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- He Was Overdressed for Summer in Sweden. So He Built a Weather App That Doesn’t Suck.
He Was Overdressed for Summer in Sweden. So He Built a Weather App That Doesn’t Suck.
Needs To Exist
August 09, 2025
In partnership with
Some people wait for the stars to align.
Others duct-tape a dream together with coffee, Wi-Fi, and a stubborn refusal to wait.
It Exists is for the second group.
Every weekend, we showcase someone who didn’t just daydream a startup, they dragged it into reality with zero chill and zero excuses. No gatekeepers. No TED Talk. Just “I built this, and now it’s real.”
Some of them sparked their idea inside NTE Pro, our vault of close to 5k startup concepts. Others used NTE Zero to One to get hands-on help building their MVP. Most? They just started fixing a problem that they had. Scrappy, imperfect, and unstoppable.
Either way, the story’s the same: they took the leap, and now it exists.
This isn’t theory. It’s proof.
You’re next.
Let’s roll.
It was August in Stockholm.
53 degrees outside. He was wearing a full-blown winter coat.
Locals were biking in shorts. Kids were eating ice cream.
And he, newly arrived from Abu Dhabi, was sweating through three layers like it was monsoon season in Mumbai.
That was the moment.
Not a startup idea. Not some “aha” insight. Just deep personal discomfort.
He laughed. Then paused. Then thought:
“Why is nobody telling me how this weather’s actually gonna feel?”
Because here’s the truth:
Weather apps aren’t built for humans. They’re built for meteorologists.
No, “Hey, it’s 50°F, but you’ll freeze your ass off if you wear a t-shirt.”
So he started asking around. And something weird happened.
Even Swedes didn’t know what to wear.
The Real Trigger
Years later, he’d settled in. Living in Sweden. Playing hockey. Adjusted, mostly.
Then one day before practice, his girlfriend, Dutch, raised in cold weather, familiar with Scandinavian winters turns to him and asks:
“How many layers are you wearing?”
Wait… what?
She’s been through dozens of Nordic winters.
If she’s still guessing, what chance does anyone else have?
He checked the weather app. 50°F.
It meant nothing.
He wanted to scream:
“JUST TELL ME WHAT TO WEAR.”
That was the spark.
Not a TAM analysis. Not a market gap. Just pure, sweaty rage.
So he opened up his laptop. Skipped Figma. Skipped the sprint planning.
And started building something for real people who leave the house.
This Wasn’t His First Time Building a Tool Out of Frustration
Years earlier, when he was a teenager, he built Swaraksha, a safety app that could share your geolocation in an emergency. It didn’t go viral. But it worked. And it mattered.
Later, he built bananaflights.xyz, a way to visualize carbon emissions by translating them into something people actually understand: bananas.
“Saying a flight emits one ton of carbon means nothing to most people. But if you say it’s the same as 10,000 bananas? That sticks.”
That became a pattern.
He kept noticing moments of confusion, friction, or frustration and turning them into tools.
Sometimes serious.
Sometimes ridiculous. (Like the time he mashed up wise quotes with Pitbull lyrics and hit the front page of Hacker News with daale.club.)
He even made a habit tracker called t-minus-90. One habit. One goal. 90 days.
No streaks. No charts. Just a gentle push to do one thing well.
“Most habit apps want you glued to your phone. I wanted the opposite, to build something that helps you leave the phone behind.”
This new app was just the next in that line. A tiny fix for a daily problem.
One more chance to reduce the unnecessary friction most people just accept.
He Called It Layers.today — But That’s Not the Point
The point was this:
🧥 People don’t want data. They want comfort.
They want to know how it feels and what to wear not what the barometric pressure is.
So he made it simple.
- No login.
- No bloat.
- No dashboard.
Just a one-tap answer to the question we all ask every morning:
“What do I need to wear to not hate my life in 3 hours?”
That was the moment Layers.today was born.
Lesson 1: Solve the Daily Friction Nobody’s Owning
Every weather app throws raw data at you: temperature, humidity, UV index, dew point.
But none of them answer the only question that actually matters:
“What should I wear?”
And weirdly, nobody had solved it.
He started by asking friends, expats, locals, athletes, how they decided what to wear.
Every answer was a variation of: “I check the app… then guess.”
It didn’t make sense. So he built something that did.
He Didn’t Build a Dashboard. He Built a Mirror.
Before he touched code, he opened a notebook.
And wrote out the actual rules of layering he’d picked up over time in Sweden.
Base layer if it’s below 60°F. Mid-layer if it’s windy. Shell if it’s raining.
That scribbled logic? It’s still what drives the app today.
Then he opened Lovable, a tool he still uses to this day and started prompting.
No roadmap. No PRD. Just intuition and a rule of thumb:
If an app makes you feel like a meteorologist, you’ve already lost.
He built a basic UI. Mapped temp ranges to outfit types. Added logic for wind, rain, and season.
Then he sent it to a few friends.
Some were new to Sweden. Others had lived there for decades.
All of them said the same thing:
“Wait… this is what I’ve needed the whole time.”
Lesson 2: One Clear Outcome Beats 1,000 Features
Layers.today does one thing:
It tells you exactly how many layers to wear and whether to bring a raincoat.
That’s it.
No ads. No radar. No forecast for next Thursday.
Just:
🧥 “Wear 2 layers today.”
☂ “Grab a light shell. Chance of rain.”
👕 “Shorts and t-shirt. You’re good.”
And it works.
The simplicity is the reason people switch from their default weather app.
Because once it’s right a few times, it earns trust. And trust sticks.
The Flipcounter That Changed Everything
As more people used Layers.today, he added a small visual counter:
A flipboard showing how many layer suggestions the app had served in real time.
The number climbed. 10,000. 25,000. 50,000.
Every flip wasn’t just a usage stat, it was a tiny victory against uncertainty.
A broken daily decision, now solved.
“People are trained to guess. Trained to open a dashboard and interpret numbers. But the moment they see a better answer, they never go back.”
Layers.today didn’t grow from some viral Product Hunt launch.
It grew from one user at a time, mostly cold outreach.
He found people on Reddit complaining about being cold.
People on X talking about bad forecasts.
People in Facebook expat groups asking what to wear in Denmark.
And he sent them the link.
“It’s not flashy. But every time someone used it and said ‘oh wow’ that was fuel.”
When it got featured in Lenny’s newsletter and Lovable’s Hall of Fame, usage spiked.
But the foundation had already been laid.
From Daily Recs to Travel Packing
Then something interesting happened.
People who trusted Layers.today for what to wear today started asking:
“What about what to pack for my trip next week?”
So he added a packing view, just input your destination and dates, and it tells you what layers to bring.
Later, athletes started asking for cycling- and running-specific advice.
So he built personalization features because someone biking 40km at 7am in Berlin doesn’t need the same advice as someone walking to the café in Brooklyn.
Lesson 4: Listen to What the Product Wants to Become
He didn’t plan to build a packing assistant. Or athletic recs.
But the users kept nudging the product in that direction.
“Once people trust you for one daily decision, they start asking for the next adjacent one.”
He didn’t need to brainstorm what to build next.
The demand showed up in his inbox.
The App Cost $100. But the Reps Were Everything.
The real investment?
Hundreds of cold DMs. Community replies. Feedback loops.
And every time he hit the 80% wall, the “this works, but I’m tired” stage, he’d walk away for a few days.
Then come back, reread the feedback, and fix one more thing.
“Shipping is hard. But hearing someone say ‘this helped me today’? That gets you moving again.”
Lesson 5: Simple Tools. Serious Taste. Relentless Follow-Through.
He’s not a dev by trade.
He’s a product manager at Remote. He played pro hockey. He builds for fun.
But that combo, taste + systems + reps, let him ship something better than the default.
He didn’t need fancy tech.
He needed clarity, conviction, and the willingness to put it in front of people until it stuck.
“Experience is gained by doing. You figure it out while building, not before.”
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What He’s Building Next
He’s still improving Layers.today adding more personalization features, context-aware logic, and global support.
He’s also working on beepoff.io, his next “daily friction” tool.
Because that’s his lens now:
Look for the everyday problems that don’t scream. The ones that nudge.
Fix them beautifully.
Try Layers.today
👉 layers.today — get dressed right
👉 beepoff.io — his next project
Ever check the weather and still walk out wearing the wrong thing?
Same.
That’s why he built this.
Not just another app but a smarter default.
This is what It Exists is all about.
Someone saw the gap. Then filled it.
No committee. No roadmap. Just momentum.
You don’t need a perfect plan.
You need a push.
✨ Need ideas? NTE Pro has close to 5k sparks ready to catch fire.
🛠 Need help building? NTE Zero to One gets your MVP off the ground.
Let’s build it.
Let’s ship it.
Let’s make it exist.
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