It is amazing what our team has accomplished in five short years. In that time we have grown from a startup to one of the largest providers in North America and the clear technology leader in our market.
GIS WebTech is an entrepreneurial success story.
GIS WebTech was formed in late 2016 from a predecessor company started by Jason Elliott, our CTO, to develop technology for economic development. When Jason looked at economic development he saw legacy technology that simply hadn’t kept up with modern GIS. A few of us joined Jason to form GIS WebTech because we believed in his vision for a new kind of technology, designed to address the lack of innovation in legacy apps. When we spoke to economic developers and site selectors they confirmed our observations and told us they wanted newer technology and were unhappy with the glacial pace of improvements from legacy providers.
So we took the classic technology entrepreneurs’ risk: we used virtually all of our startup capital to develop Recruit and launched it with the goal of disrupting a sleepy market. Recruit was an immediate hit because it addressed this unmet demand, and GIS WebTech has been the fastest-growing provider ever since. Our compound annual growth rate was 119% over our first four years, meaning that we more than doubled on average each year during that period. In fact, we kept growing rapidly right through the pandemic and continue to do so today, as you can see in the nearby chart. During 2021 we expanded our presence in multiple states and signed our first customers in Colorado, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Montana. We also entered international markets with our first customer in Canada.
Over the last five years GIS WebTech pioneered many features that are now common in online site selection. GIS WebTech was the first to integrate workforce data, the first to make drive times customizable for real-life traffic, the first to provide one-click sharing of property search results, and the first to use property clustering on the map.
And while imitation is always flattering, our continuous innovation keeps our clients on the cutting edge and legacy providers playing a never-ending game of catch-up. Consider just a few examples of how our company has maintained its technology leadership:
- The only technology keeping your prospects on your site. Recruit contains all the components of a virtual site visit, including 3D, inside the app, so prospects stay on your site and stay focused on your community. Legacy technologies lack 3D, so they send your prospects off your site to Google Earth – violating the first rule of digital marketing. Once those prospects leave your site have no control over what they see, what they do, or even if they’ll return.
- The only technology providing a complete GIS. We provide two free Esri tools that integrate seamlessly with Recruit, providing a complete, easy-to-use GIS.
You can add layers from your local GIS department with just a few clicks; you can turbocharge your RFI response and proposal generation; you can easily produce eye-catching, custom infographics for use on your website; and you can even produce beautiful layers highlighting your local data, as illustrated with the nearby example produced by Jason Flora of York County, SC. Best of all, no specialized GIS training is required!
- The only technology providing real-time access to the entire Esri data set. Esri is the data most requested by businesses and site selectors. In fact, it is almost certainly the data they used to find you in the first place. Legacy providers source data from cheaper providers you probably never heard of, or buy a few dozen Esri variables. Only GIS WebTech provides real-time access, so your data is never out of date, and only GIS WebTech provides the entire Esri data set – thousands of variables.
As we celebrate our first five years I would like to thank our team, whose dedication to technology leadership and client service have driven our success, and our incredible clients, who honor us by allowing us to serve them every day.