Tomorrow.io: A Strategy Case Study
An entrepreneurial strategy case study examining Tomorrow.io's path to disrupting the weather technology industry.
Tomorrow.io 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 customising for a single client would not be ideal. The company had never had a single industry serve more than 10% of its revenue — demonstrating both the breadth of its applications and the diversity of its client base.
Tomorrow made a conscious effort to develop its product through academically-achieved employees — hiring machine learning, remote sensing, and aerospace engineers in its first 40-odd hires. A strategic advantage emerged as Tomorrow found an underserved area in an industry facing decades-old technology for weather prediction.
Tomorrow's biggest strategic advantage was a combination of factors coming together at the right time: the ability to provide hourly weather forecasts across the globe. This meant foraying into the space industry and developing its own radar and satellites — making the offering significantly more competitive.
The company's identity drew from its founders' backgrounds, with a laser focus on ensuring its core product was a general weather service that offered better insights. The company rebranded from Climacell to Tomorrow.io as a key step towards seeing the bigger picture of its differentiator from legacy weather services.
Tomorrow competed directly in both the commercial and public sector, outsourcing only non-core satellite components to carefully vetted vendors. Through calculated and scientifically-researched methods, the team quickly iterated to develop an initial radar prototype within its requirements — choosing to compete knowing that hardware costs would decrease as more players entered the market.
The company's core focus is to build a general-purpose weather tool, one of the most ubiquitous data products governing everything from farming and insurance modeling to understanding climate change. Owning its value chain end-to-end means Tomorrow.io has invested in executing the best possible product for any industry.
