Announcing PeepWeather.com! The at-a-glance weather forecast for outdoor enthusiasts.

I'm very pleased to announce that my outdoor weather "at a glance" site is now live at peepweather.com. Yay! Now it's virtually real. I added a little branding (the chick header with the word "Peep" in yellow - marketing breakthroughs, both) plus some more features (the embeddable widget is on the right) but basically the site is feature-complete. The next step is sharing it with folks who would like to use it.

Getting the word out is the more difficult aspect of the project for me. Writing it was hard in its own way, but I'm very comfortable with technical work. Marketing, on the other hand, feels nebulous and daunting. Because the app is widely applicable for outdoor enthusiasts, my current thinking is to break potential audiences down into types of outdoor activities that I then reach out to individually. For example, sports (running, bicycling, hunting), motorcycling, etc. Basically any group of people who love being outside and want to know when it will be nice, hour by hour. The only activities that would not be a good match are those that require specific condition information, such as skiing (snow conditions) or surfing (water, tides, etc.) SEO is also important, but it's hard for me to know where to start.

That said, 1) the site is written, 2) my initial users say it's novel (!) and definitely useful, and 3) I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. Onward!

Comments

[Bob Stanke]

Awesome tool! I tweeted it out to my network. Was a little depressing looking at the report for Minneapolis, Minnesota! --> http://www.peepweather.com/forecast/55401

Just wanted to help you out on the marketing side a little bit! :)

Regards,

Bob Stanke

[Matthew Cornell]

Thanks a ton, Bob! Much appreciated. Yah, your weather looks a lot like mine :-)