We're a month into Seed Raise.

It’s week 4 of fundraise and so far, we’ve got some early signs of interest. We’ve got three investors who seem to be taking a close look in our data room, as well as feedback like this:

I had anticipated, we reviewed a few players in the competitive landscape already and I find c15 to have the best product-market-fit, both by means of smart targeting as well as feature development.

Here’s the latest investor update sent to both our investors and prospectives, and a very nice note our angel investor Gail Mellow:

Bomee and the Cadence OneFive Team,

Reading your progress report is so exciting. I wish we had $3m to send to you. But all I have to offer is my congratulations and fervent hope that your smart strategy of moving to a transaction revenue structure and concentrating on a retrofit target group is successful beyond your wildest dreams. 

Ideas about how to address climate change are wonderful, but it is your brilliant focus on the practical matter of how to enact better practices that continues to thrill and amaze.

My best,
Gail

Metrics

• Unique Buildings: 5,689 (September)
• Annual Run Rate: $1.3M (unchanged)
• Monthly net burn: $73K (average over last three months)
• 2024 Transaction fees to date: $6,721.34 from CPC (+$464 WoW); also $15,164 invoiced to Carleton
• Outstanding invoices as of today: $134,858.58

Last Week’s Highlights

• Security: with the last recent pushes (Captcha, static code analysis for calc service, buttonning up processes) we should be ready for the next phase of SOC 2 starting next week. An external auditor will start poking holes (via Reuben), and we will conduct a few training drills.
• Release 81: included a flurry of fixes to help CPC CFHF, to improve our building guesses based on their location, to remove a bunch of NY-specific references from the UI (more to come), new dashboard polishing tasks, progress on MA building performance standard modeling (BERDO), and of course GP progress (improvements to bid review, contractor overview, bid form creation).
• 360s: Naina led a great discussion for her 90-day 360. And the larger group discussed how to make ongoing 360s for all staff more of a regular process. It’s encouraging to see this important part of our culture continue to evolve. Remember: feedback is a gift! (JB)
• 360s Part II: In the permanent staff meeting, we agreed on the value of everyone doing their 360s on a regular basis (every six monhts) and getting back to the quarterly goals meeting. Key takeaway- we all have to do our part to make the 360 process work - more to come on next steps! (EP)
• Building science to power national expansion: a flurry of building science back and forth focused on updating measures and scope logic for smaller multifamily buildings in Northern climates in advance of a Massachussets demo. (MZ)
• More bidding data: interesting learnings from a few bid rounds this week, where contractors bid with the expectation of only being awarded a single building. Variation in contractor bids was 3x - 5x greater in such cases where contractors were only bidding on a single buidling than in previous bidding rounds where groups of 10+ buildings were awarded together. These results are of course all still preliminary but do start to at least put some initial numbers to the potential benefits of aggregating buildings. (MZ)

Any missing highlights? Please share in Slack comments.

Watch List

François’ List:

• Light(s) at the end of the productivity tunnel(s): I’ve been feeling good about our productivity in the back-end, with rapid turnaround on demo feedback. On the application side, things are perking up, but the conversion of hard work into results isn’t there yet. Improving our processes, stack, and tools to reach a pace we can all feel good about is a top priority.
• Framework choices: The Building Edit Details page re-work is a great opportunity to evaluate gradually pivoting away from Livewire. Thanks to Luke’s work, we’ve identified Inertia is a strong contender, which would enable us to use Vue or React, technologies that are easier to work with (and likely easier to hire for) than Livewire.
• Development papercuts: a fast, reliable, comprehensive test suite is a must-have foundation to get things done quickly for large projects. Momentum’s is neither fast (~10m per run), nor reliable (flaky tests gallore), nor comprehensive. In the rush of pushing features out we’ve put fixing this on the backburner, but interest on this tech debt is accruing fast.
• Flexing: Our product can juggle complex parameters to reflect local costs, climate, utilities, rebates, tax incentives, building types, etc. Showing more of this work in the front-end not only help us catch bugs faster, but demonstrates the depth of our technology to users and investors.
• SOC 2: Our 3-month audit period began 9/1, and our auditor will start engaging with us to review our processes throughout the audit (Reuben leading) starting 10/7.
• Recruiting: We have a delicate balance to strike until we have clarity on funding. We need to prepare a good letter to Santa (clarity on the talent we need and why), cultivate relationships with great talent at a time we can’t make promises yet, and get our development processes/tools together so that new folks can be productive.

Jason’s List:

• I think we’re getting closer to a revised GTM plan, along with proposed KPIs we can use to help us all better gauge the impact our contributions. There’s more to do to call this settled, but it’s in progress!
• Jeremy is putting together a proposal to revise our development sprint planning. To paraphrase him, there are many ways our team could run our development cycle. Sure, it’s possible that the process we’ve stumbled into is the optimal one for us, but why not try something different for a bit and see if that can help us move faster? Beyond its potential impact to our productivity, it’s a great reminder to think about small, iterative experiments in other aspects of our work.

Erika’s List:

• We don’t want to lose sight of the 2025 budget and ensuring that all departments are aligned on goals and resources for the next year.

Marc’s List:

• One disconnect that was surfaced for me on the revised GTM plan was the importance of building out a pipeline of transactional revenue in both the current unique buildings in Momentum and in new groups of buildings. Makes me realize I need to better understand how and why some of our power users are creating their buildings and scopes.

Bomee’s List:

• Fundraise is a little slower than I had hoped, though still much more organized than our Pre-Seed. I’d like to get a term sheet in hand this week if possoble, and I’m feeling like we’re at the point where some FOMO would be good (but I can’t lie to people, so….)

On Deck for This Week

• Our zaftig roadmap is full of good features we want to build, but we can’t do it all. So it’s time for another focused look at our development priorities to see how we can best deliver some MVP-level and incremental improvements to our various users. (JB)
• François, Jason, Jeremy, Naina, and Robin will regroup to discuss an implementation plan for the CPC Climate Friendly Homes Fund updates. This will be a good place to exercise some of the lessons learned from the generic projects retro: making sure someone on the project acts as the tech lead and breaking the work out into incremental pieces that we can demo and ship weekly. (JB)
• Another concrete GGRF RFP We have a call partners Bright Power and New Ecology to discuss (1) potentially partnering on a second RFP issued by the Opportunity Finance network, a major recipient of GGRF capital and (2) preparing for an expected interview for our GGRF RFP response submitted in September to CPC (MZ)
• Gearing up for the Retrofit Accelerator RFP We don’t expect this RFP to hit till November but it remains a highly efficient approach to consolidating the NYC market and important to ramp up prepartion (MZ)
• Consulting! Need to do some NYC analysis for our customer Related and some national analysis for our customer the Housing Partnership Network. Also need to mock up some charts requested by a potential local/natioanl customer, First Service Energy. None of these exercises can yet be done in Momentum but doing this work manually will inform building science development roadmap (MZ).

• We have an opportunity for expert support via NYSERDA’s Climatetech Entrepreneur Network (CEN). For up to 3 months or 120 hours, we will have access to experts across a range of startup areas of expertise. This week we’re meeting with FinOps talent (unofficial audit support) and preparing a brief for HR support (audit of onboarding and integration activities).

• Here’s what’s on the Company Radar

Please Leave Feedback

Please note your reaction to this update in the Slack channel. It helps us to know what is resonating, what is unclear, etc. Thanks!

• What are your highlights / lowlights?
• Did we miss a highlight? Something else you want to react to?

Bomee :house: Oct 7th at 10:58 AM

Ooh, yikes - look at the styling with > and ``` in markdown! Would be great to fix at some point! I really enjoy reading this new format with thoughts from all the corners coming in, and I would enjoy it even more with folks adding their personal highlights and watchlists in comments!

Oh and the rest of the message from the VC: I have had a chance to spar with my team today about the opportunity to participate to C15’s seed round and the feedback is unanimous: this will be need-to-have as below market capital and incentives drive owners to take action with specific interventions aimed at reducing emissions and increasing efficiency of their assets.

Luke (Coder) [they/them] Oct 7th at 2:16 PM

Comments

…three investors who seem to be taking a close look in our data room…’ Data room? …best product-market-fit … feature development… did they mention what features? (maybe they are talking about focus on going national? (guessing from skimming the investor update)) highlighter yellow and super long scroll on that quote, oof :eyes:

Metrics

• I like this section, but for someone not in that mindset and w/o remembering the previous values, I am not sure how to gauge the impact of them
• Excited to see more high level goal meetings :bangbang: Highlights We are now auto-formatting almost all our code in the Momentum codebase. So we don’t have to worry about that making PRs dirty and it catches bad HTML errors before going out to prod (we had 10s of them already!)

Watch List

hoping to see some nice UI changes soon w/ the new building details page the new tools we are using allows for a modern frontend solution EDIT: I guess this is a “hey watch for this” instead of something on my watchlist keeping an eye on the scope builder and adding in more robust visuals/tools for calculation adjustments EDIT: I want to make sure we don’t add more tangled spaghetti to the scope builder by patching it with more features. This might call for more re-work of the page itself. Bomee :house: Oct 7th at 2:20 PM @Luke (Coder) [they/them] great! For your watchlist items, can you say more about why these are your watchlist items? I.e. what risks are you keeping an eye on?

data room: a file store for investors to look at due diligence docs. See last week's process description