Internal Documentation

The 4th Quarter

October 11, 2024 (Review of Week EOY-12)

Welcome to the 4th quarter of 2024! There is a lot that will happen in Q4 that will materially change what resources we’ll have in 2025 (and to some degree, what we’ll be working on). We spent some time hashing out scenarios this week covering:

  • Outcome of Seed Raise
  • Outcome of CPC Climate Capital procurement (Marc was in the team interview on Friday)
  • NYC Accelerator procurement (RFP was expected Climate Week, and now it’s expected November)

Our “Low Budget” assumes modest additional earnings (CPC transaction fees and contractor transaction fees) that will keep our 2025 revenues about level with 2024. We do have some expenses that will go up in 2025 (health insurance, for example) and grants that will end in 2024, so we will need to look at discretionary spending very carefully, but we don’t plan any additional downsizing.

“High budget” scenarios (CPC GGRF, Accelerator, Seed) will incorporate some pay adjustments as well as hiring, which will focus first on filling gaps that will allow folks to wear fewer simultaneous hats. These additional resources would be great; but they will mean more external commitments – and we’ll need to efficiently onboard additional folks without losing speed (important to discuss and plan for!).

As we figure all this out, a few “north star” items that I’ve now heard from multiple VCs over both our pre-seed and seed discussions:

  1. We need to diversify our revenue. We currently look like this:

    1% Other (1)
5% Lender (3)
26% Real Estate (7)
68% Utility Program (1)

    and that 68% from a single customer is hard for investors to get over.

  2. Get established in multiple markets outside NY. People just refuse to believe that “if you can do it here, you can do it anywhere.”
  3. Prove that transaction revenue is repeatable and not due to consulting. To me, this means we need to have the ability to deliver the value proposition (faster process, tight bids, better contractors, etc.) via software.

Here are some quotes from two of our top investor prospects:

“We’re particularly looking for proof points around diversifying your revenue beyond the ConEd account, as well as economics on the installer referral fees.”

“the right profile for us would be when we could knock down two of those three pieces. So either we’ve got line of sight of multiple markets where maybe it’s not at scale, but we’ve watched it, and then the contractor take rate, and then the automation process”

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 from CPC and $15,164 invoiced to Carleton (no change WoW)
  • Outstanding invoices as of today: $163,136.71 (+$28,278 WoW)

Last Week’s Highlights

  • B Corp Assessment: We are officially in the evaluation stage of the B Corp Certification process and had our first call with their third-party auditor this week. We currently have 113 points across three impact business models (you need a minimum of 80 to become a B Corp) and the more they understand the business, the better to maintain or increase our score. Initial feedback on the first areas assessed (our business, how we treat employees and our mission) was positive. We have one more audit round and if there are no follow-ups, we move to the final assessment where we are signed off on becoming a B Corp. So far, so good! - EP
  • Release 82 A late week release to unlock having Generic Project open for internal testing in production! Release 82 also includes improvements for CPC project cards, smarter GHG calculations (locale-aware as opposed to NY-centric), better building guesses, more MA program rebates + an attic insulation measure + a new preset scope ahead of Marc’s demo for Massachusetts, and of course, a few more security improvements. - FH
  • Our team had an interview for the CPC Climate United GGRF RFP. It’s hard to know what the evaluation committee thought (they had excellent poker faces), but the team put together a strong presentation with just a few days’ notice, and I think did a great job. Kudos to Marc to delivering a tight pitch about the need for and benefits of a technology platform powered by Momentum as the backbone! - JB
  • On Friday afternoon the development team started a pivot to a new two-week sprint cycle to see if it can help us move faster. While it has been a team effort with input from everyone, thank you to Jeremy for spearheading this transition and to Naina for driving the inaugural sprint planning meeting! - JB
  • While we are behind in my original projections for the bidding program, Kate and Martine made this past week our biggest bidding round yet which is going to meaningfully enhance the learnings coming from this pilot work (MZ)
  • Great interview with our Rebecca at Willdan on how she uses the tool today and how she might use it in the fuure. In addition to a wide vareity of constructive feedback got a couple of unexpected tidbits: (1) that large owners ask her for MWBE contractor lists and (2) If Momentum could spit out timelines for projects, it would help owners better understand next steps and programs better plan. (MZ)

Any missing highlights? Please share in Slack comments.

Watch List

  • Fundraising: We have 25-ish live deals at the moment. Either the round will come together in the next week or so, or we’ll go to plan B: small pre-seed extension. (BJ)
  • Subscription renewals: We have a few customers up for renewal, and it’s important to keep them!

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. Update 10/11: I’m looking forward to the two-weeks sprint experiment, opening the “post-generic project” era of our team :).
  • 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. Update 10/11: I’m excited about Maksym’s progress in this area, shaving 1 minute off of tests we ran 148 times last week in Github (and more locally).
  • 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 begun 9/1, and our auditor will start engaging with us to review our processes throughout the audit (Reuben leading) starting 10/7.

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!
  • Planning for the new building details page and the CPC CFHF scoping updates will help us practice the lessons learned from the generic project work.

Marc’s List:

  • We need to figure out what else we want to accomplish with the bidding program through the rest of the year that best builds on learnings to date
  • Excited to see the continued fine tuning of our MA product including evolving building science logic in advance of a 10/25 demo with the the MA Climate Bank
  • Interview with Rebecca at Willdan understcored need for me to get a few more customer/partner interviews scheduled this month.

On Deck for This Week

  • I didn’t get to organize the product roadmap like I wanted to last week, but I will this week (JB)
  • The quick turn around CPC GGRF RFP pushed a few things back… this week need to do some manual analysis (consulting) for both NYC and national customers/partners that will inform our product roadmap (MZ)

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?

Naina (Generalist) Tuesday at 9:01 AM

Lots to think about here! I hope that the work we’re doing in the national backend stuff is moving at a fast enough pace that it’ll be useful to the number 2 “north star” item (Get established in multiple markets outside NY). And in the high budget scenario, efficient onboarding will be key - and I think maybe something François, Robin, and I can experiment with when we have our 3 week long intern, where efficient onboarding will be very necessary

Luke (Coder) [they/them] Tuesday at 2:59 PM

Comments

  • Reading the “high budget” scenario got me excited; some things we really need! :pray:
  • Are we looking at specific utility programs outside of NY? That would partially address the first 2 investor key asks
  • :shushing_face: typos at “use it in the fuure. In addition to a wide vareity of constructive” @Marc (CRO)
  • Another shoutout to @Maksym (Contract Coder) for his work on the test performance. It may seem small but that time adds up quickly, especially across multiple developers!

Additions

  • besides tests, the local development experience got a bit easier w/ a streamlined process for automatically fixing and code format mistakes across the entire momentum repo

Jeff (QA) Wednesday at 3:47 PM

  • Yey for Q4! Boyyyy how time flies-
  • I wanna echo the efficiency, inclusiveness, and openness for feedback that the calc services group have been showing since the push for Marc demos have started-
  • The guesser is impressive had the handle to which specification they were pointing it out to make a right guess - I little bit of learning (from my end) on which parts of the db it’s pulling the info from so I can further beat it up- but it does seem unnecessary :slightly_smiling_face:
  • The changes doesn’t seem to have regressed much- apart from the small issues I’d find or @Jason (BuildSci Lead) finds– but as QA what’s impressive was how they were very quick to patch up and I think that’s just piggy backs from the success and hard work between @Jeremy (Contract Coder) and @François (HOE) ’s (pretty sure @Robin (Building Science) too and everyone else who got involved.) back to the place when laying the ground work for the back-end calc service was the thing- a benchmark of good.
  • Testing notes were clear, what not to test was very clear too- what is behind the flag, what is supposed to be rugged and it’s okay to be buggy– and what is supposed to be flushed out- the direction was there. - a breeze to test and well a lot of it with @Robin (Building Science) and @Naina (Generalist) ’s help but as a bonus I learned a ton about what we’re trying to do as a product at a national level-

My highlights and top of my mind

  • That security sprint embedded in release 81 and 82 was about north of 60 if not 70 tickets to be looked at and closed to verified- in preparation for the SOC2 audit. so I’m happy to have a handle and contribution for that end.
  • Part of which was learning how to call out app vulnerabilities within automated tools used in the industry and that reminds me that I need to run it now that everything is in prod- and ticket to Reuben vulnerabilities it reports.
  • Now that a 2 week cycle has began- shout out to @Jeremy (Contract Coder) ! it gives head space to get back on the saddle of what I wanted to do from my work plan- implement a test management tool and build out- our manual user facing test case repository and build regression test suites that touches our core user flows for momentum- that could be used in a per release basis, ran during code freezes– categorized so the effort can be targeted:

Why do this Jeff

The repo of test scripts will be user facing, this can help on board someone new be it in QA or if the Development team wants to as well for new software engineers to get familiar with “how people are using momentum” It will open feedback from fresh eyes on what could be improved (although I think I gave enough to @Jason (BuildSci Lead) but I still have some up my sleeve when we get there. we have a tracker of the tests done to ensure no bugs from the gold paths was introduced that sprint- and if there are it will be hopefully easily used to debug and patch the issue quick if it slips through me. UAT - I will revive it driven by this And in the future- it will be the stepping stone for Automation. Bonus: I could use glitter, and expand on our help page.

My low-light

  • Huge L for me- I’m self evaluating atm.
  • I could have been more involved in this round of GP I think- The fact that the devs are grouping themselves to test it on their own rendered me unnecessary so I took a step back, it was a too many cooks in the kitchen situation at least for me- maybe I shouldn’t have- but I just did not get the distinction between not ready for QA enough, but then it’s ready for internal customers to play with it’s unusual to me, but I can go with the flow if this where we’re heading. - and maybe this is an exemption :man-shrugging::skin-tone-4:
  • To me all customers are the same, if they needed hand holding to use a product it’s a failure of me not guarding the quality enough. - that’s just how I gauge my success in my role. or my mentors- taught me that way. :man-shrugging::skin-tone-4: - so room for growth for me that’s good.
  • So I’m not proud of not being able to be very involved, or maybe I have not shown the importance of the batches of issues I was able to surface that’s why a hand off to me to do QA prior to it getting out there internally- will just be a blocker on getting it out there- was I too critical? were the bugs I raised just empty noises affecting the focus? were they not quality bugs that I reported? IDK- I’m open to feedback.
  • I was also out for a couple of days, + security tickets etc all happening at once- when the work for the last push began so that could be a factor too

Jeremy (Contract Coder) Wednesday at 4:24 PM

  • It’s interesting to hear about what we look like to investors. I’m still pretty out of touch with the big picture view of how we’re doing in terms of finding product-market fit and all that stuff.
  • Is there a video of someone presenting our Go To Market strategy? I have a copy of the deck, but it’s not super explanatory.
  • I really do feel like the dev team’s velocity is starting to pick up. We’re benefitting from the work on stupid little annoying things like conflicting formatting changes, linter issues, flaky and slow automated tests, or lack of automated test coverage. Doing all that work slowed us down a bit in the short run, but I feel like the investments we’ve made in cleaning up that tech debt have already paid off.