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WhatTemp
Strategy & IP Brief · Confidential

The temperature layer for the physical world.

Before you leave home, you check the weather. You should be able to check the temperature inside the place you’re going — the theater, the concert hall, the restaurant. WhatTemp makes the indoor climate of every public space a searchable, trustworthy data point.

The problem

Indoor temperature is the most-felt, least-published fact about a venue. “Bring a sweater” is folklore, not data. No one owns the answer — so no one can show it to you at the moment you’re deciding what to wear.

The product

A free consumer app that geolocates you and shows nearby venues’ live indoor temps with a plain-language verdict — plus the same reading surfaced inside Google, Maps, and any geo search via a structured “Indoor temperature” field.

Why now

Connected thermostats (Nest, ecobee, Honeywell, SmartThings) now sit in a majority of commercial spaces and expose official read-only APIs. The sensors already exist and are already online. The missing piece is a neutral layer that aggregates and publishes them.

The wedge

One dense metro, and the venue categories where temperature actually changes the decision — cinemas, theaters, gyms, houses of worship, museums. Crowd reports and an estimate model give day-one coverage; connected thermostats convert it to verified.

The defensible IP — what is genuinely ours

  1. The cross-vendor aggregation layer. One normalized reading out of many incompatible thermostat APIs. “One toggle, public everywhere.” No single thermostat maker has the incentive — or the neutrality — to build across all of them.
  2. The “Indoor Temperature” schema & the canonical dataset behind it. Define the structured format search engines ingest, and own the verified data that fills it. Own the standard, own the category.
  3. Confidence & verification scoring. Sensor vs. crowd vs. estimate, scored for trust — the credibility that makes a platform willing to display the number.
  4. The indoor-comfort estimate model. Predict a venue’s temperature from type, outdoor weather, occupancy, and time. Solves cold-start and gives coverage everywhere a sensor isn’t.

Business model

Free for consumers — and free for venues to publish, because coverage is the asset. Revenue from a $9/mo Pro tier (trends, verified badge, multi-site, HVAC-efficiency insights), a licensed API for maps & search platforms, and anonymized comfort analytics for chains.

Why not gate publishing

Charging to publish would throttle the one metric that makes the company valuable and acquirable: density. Maximize coverage; monetize the extras and the data pipe.

Distribution

The ambient surface compounds: every venue that opts in adds an SEO-rich “indoor temperature” result that points back to WhatTemp — a flywheel of free discovery on Google and Maps.

The exit

Whoever owns local discovery (Google / Maps), or the thermostats themselves (Nest / ecobee), needs this layer and won’t build it neutrally. Own the cross-vendor pipe and the standard first; that is the position that gets acquired — not licensed around.

WhatTemp · Confidential · Figures illustrativewhattemp.app