Tomorrow.io

Tomorrow.io A Strategy Case Study

Choices in Entrepreneurial Strategy

Customer: Tomorrow^[1] chose to stick to serving a general customer base even if that meant letting go of larger revenue streams. The leadership's commitment to building a general-purpose weather technology meant that customizing or the need to diverge significant resources to a single client would not be ideal. Tomorrow’s business is predominantly B2B serving an enterprise stack which means that the loss of a large customer would make a significant impact on their bottom line. The company had never had a single industry serve more than 10% of its revenue. It goes without saying it also shows the wide array of applications and client base interested in weather data.

There is a conscious effort also to ensure that the investors it brought on board aligned with its vision to build and execute a service unlike any other, which meant giving up on serving large clients with customized needs. However, Tomorrow did not always lose the client but rather managed to convert the client by changing the term sheet and negotiating on delivery of its service to the client.

Serve a general client base and focus on core technology^[2].

Technology: Tomorrow made a conscious effort to develop its product through academically achieved employees. In its first 40 or so odd employees, it hired experts, including machine learning, remote sensing, and aerospace engineers. A strategic advantage, Tomorrow found an underserved area in an industry faced with issues in the decades-old technology that was being used to predict the weather. Tomorrow built a flexible and robust product workflow. However, it knew the tradeoffs in not owning the infrastructure at the time and used multiple data sources to augment and create a minimum viable product.

Tomorrow's biggest strategic advantage was a combination of factors all coming together at the right time. Tomorrow began investing in its key differentiating factor by being able to provide hourly weather forecasts across the globe. This meant foraying into the space industry and developing its own radar and satellites. It made Tomorrow’s offering significantly more competitive in the industry.

The technological leap in sensing weather globally with a revisit every hour and direct plug-in to existing workflow

Identity: Tomorrow's focus on generating an identity came from, in part, its founders, who were all involved in some form or the other in the Israeli Defense Force. The founder, Elkabetz, draws from his own experiences of being affected by weather changes. Tomorrows from early on, had a laser focus to ensure its core product was a general weather service that offered better insights for companies to utilize. The company was led with a high level of test-learn driven by basic and applied research into weather technologies.

Tomorrow was focused on climate change as it has now begun to effect everyday business risks to critical industries in logistics and supply chain. Companies were on the lookout for a company that could not just predict the weather for the next hour but is able to give a high level of confidence in tomorrow's weather. This is where Tomorrow changed its name from Climacell to Tomorrow.io, a key step towards seeing the bigger picture of its crucial differentiator from other weather services.

Driven by personal experiences, militaristic determination, and a key differentiating factor of a test-learn strategy. Compete through execution

Tomorrow is competing directly with its direct competitors in the commercial and public sector. However, Tomorrow does choose to outsource some of its satellite parts development to vendors; this was not important to their core service but to their execution of the product. They decided to carefully vet their vendors and narrow the list to their specific application. The company and its team quickly iterated and designed their satellite bus and focused their efforts on creating the most viable radar for detecting water in the atmosphere.

Through calculated and scientifically researched methods, Tomorrow quickly and cost-effectively developed and built its initial prototype within its needs and requirements to fulfill its mission. It chose to compete as the company knew the costs would come down as more players entered the market. However, its advantage was its existing product could quickly adopt the new data produced by its radars, one which would take others too long to figure out both sides of the problem. Disruption through innovation

The company's core focus is to build a general purpose weather tool since it is among the most ubiquitous data products that governs everything we do today, from farming, insurance modeling, and event planning to understanding climate change. There were numerous avenues to serve, and with little need to customise the service early on. The intention to execute the best data source for weather modeling and prediction sets the company up for long term success. Value Capture

Tomorrow’s plan to capture customer value depends on delivering a product that can easily be malleable into any industry without the company needing to create an entirely new product/service. Its current ability to provide and predict the weather over large swaths of the earth continuously and in regular close intervals means that a number of businesses that a reliant on local level weather data can benefit from its current offering. Owning its value chain from end to end means Tomorrow.io has invested in executing the best possible product for any industry. As the product matures, the company can add features into the API to allow different industries to gain more benefits, to the extent that the company becomes the sole provider of weather data to its client at a scalable and reliable method with little to no costs incurred to the company.