How one startup’s bet on the ‘old school web’ pays off

Craig Campbell moved away from the stream of money flowing into AI to create, of all things, a website.

Sure, Campbell could have started an AI company. He is a former engineer at Meta and a technology startup who in 2022 sold his last project – an e-commerce tool for companies that use Shopify – while AI is growing. “I had my previous VC money breathing down my neck, going ‘start something else. We’ll write you a check.'” He had other ideas.

People don’t usually rush to get into the website business, it’s what it is Google Zero feature it’s getting closer. Campbell was undaunted and has grown his career – Ancient Maps – being a sustainable business. And they managed it in an unexpected way: through organic search.

Old Maps is true to its name. This site allows you to view old maps of a particular area with modern maps overlaid. You can change the view to fade between the two views. The map comes from publicly available sources such as the US Geological Survey, but the tools to allow people to do this research were developed by Campbell. He built them to help him discover his favorite metal detectors – by pointing out the modern locations of old buildings and streets, he identifies new places to search for artifacts. He started sharing his mapping tools on Reddit with other metal enthusiasts and found that other people wanted to get their hands on what he had created. With this, his new professional career was created.

You don’t have to pan for real gold to enjoy Vintage Maps. For someone who just wants to know what’s around them, it’s a treasure trove. I’ve used it to help identify things like how the Duwamish River was created before it was channelized to help ships navigate the waterway. Campbell’s customers use them for a variety of purposes – from genealogical research to the everyday user who maps old oil wells. It’s a research tool, but it’s also just plain fun.

The growth path has been steady. Campbell says traffic is increasing from 20,000 users per month to now more than 300,000 per month in the third year. The income is enough to support Campbell and his wife, who also helps with the business. But he can’t help but think about how the money would have been if he had taken VC money to work on AI. “I’m doing something similar to what I was like, E4 at Facebook, which is like a middle engineer.”

The main source of traffic for previous Maps is Google Search results. Campbell discovered early on that Old Maps were rising in search engines when people went to search for historical information about places of interest to them – the church their grandparents attended, or the abandoned mining site in another region.

By writing his maps and pages in a way that Google understood, he saw the cycle begin. “Once I started getting this information out and making it available to Google and giving it a place on the web, the traffic just started.”

“This is how the web is supposed to work. This is the old web,” he says. “It’s alive and well, but only in these small areas.”

A typical online publisher of 10 or 15 years ago would probably have relied on ads to show how much they were earning. You can play with a free Maps Past account, but deeper access requires $9 per week or $52 per year for an annual subscription. The subscription protects Campbell from the risk of fluctuating advertising costs and Google-driven technology sales – which the DOJ ruled as illegal in 2025.

While AI is eating the open web alive, Campbell has embraced AI tools to help drive the business. Campbell says he used to spend an hour or two a day working on any project he wanted, writing long emails instead of submitting form answers and FAQs. Now, they allow a type of local agent on their computer to manage the front line. His scheduled service runs once an hour – assuming his laptop is turned on – and he can use his Gmail. It removes spam and commercial messages, identifies items that need its attention, and writes responses. He said that this has reduced his time to help customers to 10 minutes day.

“Sometimes I have angry customers,” Campbell said. At that time, they check the request, accept or reject it, and check the message before sending it.

Campbell is also using AI to help develop an OCR – Optical Character Recognition – tool that will work with old maps. “Mapmakers are donkeys,” Campbell joked. Old maps are too difficult for existing OCR systems. The text bends sideways like rivers, uses irregular spaces, and is sometimes crowded. Campbell discovered that off-the-shelf equipment could not analyze these maps. He found great success with modern LLMs using reasoning, but it is not an easy matter to make the assistant “OCR these maps,” he says.

In fact, he has found success in combining the human mind by experimenting with the capabilities of the LLM, rather than relying on the tool. “It’s not just bringing the human mind, but the creativity, and connecting together over the years using tools like this,” he says. “You still have to bring some human light into the mix.”

Campbell may have walked away from the AI ​​gold rush, but in doing so he seems to have created a way to create a successful online business in the age of Claude Code and AI in a nutshell. When you start with something you love, create something that is useful, and share it with other people like you, that’s a great foundation. Campbell’s day-to-day looks very different from how you would build and run a website 10 years ago, but the things that have made the business so successful today are the people.