Michele Hansen

Michele Hansen is the co-founder and CEO of Geocodio, a geocoding API and data processing service that converts addresses into coordinates and back, enriched with data such as census and legislative districts. She and her husband, Mathias Hansen, who serves as CTO, started Geocodio as a side project in 2014 after the pricing and storage restrictions of major geocoding providers made their own project unworkable.

Hansen was a product manager when Geocodio started and went full time on the business in 2017. Geocodio has stayed an intentionally small company focused on the North American market, has been used by more than 150,000 people to process billions of addresses, and serves customers ranging from students to researchers and large financial institutions.

She is widely known in the bootstrapper community for her work on customer research. Her book Deploy Empathy, a practical guide to interviewing customers written with developers-turned-founders in mind, was first published in 2021 and later released in an updated and expanded edition. She co-hosted the Software Social podcast and speaks regularly at events such as MicroConf.

In 2020 the Hansens moved from the Washington, D.C. area to a farm in the Danish countryside, while Geocodio remains a US company.