Ready for my next move

tl;dr: After an intense few years, I’m off to my next gig. Our fantastic team at Mapme will continue to grow the company and our COO will take over as CEO.

Since starting Mapme, two years ago, the company has evolved from a job hunting site, to a community engagement platform, to a publisher tool and now to a freemium SaaS platform for visual content creation. As usual with startups, it took a while, but we finally hit a winner. I’m proud of how far we’ve come. After all, I never expected my original side project, Mapped In Israel, to make it so far.

Our last shift towards a SaaS business was something we’d always considered doing. From day one, a portion of our users had asked for premium features, advanced customization and custom integrations.

A few months ago we decided to test out paying plans. We started manually, with a few paying customers, and built out premium plans, integrated Stripe, put ads in the free service and started selling more subscriptions. So far, we’re off to a great start. We have paying customers in a broad range of verticals including real estate, education, publishing and government.

I’m so proud of the two products we’ve built, Classic and Stories. Seeing all the love from our users and customers has been incredibly rewarding.

Moving along, it became clear that our COO, Philippe, has a lot more experience and knowledge when it comes to building a SaaS business. So it makes sense for him to take the lead while I continue as an advisor.

It’s been a wild few years. All the highs and lows. All the lessons and mistakes. Truly appreciate all the support we’ve received during our ongoing journey. None of this would have been possible without our investors, team, advisors, families, friends and customers.

I’m really excited to see where Mapme goes from here. ??

What’s next for me? Not sure yet, taking some time to explore. Will be in Israel for a few weeks starting next Sunday. If you’re working on something interesting, I’d love to hear: [email protected]

PS: Raphael and I are partnering with Erik to bring On Deck to Tel Aviv. We’ll be organizing the first dinner mid November. If you’d like to join, please apply here. ??