SWOT Analysis
Description of New Venture

The new venture being proposed will be a company seeks to develop an app that will determine optimal weather days in different locations. The tool will take a massive data set of historical data for all the geographies available – in the US and throughout the world’s major tourist areas to begin with. The user will enter the location, their desired activity and a span of time, and will receive as an output the optimal days, based on historical patterns. The current landscape for someone planning a trip might have generic information (i.e. golfers should visit Arizona in the winter when it’s not 120F outside), but that is often not granular enough. For example, someone thinking of visiting Bora Bora in 2020 can easily find out when rainy season is, but more refined data might help them to choose a specific week during shoulder season that is least likely to have rain. Organizers of outdoor events might also benefit from this application, as it will allow people to find the absolute sweet spots for climate, where there are observable patterns. In many parts of the world, weather can be changeable, but there should be a sweet spot of perfect weather for a given activity. For example, if one wishes to go heli-skiing in British Columbia, they might want to find a weekend when it is most likely to be both sunny but not too cold – an expensive activity like that you want to maximize the chances of perfect weather.

The product name has not yet been determined but will play on the perfect weather theme, to effectively communicate what the app delivers. The team that builds the app can be fairly lean – front end, back end, UX/UI, maybe a writer or designer, and someone to handle the algorithm that will parse the data. The time to develop an app is around 18 weeks, and requires at least the above-mentioned specialist roles, along with project management, product marketing and a number of other roles that might provide greater expertise to the project (Haselmayr, 2013).

The ideal vision might be someone who is looking at a fairly broad spectrum of options – like if they have vacation time in the first week of October and want to know where the weather is most likely to be perfect for hiking, the app might provide a dozen recommendations all around the world. The target market is really anybody who is planning a trip, or an outdoor event of any type. This can be professional planners, or even just someone who wants to organize a family reunion. There are ample articles and blogs about who to find the perfect weather at any time of year, but most of these are backed only by basic statistics and anecdotal evidence, rather than professional statistical analysis of a massive dataset (Taylor, 2016).

The product will make its money by partnering with travel applications. These partnerships are common in that industry – if our users are referred to a major travel website, we will make a cut of whatever they buy. Thus, people using our app for vacation planning will be guided to buy tickets, and then our company will get a percentage of those tickets. We also will want to develop stickiness attributes to our site in order to garner a high degree of target market participation that will help build an audience, leveraging the first mover advantage to create a barrier to entry.

SWOT Analysis

There are really only two strengths that we have at present. In a perfect world, we would have more but any startup business can only say with confidence what they have in terms of the idea, and the internal team. We believe that we have a blue ocean idea, one that is not available anywhere. Where climate data is available for any one region, this...…their labor in order to explore the concept. If we can build the product, attract an audience and start to generate revenue quickly, there is certainly potential here. That said, we have to take a realistic view of our cash flow situation. If we are not able to generate sufficient revenue to sustain operations, or attract angel financing, then we have to establish a point in time when we will determine that our idea was indeed not a huge success.

We feel that we will be able to tell fairly soon after launch whether this is a success. Our marketing team member will be working on building the partnerships, and our marketing plan, during this period, in order to ensure that we can start earning revenue as quickly as possible once the app is ready to be launched. We feel that launching with a product that we can sell not just to the general consumer but to partners in the travel industry, is an essential component of success – we will not be able to sell something that is not professional in terms of its functionality, usability and its security.

All told, we do feel that there is enough of an opportunity here. We are unsure of the exact potential, but know that we are providing people with information that is both valuable and is otherwise difficult to acquire. In that sense, we are part of the information that they need in order to aid their decision-making, and because we intend to be able to provide it on demand, that this will be successful.

The SWOT analysis can be a powerful exercise because of the way in which it forces management to understand the situation that the company is in. The core strategy might not change, but there can be changes to some of the tactical approaches that the company undertakes, in response to the information that is gleaned from conducting a realistic and honest SWOT analysis.…