Internal Documentation

Roadmap to 2025

July 26, 2024 (Review of Week EOY-23)

I’m very crispy this week, y’all. A lot of rather intense discussions happened over the past 2 weeks and my brain needs a reboot.

On the fundraising front, I’ve spoken with a lot of our investors and supporters and I feel good about being prepared for a $3m (or $4m?) raise in Sept. I certainly know a lot more about what NOT to do, and this time around we have very good sounding boards that I plan to use very liberally.

On the product front: Jason, Marc, François, Jessica and I spent a couple hours talking through the features that Marc and I think we need to have in hand by end of this year. A big driver for this is the need to be ready to support CPC (and possibly others) for GGRF. Marc and Jessica need to be able to paint a clear picture of our offering, if we’re not to lose out to competitors like Backpack.

  • Scope builder build-out for new geographies

  • Need to be able to support 10 new locations, ideally by Jan 2025 for CPC/GGRF

  • New building details capture (already designed-ish) to allow input of first-party proprietary data

  • Measure calcs using expanded set of building details

  • Generic projects

  • I’m personally unclear if it’s v1, v2, or v3 that will be needed?

  • Program management dashboard

  • static snapshot updated nightly or hourly about status of projects

  • back end reported squirted over in JSON for simple display on front end

  • Ability to download what’s displayed as CSV

I’m sure we will discuss this a lot more in the coming days, and I’ll send out Claude-processed notes soon.

Metrics

  • Unique Buildings: 5,210 ←- as of last run

  • Annual Run Rate: $1.3M ←- no change

  • Monthly net burn: $53k ←- as of June close

  • 2024 Transaction fees to date: $6,017.34

  • Outstanding invoices as of today: $100,565.01 ←- this is actually a little high. There are some unreconciled transactions.

Last Week’s Highlights

  • Congrats on Release 71! I’m very glad to see some user-visible improvements going out the door! Congrats to the dev team!

  • 360s: I appreciated being part of Martine’s 60-day 360 today. Every cycle we do, I feel like we’re getting better at make the most of these moments of reflection and planning.

  • JLL Foundation: Although not as future-looking as the Roddenberry application, I thought some of the questions they had were good points of discussion for us to look at together. Thanks for your eyes on it!

  • CPC: We signed our amendment increasing our transaction fee to 21.4 base points on the all-in construction cost. In real terms, it’s a 4 basis point increase, because our prior fee of 20 bp was based on hard-cost only. We’re working to push up our transaction fee as we talk to additional lenders, so CPC going from 20 to 24 is a nice boost.

Did I miss any highlights? Pls share in comments below.

My Watchlist

  • Generic Project: are we close to user-testable modules?

  • Tech Recruiting: We’ll all need to pitch in as we head toward hiring. Slack channel is #ops_diverse-talent and here is the proposed handbook page.

  • Cash. Mid-year re-forecast of the budget still pending. We need a comb-through of why we are spending more than budgeted on consultants! (Erika Parkins)

  • Dev pipeline: Still so much to do after GP.

  • Partnerships: Many, many conversations: Accelerator, GGRF.

  • Onboarding: Incremental improvements to tooling and process. Will need more! Looking to Martine and Kate for their inputs on process improvement

  • Metrics: Not actively working out new metrics, but something to keep on the board.

  • Don’t be a series of small businesses: ~Marc and I are shopping for some founder coaching to make sure we’re staying on a venture-scale path~. We put this on the back burner. We don’t have time to engage right now.

On Deck for This Week

  • Kate’s 60-day 360!

  • Marc is OVD from Tuesday. Enjoy your time off!

  • Investors: Alpaca VC and Better Ventures intros

  • WOCCS 5th anniversary event (Martine as plus one!)

And here’s what’s on my radar screen - what am I forgetting?

Please Leave Feedback

Big thanks to the folks who dropped a note last week! 🎉 🤝

Please note your reaction to this update below. It helps me to know what is resonating, what is unclear, etc. Thanks!

  • What are your highlights / lowlights?

  • Did I miss a highlight? Did I miss something that should be on my watchlist? Something else you want to react to?

Untitled

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Jason I am a bit daunted by the product needs over the next 5 months. But I am hopeful that we’ve learned from past efforts and will be able to set up a better delivery system for these.  
Naina I’m excited for the looking forward to 2025 things, particularly national expansion. There’s a lot to do but it’s going to be good work and will be really interesting to see the response in different regions.  
Jeff I’m concerned about our estimation. For example, based on the new timeline Luke conceptualized in GP channel, the expected date that V0 is wrapped up is October. How doable is the hop to V3 (if that’s what we need end of year) Optimistically, we’d have an additional Engineer by September-October that’s depending on our recruitment efforts, and following the success of our fundraising. We have to think about— How much of an onboarding / learning curve will the new hire have, to start contributing quickly to the project? How will we get that time to be less than what it is now, to setup the new hire for success? TLDR, I base on how V0 is performing, Idk how realistic end of year will be, but I’m for it, the midnight oil is ready to be burned for the efforts that need to come from my end.  
François Could you explain how backpack competes with us? Reading their website it seems they offer data ingestion and management for buildings. It seems complementary, not in direct competition, with the building retrofit marketplace we’re building. Why would it not make sense to partner with them?And yes, the amount of work ahead of us is staggering and exciting. I’m looking forward to ways we can align what’s needed by year end with short-term asks from CPC and others.