Why Weather Buddy was a bad idea for a SaaS

Hey y'all, hope you are having an amazing day when reading this 😊

So a while ago I made a tweet stating that the demand for Weather Buddy is very low and almost non-existent. And I promised to do a breakdown of my market research and how I came to this conclusion.

I'm going to keep things simple as this is my first dev article.

Before we go further, I want to clarify that I have already built the service and implemented certain SaaS features before doing any market research whatsoever.

👀: Hey, you can try out Weather Buddy with this exclusive invite.

My research

During my research what did I look for?

1. Who are my users
   After building the MVP, I didn't know who I was going to market it to, who would be my users, and why they would use the service. Let's face the facts nobody really needs another weather app (free or paid), after all, anyone who owns a mobile device can easily check the weather on it. This made me question whether such a service is necessary.

2. Where my users were hanging out
   This was the one that came as a shock the most. You know the saying "Build it and they will come". I took that approach and I regret it. When I asked myself the question "Where will the come from" I came up short with no answer. I was able to find possible niches where they could come from, but it won't be a small feat to get into the niche and get them to use the product.

3. Is anyone even looking?
   I recently found out about Google Trends - A google service that gives some insight into what people are searching for and when. I did a deep dive into weather-related searches and I almost lost motivation from the results 😓. Here's a snippet of the search results for people searching about anything weather in the whole United States.

Compared to the 100 million plus people in the United States, it is such a small fraction of people which signifies that the demand for the service will be extremely low.

Lessons learned

• Do not build a product without knowing the audience you're building for.
• Market research is the most important aspect of a product.

Conclusion

Now, I'm actually a novice when it comes to market research so I might be underselling how beneficial Weather Buddy is or could be in the future. That's why I won't abandon it completely, I will work on it, update it, try hard to make it a profitable service, and share my progress with you from time to time.

You can reach me on Twitter here

You can also look at the Weather Buddy source code here