365 Days of Great Ideas for Your Map Business

My mother, the ultimate hustler, grossed like ~$2m selling small business advice. Her small business: selling small business advice. Very meta. I discovered this 22-year-old unopened idea-a-day desk calendar and it inspired me to write some "great ideas." Remember: one solid trial is worth a billion "great ideas."

1. Tasting room maps for vineyards; wine is all about terroir, terrain. An oversized varnished wooden CNC'd topo map perhaps? The drunks will love touching it.
2. Pick a patch of land you care about. Spend a few hours per month creating a luscious, baroque map of the same. It’s important for the cartographer to have show-pieces that reflect your taste and talents.
3. Fabricate and rent out a map dancefloor; you take metal 3x3ft trays, lay LEDs in the bottom, then the map layer, then a top layer of thick safety glass. What wedding could resist?
4. Make high-throughput maps for academic publishers; $300 a pop, sort 'em out fast (talk to the art director first), the PhDs will recommend you to their colleagues.
5. Make high-throughput, looks-okay maps for PowerPoint presentations; big companies love these. You just gotta get their point fast and keep it simple and readable.
6. Map kitchen table; glazed super tight and hose-downable, bamboo/cellulosic barrier between the plastic and your potables.
7. Map alarm clock; face is a nice glowy map, maybe 7x9", takes up a nightstand but looks nice.
8. Map bookshelf; individual sealed plates to swap out, tough scratch-resistant lucite or celluloid.
9. Map lamp; adhere to a lampshade, maybe sandwich between fabric. Would be a great nightlight.
10. Map escritoire; deluxe model features a 190k x 250k E-ink display, hand-stained walnut encased in the toughest varnish, backlit by a user-serviceable fault-tolerant lighting core. It’s your map.
11. Local map booth: print vintage maps of your local area, add to thrifted frames, sell for $20 each at your local farmer's market or craft fair.
12. Classroom map: you know those big rolled pull-down maps of the continents? You could update those.
13. Map baton: six-sided, like what tarmac gate guys wave, or smaller. Laminate micron-scale map into the interior of fine glass, two knobs scroll through hues and intensity.
14. Map nightlight: 4x3" micron-scale backlit map. An imagined place, the kingdom of sleeping 9 hours like a rock.
15. Multimaterial map: the USA is CNC’d gold depicting real terrain, Mexico is hand-beaten copper, Guatemala is a knot of ruby, Pacific Ocean is a foot of glass over ridges ground out of sandstone.
16. Embroidered map: start stitching, make it a yard long like Clara Bow. Threads can’t be beat for texture.
17. Map lava lamp: start with a blacked-out lamp, etch out map, illuminates nicely, shifting colors.
18. Map tunnel: Lightboxes on all surfaces, mount polyester or film maps or monochrome LCD screens. Great for expensive transition zones in commercial real estate or events.
19. Stamped copper map: Columbia Press Works did it first, but give it a shot.
20. Maps on coasters: hope they’re at least as good as https://www.etsy.com/shop/allmappedout.
21. Glowing map + recipes of the area; copy 'em down and try 'em in the kitchen.
22. Map ziggurat: mound up Getty-style marble, leave a square shaft in the middle. You hit the top and walk atop water-clear fused quartz; look down 20 feet, maps interleaved with more glass. Lit from below with low-pressure sodium-style light. 90-deg mirrored telescopes on casters to peer down. What’s buried in there?
23. Land/garden map: find a rich landowner or estate, make a beautiful bird’s-eye, top-down, or oblique map of their land, stuffed with illos like Neil Gower’s work for Naumkeag.
24. Map tutorials: sell a series of .AI files with a complete, labeled, pretty 10x10" map on the right, unstyled QGIS output on the left, "make left look like right."