. How are you going to attract developers, show the value of stadium apps to them and engage with them in both capacities whether offering better support or growing the market? I think from a growth standpoint, it's going to come down to technical documentation. I think that that was a very important area uh of interest at Lenode. People trusted our technical documentation to get started. Um so I think that there's one area. I think the second piece of it again as Rick mentioned is the human support element that somebody can get an answer. Um and Rick knows how to scale organizations. So when we grow from X to Y or X to X2, um we can still offer that human support. Uh on the AI front, I'm a huge believer in the work that I'm doing, you know, behind the scenes with Cloudco and so forth. I'm a huge believer in human in the loop. I don't think that that's ever going to go away. Um I think anybody who pushes an AI uh agenda on you that doesn't mention human in the loop is not telling the whole story. Um there there has to be human in the loop. And if that's um from a developer working with cloud co-work or cloud code to drive their next project um to a growth marketer you know using cloud co-work to do x y and zed to somebody in the support success area who using AI the human in the loop is going to be critical. We we can do things t a lot faster and a lot more efficient with AI but we're not being replaced. We need a human. you need somebody to to to ver validate and verify you know the accuracy of any output. >> I totally agree. I I was having this conversation with a couple of friends this weekend actually. Um one of the I love the personal software re revolution that's happening right now. I think it's incredible. Um and I love that everyone can um create tools that uh didn't exist yesterday uh without an incredible amount of friction. whether that's for personal use or professional use. That's kind of the difference. So we want to be there for users and I think every I think everyone should um maybe think about operating this way is I think um we need to be we need to be there for users who uh maybe have never written code before, right? Like who have never um but have a great idea and they want to do something. Um and we're seeing that already in the support organization. We're seeing people who um are coming in and they're like, I just have this idea like how do I do this thing? And um that's one of those things that uh if they if a customer goes and asks that of four providers and three of them give just have a chatbot response that are like you just use this API. Um I think that those providers are going to lose. Uh, and I think the people who are going to win are the people who are um that have people on the other end to say, you know, good idea. You should think about this, you should think about this, and you should think about this. I'm not saying I'm completely writing off uh AI um support or uh uh AI um support engines or AI assisted support. I'm not. Uh but I do agree with Rob that there's something um really magical in having a human on the other line. Um and then I think at this at the other on the other side of the coin there are professionals who are using um the our our tools our platform and we have to be ready for them in all the ways that Rob was describing um having an MC MCP server having great documentation having um machine readable documentation having all those things available to us because the gamut of of customers who are using Stadia apps has grown with AI which is a really cool problem to try to solve uh from a support perspective and from Rob's perspective as well and from a product perspective too. >> Yeah. And I would also add to that uh community right I think just at its core and foundation you know you know with us you know really foundationally being around you know built around open source you know I think there's a tremendous opportunity for stadia maps to drive um more community in involvement either to be to to be a leader in that or just to be involved in it. Um, when I say, you know, be a leader in it, you know, do we create our own, you know, community, you know, do we do we go off and do something on our own or do we just participate more and be more active? Um, I think there's a lot there. Um, Luke and Ian are brilliant people. They're brilliant men and they're just so smart when it comes to the location uh ecosystem. So, you know, we we need to get them and they want to be more involved in the community. Um, but for the last, you know, 10 plus years, they've been just running a business, right? And they haven't been able to do that. And I know, you know, they're both very interested. Ian's already doing a lot more blog posts on stadiums.com and Luke's, you know, talking to me, you know, very often about, you know, how he can be, you know, more forward and be more out there in the community. So I think that that's another opportunity that we can that we bring you know kind of taking off some of the you know the growth initiatives and the support and success initiatives off of two co-founders um and doing it that way. You Rob mentioned that you also want to increase community engagement. uh you know uh of course you folks recently joined so I will not ask you to share the whole but what what ideas that you have that you know whether it comes from all the leno days through a kama journey or what you have seen because this is a different market this is not a market where you can get everybody involved you know it's only very specific market targeting very specific audience so what what is your both of you what is your vision to get more developers community engagement >> I think the first one that comes to mind for me is developer advocate vates, advocates who are out there using stadium apps in the wild and having them create content, speak on our behalf, uh, and and and just be more public. Um, and I'm not talking about paid influencer marketing. I, you know, there's we did we did some of that at Lenode as well. Um, people can see right through some of that. Um, so, you know, if I had to list things, developer advocacy would be much higher on the list than, you know, some paid influencer marketing campaign. uh you know and I think that that developer advocate piece extends into something I mentioned before which is you know something more founderled you know something that allows us to put Ian and uh Luke out there as subject matter experts um so I think there's tons that we can do organically um ground up um around developer advocacy I would probably say that would be one area and then as I mentioned also earlier I think just purely from a content p perspective um discoverability ities perspective, you know, in answer engines and and so forth. Just making sure that we're there, right? Just making have getting more mentions, getting more citations, you know, in the next 3 to 6 months, if not, you know, sooner, you know, those are some initiatives that I'd love to, you know, get off the ground. >> Maybe repeating what you were saying, Rob, of putting in a different way. Um, my thought has always been the companies that I want to use are the companies that are part of the conversation, right? they're relevant and they're not companies who are just like here come buy our stuff. It's here let's um let me help you succeed in what you're trying to do. And I think that you it's very obvious you can see the companies that do that and you can see the companies that don't do that. Um and some of the things that Rob mentioned are part of just being relevant and being part of the conversation. Um we want to put out great developer uh documentation and not just about Stadia maps but about location services about maps like maps are complicated right uh geocoding is complicated um I think we have a blog post coming up fairly soon about uh geoc reverse and forward geocoding about how they how they work what they are like I we don't really care necessarily that someone comes to stadium maps reads our docs and uh signs up as much as someone comes to Stadium Maps, reads our docs, continues to explore the ecosystem, figures out what they're trying to do, and then when they need to buy, they say, "You know who was helpful? Stadium Apps." And that that's kind of our playbook. And it's it's more genuine. It's and genuinity or um or um uh um the the words escaping me, but that that real uh that real connection with customers where you actually care about uh the company and the company cares about you. And again, you know these companies like you you have them. I'm not going to say them out loud, but you know them. Everybody knows them. We want to be that company. um because we think that that is that is long-term success. Um not not the flash in the pan, which by the way is how Stadium MS has operated up until we've shown up. Like they're Stadium Maps is in it for the long game. Like there's no like um get a bunch of money uh sell go public, get acquired plan here. It's to build the location services platform that is here for a long time and helps customers achieve their goals for a long time. There's no escape hatcher or plan to get out. We're just trying to build a good company that does good stuff for customers >> and have fun doing it, right? Have fun while we're doing it. I mean, there's there's there's definitely this, you know, I would again back to Little Node days. I joined Lenode in 2019. Rick was there way before me, but there's this concept of just having some fun doing it, right? The outcomes were different. you know, Lenode was acquired. There's nothing, you know, like that on the road map for Stadium Maps, but we want to just have fun doing it. It's one of the reasons why I chose to join, you know, and uh to to join Stadium Maps. Real Rick's there. Rick, I know Rick. I like Rick. I've worked well work well with Rick. Um I knew Luke and Ian, you know, they're good people. So, I want to be at this point in my career, I want to be surrounded by people I want to be, you know, I want to be working with every day and see every day. Rick Rob thank you so much uh for joining and sharing your story and status I remember I talked to the founders couple of years ago you folks are doing a great work this space you know that's what open open source is all about so thank you for not only sharing those story but also reconnecting which also means we'll talk a lot as things new things happen in state map so I would love to have you folks back on the show but I really really really appreciate your time today thank you >> thanks Bob thanks I'll talk to you