Weather Embed: From API to SaaS

In the dark early days of the COVID pandemic in 2020, I set out to build a little side project: A way to generate an image containing a weather forecast. This was born out of a complaint I had heard from my friend Colin, who previously worked in hospitality marketing. Hotels send out emails to visitors before they check-in, and they wanted to include the weather forecast in those emails. Seems simple enough!

I consume many developer-focused API products, like Stripe and Twilio, but I have yet to build one myself. So this was my perfect excuse to make one! I spent a week whipping it together and launched it on a website and with subscriptions through RapidAPI.

It had a generous free tier, but surprisingly, it picked up quite a few subscribers over the years. At its peak, it was making me around $500/month.

Realization

Recently I’ve been having a few more incoming support tickets about issues with the API. Either people need to understand how to use it or have technical problems with RapidAPI. So I asked about their use cases and was happy to discover it was all hospitality use cases.

The surprise was that they weren’t technical people; they wanted to avoid fancy API automation features; they just wanted to put in some settings In a web panel, get a link, and use that in their email marketing tool.

How had I not realized this back in 2020! I had built the wrong product for the problem. An API was causing so much friction and pain for my users.

Relaunch

Over a few days, I converted the initial idea into a multi-tenant SaaS app. Gone was the free tier, just a $10/month product for a basic image embed that anyone with no technical skills can set up in a few minutes.

This was one of my first experiences with ChatGPT and programming. I’ve used generative AI for many creative use cases, but this was my first excuse for it in development. I’ve been hearing from my developers at ArborXR, notably Simon, about all the incredible use cases they’ve found, and I was excited to try it for myself. I took my old typescript code for generating images that took me hours to create and asked ChatGPT 4 to convert it to PHP. I was blown away by the results! 90% was working instantly, using a specific programming library I specified, and I only needed to spend a few minutes fixing up the pieces that weren’t functioning correctly.

With that part out of the way, I created a simple dashboard, set up a billing system and account management, and the world’s most basic landing page. I’ve since shut down the RapidAPI project and notified current users they have 3 months to migrate to the new platform.

Future

Right now, there is just a Basic plan with minimal customization and a custom enterprise plan with more customization available by reaching out. I want to take the time to fully flesh out the enterprise plan and build all that customization into the web application. Offering multiple fonts, weather icon libraries, size and layout options, and more.

For now, I am working directly with the enterprise customers to implement their requests in a more bespoke manner. I plan on doing that until it doesn’t scale anymore, and then I will return to improving the web application.

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