We often ask ourselves, “What would we want to happen if we were the customer in this situation?” That question drives everything from how we build features to how we handle support. If we disagree or are unsure, we fall back on another thing we say a lot: “just go talk to people.” When in doubt, we talk to our customers. (This is why you will get emails from team members asking about your experience, including from the founders.)

We like to say, somewhat ironically, that we do "GIS for people who are not GIS people." Developer, data analyst, marketer, researcher, journalist. Whatever your background, Geocodio is built to make location data accessible. No past geography experience required.

(We’ll let you in on a secret: No one on our team has a geography degree. We make geography tools for non-geography people because that is who we are, too. Though, after over a decade of doing geocoding, people tend to quibble with us identifying as “not GIS people.”)

We also find ourselves saying that “coordinates aren’t stamps—no one is collecting them for the fun of it.” We know our place: like lumber, we’re a building block. It just has to work. You just need to be able to do what you need to do with the data. And perhaps because we had those frustrations ourselves, we care a lot about making things easier for you. Our goal is to get out of the way so you can get back to whatever it is you’re building, and stay out of the way.

Geocodio is run by a small team led by husband-wife team Michele and Mathias Hansen. Our team is small enough that when you need help, you hear from the people who built it. Yet we’re also big enough to provide a service that can reliably process billions of requests every month. (After all, for years, on the rare occasion there was a middle-of-the-night on-call alert about our servers, it was Michele and Mathias who were woken up. We take infrastructure reliability personally.)

Perhaps because we’ve been personally incentivized to have rock-solid infrastructure, the thing we hear most often from customers is that Geocodio is the part of their stack they don’t have to think about. They write the integration once, and it just works. We still support the very first API version we ever released. No breaking changes without a new version. No rug pulls. No bad surprises.

That might sound like a low bar. Anyone who has worked with geospatial data knows it isn’t.

Perhaps surprisingly, even though geocoding isn’t exactly party conversation, we’ve largely grown through one person telling someone else about us. It turns out a lot of people have run into the same roadblocks we did over a decade ago, are delighted to find a solution, and a boring little building block becomes something they excitedly tell their friends about.

And honestly, that’s what drives us. We talk to our customers to solve their problems, but also because we genuinely find it fascinating to hear about what they’re solving and how we might help. So many different things require geocoding as a building block. There are always new challenges and, more importantly, new people to solve those challenges for. We have been doing this for 12 years. We are not going anywhere.