App Report: Mapstr (social location-saving)

Platform delivers simple innovative solution…

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Biz Dev Daily

10 min readNov 27, 2015

I don’t recall when I first came across this app but I became an active user late this summer when I grew continuously frustrated with the inflexibility of the ‘saving locations’ (that little star icon) feature on Google Maps because it doesn’t allow you to update the name of the location, add notes to it, or use tags to organize it.

…enter Mapstr.

Core Offerings

SAVE: flag any location and add notes/photos

ORGANIZE: create custom tags to categorize locations

SHARE: social functionality to share locations with others

App Summary

Mapstr is a mapping platform that empowers users to flag locations of interest, categorize them using a customizable tagging system, and then add additional notes or photos to each location.

These locations can be established businesses or any point of interest - a park, an address from a contacts database, a bridge, etc - literally any physical location that one may want to mark for future reference.

And then there is a social functionality which allows you to share locations from your map (those which you haven’t marked as private) with others you are connected to on Facebook or individuals who you send personal invites to.

Video courtesy of Mapstr founder, Sébastien Caron

Media Coverage

Not a ton of mainstream attention yet, majority of coverage is in French (developer is French), but here’s a few of the more high-profile reviews…

“Easy-to-build list-making app that pinpoints places on a map so you can tag and save your favorites” — LA Times [8/30/15]
“Mapstr already attracted 50,000 users who saved over 400,000 places” — TechCrunch [8/25/15]
“The app Google Maps forgot to do… We bet it will soon be a must-have in our smartphone” — Vanity Fair (France) [2/17/15]
“The app Google should have developed with Maps, to let users save all their favorites places” — GQ (France) [12/17/14]

B2C User Audience = EVERYONE

One of the strongest characteristics of this app is that, while of course there are several unique profile sets of likely power users, this is something that anyone could implement in a useful way on some level.

Specific target user groups could include:

Recent arrivals to a new city — trying to plot out a lay of the land
Holiday travelers — preparing for a trip mapping out all the sights and special points of interest
Locals — passing by new places that catch their eye
Business travelers — planning trip and want to create a map of office locations of contacts whom they may be trying to schedule meetings with
Families — easy way to share addresses of all relatives or other meaningful locations for the family (schools, children activity locations, parent offices, etc) as sort of a visual contacts database

Personal Use Examples

Big strength of the platform to me is the tagging function and ease with which to toggle the various tags so you can find what you’re looking for simply and quickly. And here’s a few examples in action of the different kinds of place one might add and how that could be useful…

Recently re-located to Berlin and as I began to explore this city, I am constantly finding new places that I want to remember later….

Bike shop in Kreuzberg with cool vintage road bikes in the window (but it’s closed as I walk by it on Sunday) [tagged cycling, shopping, Kreuzberg]
Clothing shop in Mitte with displays that catch my eye (but it’s 2am and they’re closed as I pass by en route to meet friends at a bar) [tagged clothes, shopping, Mitte]
Outdoor basketball court in Friedrichshain which actually has the chain nets I love playing on, instead of those silly double rim things that are on most baskets across Berlin (and I want to remember it for next time I feel like playing) [tagged basketball, Fhain]

Took a trip to Portugal with my boyfriend a few weeks ago…

We were each able to compile a neatly organized set of places of interest (tourist sights, bars/restaurants/cafes, museums, etc) which we found through research or that people had recommended.
Gave us the ability to access a resource of relevant places that happened to be nearby when we spontaneously realized we had an hour to kill before our train or to see nearby cafes when the random urge struck to have a famous Portuguese pasta de natal and some coffee.
Normally, sans Mapstr, we’d get hungry, do a quick look on Google Maps or Yelp or similar local service, spend a couple minutes exploring nearby choices based on minimal info, then choose a spot. Or we would just continue wandering a neighborhood and choose a place we happen to come across, but might be frustrating to find out later, for example, that there was an unbelievable place just around the corner from where we went that several friends had previously recommended.

B2B Potential

I could foresee scores of sectors of businesses and public organizations could implement elements of Mapstr via an API or a more custom-tailored white label solution.

Here’s a few:

Government agencies looking for a solution to disseminate maps with points of interest for certain populations (tourism boards for tourists, social service agencies for refugees, etc) to easily access
Insurance companies looking for a solution (potentially within their own app) for users to locate the nearest medical provider in their network
Interactive educational tool - what if a teacher could create a map of certain local historical locations with notes on the background, history, significance of those locations and students could access that and go out on a walking tour on their own time as one element of an interactive lesson module
HR/On-boarding/Orientation for businesses (to their new employees) or universities (to their new students) to get them acclimated to new locale and familiar with key locations
Curated city guides by tastemaker/specialist media outlets - what if an outlet like Thrillist or Time Out or Rolling Stone was interested in a solution to present their audience with a visual map of curated location picks (coolest bars, best concert venues, etc) wrapped with their own custom branding for their website or as a tab within their own native app

Revenue / Monetization

In addition to the B2B possibilities listed above which could potentially generate revenue, there are several straight-forward ways they could access channels of monetization.

Here’s a few:

Leveraging user data to offer targeted reach to advertising partners
Offering a premium version of the app to access deeper set of features
Selling in-app subscription purchases to give users access to existing collections of maps with relevant points of interest

Strategic Partnerships — User Acquisition

In the case of an app like this, one way to approach strategic partnerships could be to research and identify individuals or organizations with access to target users of the app and find a way to get engage in a relationship with them to get meaningful access to that audience with the goal of acquiring more users.

Here’s a couple possibilities of strategic partnerships that could be effective for Mapstr in acquiring new users:

Establishing mutually-beneficial cooperations with any organization who has access to an audience of target user groups (such as travel companies, hotel groups, universities, etc) - it may be possible to potentially enact a partnership like this at no cost - what if Mapstr offered a hotel chain to develop (for free) a set of maps for their guests in each city with their top recommendations, cool points for the hotel group by looking tech-savvy offering this solution to their guests instead of a paper map brochure at the front desk and value added for Mapstr because the hotel guests would have to download the app to access the hotel’s map, win-win situation
Signing up social influencers (individuals with the power to reach a large/meaningful audience and affect their decision-making because of their position/status) to raise awareness and visibility of the app - what if Mapstr enlisted a niche celebrity (say a popular chef personality from a big TV show) to put together a set of locations (in the case of the chef, say a list of great under-the-radar eateries) to be published on Mapstr and shared via the influencer’s wide-reaching social media channels
Traditional approach of outreach to local businesses to introduce the platform, present the basic value proposition, and encourage physical call-to-action promotion via store-front poster or postcard or sticker to “Add us on Mapstr”

Functionality Feedback For Updates

There really should be some kind of web app for sharing because one frustrating thing is that when you click within Mapstr to share a location with someone who doesn’t have the app, they get directed to the App Store to prompt them to download the app. A web version which displays the details of the location listing could solve this annoyance.
The tagging functionality could be tweaked in a few ways for greater ease of use. Part of the appeal is being able to quickly add a place without having to stand there for a few minutes inputting the data. As a very active user, I now have like 40+ tags and there is no rhyme or reason to the way in which the tags are displayed when you are selecting the tags to add to a new location. Perhaps an auto-fill based on your set of created tags or at least just putting them in alphabetical order or something could solve this minor frustration with the interface.
Creating publicly accessible accounts to follow may potentially be a feature which allows users to instantly start to more deeply engage with the app. When someone first downloads the app, of course one can naturally assume that their first motivation is to start adding their own places to their own map, but might be more engaging and inspiring to be able to see the variety of kinds of locations that others have added to their maps.
Expanding the inbound location API for generating listings could be helpful as well since many businesses (surprisingly!) still haven’t added or don’t regularly update their listing on Google Places. This means that some businesses don’t show up at all and then you have to manually enter the details or the business comes up but the details aren’t accurate.

Technical Developer Notes

Mapstr utilizes the Google Places API to pull in data about existing locations to provide extended info to the user (such as exact address, website, phone number, opening hours) within the app
Website browsing for a location can be done in-app or via external connection to user’s preferred mobile browser (Safari, Chrome, etc)
Navigation can be accessed via external app connection to user’s preferred navigation platform (Google Maps, Waze, Apple Maps, etc)

Summary Conclusion

This is a platform with a tremendous amount of potential to exploit a particular niche that anyone could potentially find a place for in their daily lives. There seem to be lots of natural strategic partnership opportunities along with some pretty straight-forward monetization possibilities.

Primary key to success at this stage is going to be user growth and meaningful active usage. It might be wise to update the UI with some tweaks or new features to improve the social functionality and enable greater organic sharing. Some effectively-budgeted marketing and promotion efforts would also likely be appropriate to raise awareness.

The development and execution of a strategic partnership strategy could also be a very meaningful way to reach more potential users and increase the user base. Partnerships can really only come from the passionate hustle and labor of a business development team getting it done.

Downside here is that if any of the bigger players in the mapping space (Google, Apple, Bing, Here, Mapbox, etc) wanted to push them out at this early stage, because there doesn’t seem to be any major proprietary technological innovation, I’m not sure they could do much to prevent that.

However, that could also prove to set the stage for a natural exit if one of those bigger players opted to make an acquisition play and incorporate the new user-generated data from Mapstr into their bigger ecosystem similar to what Google did with its acquisition of Waze.

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Mapstr is available for free on the App Store at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mapstr/id917288465

More information available at: www.mapstr.com

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A selection of screenshots…