Show IH: 369 visitors/month, no signup, no ads - my weather app has a distribution problem, not a product problem
I built a free hourly meteogram: https://gribgrab.com — type any place or paste coordinates, get the next days hour by hour. No account, no app, no cookie banner. PL/EN. Data from Open-Meteo.
Stack is deliberately boring: one HTML file, vanilla JS, canvas chart, no framework, no bundler, static hosting. A Python script generates the city landing pages (153 EN, 101 PL). Total infrastructure cost is the domain.
The honest status: it works, it's been finished for months, and almost nobody uses it. 369 visitors a month. I have been treating "build the next feature" as the answer to that, which it plainly isn't.
The plan I'm testing now is an embeddable widget — a campsite or a sailing club puts the forecast for their coordinates on their own page instead of linking to a big weather portal. That's the only version of this with revenue in it.
If you've taken a free tool from zero to its first paying user without an audience, I'd like to hear how, specifically.
The widget isn't just "the version with revenue," it changes what business you're in. As a weather site you fight every giant portal for consumer eyeballs, unwinnable, hence 369 visitors. As an embeddable forecast for one coordinate, you're not a weather app, you're infrastructure a campsite or sailing club drops on their page. Different buyer, no portal competition, they don't do small-embed.
That reframes zero-to-first-customer: you need ten campsites, not an audience. Find clubs with ugly or missing weather on their sites, build the widget for their coordinates free, send it working. "Here's your forecast on your page, keep it?" is a demo, not a pitch. Ten hand-built widgets beats any content marketing.
Which niche feels weather pain hardest, sailing or camping?
The embeddable widget is the right instinct — a campsite paying for their own coordinates is a much clearer sale than a consumer weather app. Would those first buyers be Polish businesses, or international from the start? That mostly decides whether you need simple local invoicing or a checkout that handles foreign cards and VAT. I've been mapping payment setups for indie founders and can share options if useful.
369 visitors a month with no signup or ads is a pretty clean snapshot of where things stand. Curious what those visitors actually do once they land on the site.