Columbus startup LWNN launches Prelay to help outdoor contractors dispatch crews around the weather
Founder Matt Simmons, a former SpaceX engineer, built the tool after learning a local landscaping owner woke at 4 a.m. daily to check the forecast at every job site. Plans start at $50 a month for five locations, with a hail model for roofers expected in the next few months.
When a Central Ohio landscaping company was working on the outside of Matt Simmons' house, he noticed something off about the schedule. Crews sometimes showed up in bad weather, and other times they were rescheduled on days that turned out fine.
Simmons, founder and president of Local Weather News Network (LWNN), asked the manager about it. The manager turned out to be the owner, and he was waking at 4 a.m. every day to check the weather at each site where he was sending crews, using a standard phone weather app. If he guessed wrong and crews couldn't work, the company lost the money.
"This seemed like an immediate way we could help, so I threw together a basic tool using our existing data pipeline and gave it to him and his office manager," Simmons said. The company became Prelay's first customer, and the tool became LWNN's first paid product for outdoor contractors.
By the numbers
- $50 per month for a base Prelay subscription covering five locations
- $25 for each additional pack of five locations
- 10 years Simmons spent in aerospace, eight at SpaceX and two at Varda Space Industries
- About a dozen LWNN YouTube channels providing weather for communities in news deserts
- Two languages supported in Prelay, English and Spanish
From community weather to a paid product
LWNN already runs the lwnn.news weather site and its YouTube channels, which Simmons described as close to a community service. "They're good and useful to a lot of people, but in general people don't want to pay money for weather," he said. Rather than add monetization that could put off the people who rely on those channels, he hopes to partner with local municipalities that would cover operating costs in exchange for another way to reach residents.
To grow, LWNN looked for a weather-dependent market it could serve better than existing tools. The team first considered car washes and outdoor contractors, and after research and conversations chose contracting work such as landscaping and construction.
"To grow the business, we wanted to find a market segment where we could improve on the status quo for weather data, while also generating revenue to fund the company's expansion," Simmons stated.
How Prelay works and what it costs
The base subscription provides constant monitoring, email reports and customized weather alerts for five locations per organization. Locations can be as broad as a town or as precise as a street address, and Simmons noted that more specific locations allow more tailored assessments, which matters most for LWNN's custom ground moisture model.
LWNN built much of Prelay's feature set in response to requests from its landscaping customer, and the company plans to announce an integration with a major field service management platform, which Simmons said would open the door to thousands of potential customers.
Roofing is next, but it requires one more capability. "The biggest gap right now is related to hail, which is a major revenue driver for many roofing contractors and inspectors," Simmons commented. He expects a hail model in the next month or two, after early conversations with leaders of national roofing groups.
Lessons from SpaceX
Simmons spent eight years at SpaceX and two at Varda Space Industries. At SpaceX, he was the responsible engineer for the National Lightning Data server, which tracked lightning strikes across the continental U.S. and was used to evacuate personnel from launch pads and test stands during storms. He also founded the Starlink Site Reliability Team, which was responsible for every Starlink server in the world.
That work shapes how Prelay treats uncertainty. Prelay uses ensemble models to estimate the most likely outcome and lets users see the sources and numbers behind each prediction. "A forecast isn't a guarantee, and we use ensemble models to probabilistically determine what the most likely outcome is," Simmons said. "In the end, we're informing, not deciding."
He also took away lessons about scale. "It's relatively easy to build a system that monitors the weather in a specific place. It's another thing entirely to monitor the weather at tens of thousands of places simultaneously," he stated.
Building in Columbus
LWNN has a handful of employees working remotely, most of them in the Midwest. Simmons lives in Columbus, where he and his wife married 19 years ago before moving for work to New Jersey, Boston, Los Angeles and Seattle. Of those cities, he said, Columbus offers the best balance of quality of life and cost of living.
The company has not raised outside funding. "We may attempt to raise in the future, but if we do, I want it to be for unlocking a goal, not because the company needs it to operate," Simmons said.
Near-term goals are to grow Prelay's landscaping customer base, cover LWNN's infrastructure costs with Prelay revenue by the end of the first quarter of 2027 and expand the team by the end of the second quarter. LWNN serves only the United States for now because it relies heavily on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data. "The guiding star is that we should be useful to people," Simmons said.
