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. :)
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?
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.
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'…
They couldn’t come because of any number of reasons: there wasn’t enough time to apply for visa because you issued the letter 1 month before the meeting, didn’t get visa, didn’t get visa on time, visa got approved but passport didn’t arrive on time etc. You also can’t get reimbursed in India without showing actual receipts of conference, hotel etc.
You seem to think that your letter is a guarantee of visa. It’s not.
Source: I’m an academic with both US and Indian experience.
UPI exists in India. And m-Pesa in Kenya. Neither are small countries or lightly regulated. At this point, US digital infrastructure is just objectively behind everyone else.
The question was "is there anything good about mosquitos?" and your response is "control ... human population". Which I hope you know happens through pain and suffering of the affected individual and those around them. This doesn't seem like an acceptable price to pay, even if you think decreasing the population is a good thing.
Agree, I think it would have existed from the day a cat ate all chickens and one had to tell their neighbor they have no more chicken in house. Just that the neanderthal or Cro-Magnon did not need to write it down for the modern paleontologist to discover.
You should definitely read about Ancient Indian drink Soma. Soma had a cognate Haoma in Persian as well. And psychoactive sources have a long association with gods such as Shiva. This continues till modern day among his most ardent followers. You will find wide variation in what ancient humans would consider taboo.
I returned to India after close to a decade in the US, during which I got a PhD. Loved living there and was fully integrated. But felt like I could make a much bigger impact in India. So, joined IIT Delhi. Good to know about your journey. Drop me an email (in my profile) if you want to catch up over coffee. :)
P.S. I am a hydroclimate scientist/professor. Happy to discuss further.
Edit - Looks like we have almost the same background in academics. :)