My father-in-law fixed my weather app problem in four words
You’re not competing with the apps you think you are.
Hi there,
A while ago I was standing in the kitchen, checking several weather apps on my phone, trying to work out whether I should walk the dog now.
I turned around to find my father-in-law looking at me like I’d lost it: “Why are you doing that? Just look out the window.”
He wasn’t wrong. We have a book's worth of these types of down-to-earth quotes by him (“What type of music do you like to listen to while driving?” “Silence.”)
But it stuck with me. Because for me, the obvious move is always:
Open the app (or three)
Check a website
Ask someone.
For him, the obvious move is: look outside. Go outside.
Same job (”what’s the weather doing?”). Completely different idea of the obvious solution.
That four-word takedown is the whole game in early growth, and it’s the thing I watch founders miss again and again.
You think you’re competing with the other apps in your category. You’re not. You’re competing with whatever your user already does to get the job done. And usually, that thing is free, instant, and good enough.
Your competitor isn’t another app
Time and time again, I hear apps compare themselves to other apps. But I challenge you to look a little further. Once you see it, it’s everywhere:
A meditation app isn’t really up against other meditation apps. It’s up against going for a walk, a yoga class, or flopping on the sofa with the TV to switch off.
A recipe app is competing with old school cookbooks. Duolingo is competing against in-person lessons. And a weather app is competing against, well, the sky.
An app I worked on for the over-65s, helping them stay active, had one giant competitor: YouTube. Their users’ kids kept sending them free workout videos.
How we actually beat YouTube
Let’s talk about that active app and our huge challenge of going up against a mogul like YouTube. We couldn’t win on “short, easy videos.” YouTube already had those, for free, forever.
So we stopped competing with the category and started competing with the real alternative. We focused on the thing YouTube couldn’t offer: a coach who knew their specific struggles:
Could they keep their balance?
Carry the shopping home?
Get down on the floor to play with the grandkids, and back up again?
Our best-performing ad wasn’t about workouts at all. It was “keep up with your grandkids.” (Honestly, that still gets me.)
Because that’s the job. YouTube doesn’t promise that. A pile of free videos doesn’t promise that.
Why this isn’t just a nice reframe
I’m not trying to be pedantic, and it’s not just about mindset. This is about setting yourself up for success.
If you benchmark yourself against other apps, you build a slightly better version of the category, only to wonder why nobody switches.
The window is free and already in their hand. “Slightly better than the other app” loses to “free and instant” every single time.
To win, you don’t have to beat the category. You have to be, obviously, specifically better than the one thing they actually do instead.
What to do this week
1. List what they do instead. Write down everything a user does to get this job done without you. Include “nothing,” “the manual way,” and “ask a person.” For weather: the window, stepping outside, Google, a friend, the pre-installed weather app.
2. Find their default. Of that list, which one do they reach for first? That, not the App Store top charts, is your real competitor.
3. Beat that one thing, out loud. Make your value obviously better than that specific alternative, and say so. Not “a better weather app.” More like “stop guessing whether you’ll get rained on halfway through your run.”
And steal this question for your next five user interviews: “Before you had anything like this, what did you actually do?” Their answer is your competitor. (It’s almost never another app.)
What I'd recommend this week
If this clicked, the classic version is the McDonald's milkshake study (the story that kicked off Jobs To Be Done).
The team realised their milkshake wasn't competing with other milkshakes at all. It was competing with bananas, bagels, and a boring morning commute.
Clayton Christensen's Competing Against Luck is the deeper read if you want the full thinking behind it.
I fall for this too. I assumed everyone uses a weather app.
It took my father-in-law and a window to remind me that most people just... don’t.
Sometimes the thing your product is really up against is a behavior so obvious your users don’t even call it a solution.
So before you study a competitor’s paywall and onboarding for the hundredth time, go simpler. Find the free, boring, good-enough thing your users already do.
At the moment, this is often AI; AI is your competitor. So you need to understand how they use it instead and what you can do to offer real value on top of that.
See you next week,
Daphne