Our Story

Howdy! I'm Ben Tyler. I wanted to put proverbial pen to paper and trace how Lost Creek Designs came to be (more for myself and family than anyone else). A handful of key events over two decades ago unexpectedly brought a kid that hated science and math into starting a software consultancy focused on the environment.

The College Years

While in college I had an internship with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection doing GIS and mapping work in their water quality division. Every day I would get to fire up ArcGIS and do things like delineate watersheds and help with a spatial landfill leachate analsysis across the state.

This snowballed into a passion for environmental science and GIS but I was too late into my political science major and I had to ride out that decision. After graduating I did whatever I could to land back in a role where I could work in water resources and do GIS work.

Early Career

Jump forward to 2015 to the Sustaining Watersheds Conference in Avon, Colorado. I happened to see my future boss and mentor present on how they were using the Google Charts JavaScript library to bring stream flow data to life with dynamic and interactive charts in a web page. This blew my mind. I thought, could you do this with maps too? At this point I did whatever I could to land a job at the company that had been presenting.

I got lucky and the firm took a chance on the political science major. Over the next 5 years I went deeper and deeper into software alongside my environmental and GIS work. I had the opportunity to build things ranging from watershed planning tools for large municipalaties to water supply operating systems for irrigation and water districts.

First Taste of Business

During these early years, I got my first taste of side projects and winning work. I had been a fly in the wall during a meeting of the South Platte Urban Waters Partnership (SPUWP) when they were discussing how they could pull together water quality datasets across all of their respective agencies. The end goal was to make the data accessible and understandable by the general public and decision makers.

I don't know what possessed 23 year old me on that day, but I decided to speak up and say I think I could build them a website that allows the users to explore the water quality data through interactive maps and graphs (I was still fresh off that conference presentation). The SPUWP was intrigued and wanted to pursue it.

My naïve, younger self had assumed this would be a passion project I would do for free. The SPUWP proposed paying me to build it though. It was time to setup an LLC! And thus Lost Creek Designs was born.

I got the first taste of getting paid to write software. It felt like magic getting paid to do what I would have done for fun. I loved learning the new skills of how to write a proposal, track a project, and issue invoices (as boring as it sounds).

Side Projects

After building the Water Quality Assessment Tool for the SPUWP, more referrals came in and I slowly grew my consulting business on nights and weekends. The magic of getitng paid to build what I would be build for free continued.

During this time I went deeper and deeper down the software rabbit hole. I have long loved storytelling and mythology. I got more and more excited as I realized that while technical, software can be an incredible storytelling tool. The way you package information through thoughtful design and incorporating aids like interactive maps and charts can bring meaning to the most complex and boring datasets. You start with a gargantuan idea and like a myth or a fable you chisel away until you have the simplest form to convey meaning.

Going All In

Alright, moving forward from the mythology tangent. I decided (aka forced by layoff) I wanted to turn Lost Creek into my day job in 2023.

I took a brief detour in 2020 working as senior software engineer at two early stage startups My predictably unpredictable experiences at these startups (i.e. startup going under a month before our son was born and losing health insurance, another founder overnight deciding that everyone needed to move to NYC) made the idea of being able to control our destiny a bit more appealing.

The rails were already in place from continuing to do work on the side as referrals came in over the years so it wasn't a huge stretch. During this stint in the more traditional tech world, I had missed building software within the niche of environment. Orienting Lost Creek around software and environment became a natural choice.

Finding the Groove

Since going all in on Lost Creek, I have had so many opportunities to work on wide ranging projects and get deeply interwined with others journeys in this space. It has been amazing.

I didn't set out to start my own company but here we are. I am still loving it and still get the sense of magic of "I can't believe I get paid to do this." Admittedly it is a bit weird right now with AI and the soul searching it entails but that is a blog post for another day. At the end of the day software is still the tool I love to use to tell stories about the environment.

Thanks for reading. We are looking to grow the team and who we partner with. If this resonates with you (as a future team member or as a client), would love to chat. Please get in touch!

Best,
Ben