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Comment by msaharia | Hacker News Reader

The UI is fantastic . I don't think there is anything wrong with the website. The reason you are not making a sale has probably nothing to do with UI. I think you should concentrate on sales and filling an important gap in user requirement. Who needs this data? There are already many websites where you can get extreme precipitation data for free.

P.S. I am a hydroclimate scientist/professor. Happy to discuss further.

Edit - Looks like we have almost the same background in academics. :)

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Yes, I've been focused on sales only for a number of months.

XRain is mostly designed to help in situations where data (free or otherwise) isn't available from anywhere else.

However I've come to realise that most places have some sort of data that they use and are familiar with, even if that data isn't very good. As a result people/companies haven't been very willing to part with their cash.

Exactly - I can tell you an example from India. India has the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) precipitation dataset. Even if your estimates are more accurate, no company will use your dataset to design/validate a civil engineering design. This has to do with liability of using a dataset from a "non-official" source. Right now, you are stuck in the middle where it is not viable for non-US companies to use it, while US companies will mostly rely on NOAA Atlas. If this is to become a public-facing product, then the current pricing is too high, and might have to develop an alternative business model. Maybe people are interested in checking the floodplain zonation/xrain before buying a house, for example. But no SAAS in that case.

How flexible is your codebase to incorporate regional datasets? I think you will have to regional merging.

What are your current costs of running the setup? Any possibility/plans of white-labeling the codebase?

You're probably right, at least for a decent chunk of the world.

Regional merging would be valuable, but compiling a comprehensive set of high-resolution (sub-daily) rainfall data might be quite hard.

Hosting costs are reasonably low. What do you have in mind with respect to white labelling? (what use cases were you thinking?)

Policy impediments to use are real! Your data gap-filler approach is interesting though.

Along this line… occasionally there is official but obviously-wrong data from even WMO accredited providers whose automatic weather stations ('AWS') are busted. Perhaps your approach would help provide a widely validated bound-check? The trouble is often that kind of undetected, obviously-wrong data, is also a symptom of 'we have no money to fix it'…

When I was looking at purchasing a house in the Portland area, I wanted to know the sunlight per day over a year (the house was on a hill). There was a Swedish company that had an interesting service which would generate a sunlight report. I paid for it, about $20 if I recall correctly. The conversation here about people using this to determine flooding before purchasing a house seems similar.

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