Many people desperately sought a silver lining after the 2008 financial crisis. John Stewart and Ben Brantly found one. On August 26, 2009, the two launched MapAnything, originally known as Saber Solutions. The geo-productivity platform sells business applications on the Salesforce AppExchange. The company now has more than 170 employees and serves more than 1,900 clients.
Stewart is a native New Yorker who earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. He began his career in the military and aerospace defense industry, founded an engineering consulting firm in 2003, and a manufacturing company in 2006. That’s when he first came upon Salesforce.com. The company needed internal Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Material Requirement Planning (MRP) systems for their processes and Salesforce had just released their Application Program Interface (API), a set of tools, protocols, and routines for building software applications.
Stewart and Brantly built their entire system on top of force.com. Then, in 2008 the bottom fell out of the world financial market. Stewart liquidated his manufacturing company, sold his engineering services firm and was ready for a new chapter in his career. Stewart and Brantly started a salesforce.com services practice on August 26, 2009. They called it Saber Business Solutions.
By this time Stewart was in Charlotte, where his wife’s family lives. The company started doing services work, specifically for manufacturing companies, for which they built mini ERP and MRP systems on top of force.com. The spark for tying geography into the software came in 2011 when a client who owned a waste management firm expressed a desire to be able to see where all the company’s dumpsters were on a map. “The idea for MapAnything was born,” says Stewart.
MapAnything was listed on the Salesforce.com AppExchange in 2012, and “there it sat,” says Stewart. Salesforce.com allows programmers to build applications inside of their platforms. MapAnything is actually woven inside of Salesforce.com programs. Over the next year, the company sold about 175 licenses.
In 2013, Stewart and Brantly decided to divest themselves from the services business, and invest themselves in the software business. They put time, money and effort into selling the product. They rebranded the company from Saber Business Solutions to Cloudbilt, and at that time were selling four apps, but everyone only wanted to use one: MapAnything. “The market tells you who you are,” says Stewart, and following that lead, in 2015 the company was renamed MapAnything.
Along the way, they’ve gone from a single product to a platform. As the company went through different growth life cycles, many teammates moved on. Today Stewart is the CEO, while Brantly serves as Chief Technology Officer; most of the C suite have been there shortly more than a year. “The people who bring you a million in recurring revenue, or $5 million in recurring revenue, are not necessarily the same people who will take you from $10 million to $50 million so we have brought in experienced leaders as we have needed them.”
MapAnything’s platform uses location to allows sales and service personnel to maximize their time by providing a visualization of clients and prospects within a given geographic range. Leads and clients can be pulled up on maps that have live fields, which allow information to be input in real time as salespeople make calls. It also provides routes, weather, and a means to find a hotel well located to potential clients.
The software industry moves so fast that Stewart limits his forward projections to two-year horizons, at which time Stewart predicts MapAnything will be offered on a third platform, in addition to Salesforce.com, and ServiceNow, another fast-growing cloud platform. Stewart is also getting ready to give out API keys to developers, which will allow them to embed location services from MapAnything’s backend platform into their own Apps, regardless of the user’s ecosystem or platform.
In addition to being a good place to raise a family, Stewart cites Charlotte as full of well-educated people with significant capability. He’s drawn to the attractive pay scale, and a cost of living that is less than Atlanta or the West Coast.
Client support and success, marketing, operations, sales, and product management are located in Charlotte. Development is based in Atlanta because it was more difficult to get developers with the right skill set in Charlotte. “Atlanta is a bigger pond to fish in,” says Stewart.
Stewart says that success in the technology space demands that a company not force fit the product into the market demand. “You have to listen to what the market is telling you,” he says. “You don’t have to be a slave to every trend and fad that comes along. But be prepared to pivot if the market is telling you that you are solving a problem that doesn’t need to be solved.”
Two years ago MapAnything consisted of 18 people and had sold less than 3,000 licenses. Today, they have over 50,000 subscriptions and on any one day, 20,000 plus people can be using the product at any given time. “You get surprised when you reach our scale,” says Stewart. “You realize that’s the crowd that shows up for an NBA game. You realize the impact you are having on companies and businesses, and what it means to them.”
