Internal Documentation

Generic Project Wrap-up

October 18, 2024 (Review of Week EOY-11)

Congrats to the product team for the progress toward shipping generic project! Looking forward to seeing that cross the finish line! Looks very, very close!

This weekly update is late because I’ve been blocking it – as they say, I have good news and bad news:

  1. Bad news: We are on a path to running out of money. Since raising pre-seed, we’ve increased burn without increasing revenue. We are being kept afloat by grants, which Jason is servicing single-handed. We haven’t increased subscription revenue because we don’t have the right product and we don’t have the ability to nimbly deliver application enhancements.
  2. Bad news (part 2): I have enough feedback from investors now to know that we are not likely to raise more investor money until we a) get into other states and b) show repeatable sales of some kind – either subscriptions or transactions
  3. Good news: We have 12+ months of runway. This is because we got a $300K loan from the JLL Foundation this month. It gives us time to course correct (But not THAT much time!)

This is a “come to Jesus” moment, y’all. What we have been doing so far this year is not going to carry us through 2025. This is a moment for everyone to reflect at every level on what needs to be different for 2025, and ideally, start doing them now in Q4.

Some questions that you might start with:

  1. What’s gone right that we need more of? Do we know why it went right?
  2. What boulders have we been pushing up hill, and is it worth it? If it’s worth it, will it resolve in time for us not to be dead as a company by the time it’s resolved?
  3. What discussions moved us forward? What discussions aren’t happening in the open that should be?

The word for the wall is “velocity.” We need to get faster in showing traction! I look forward to your comments. – Bomee

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: $10,399 (+$3,678 WoW) from CPC and $15,164 invoiced to Carleton
  • Outstanding invoices as of today: $79,803 (-$83,333 WoW)

Last Week’s Highlights

  • We have a working generic project flow that uses a spreadsheet-based bid form to pull line item pricing in and populate a bid review tab within Momentum! Here’s a quick walkthrough. There are a few more UI and flow tweaks to take care of this week, but we’re about to turn the page on this and get started on a couple of new development priorities. (JB)
  • The development team started our new two-week sprint cycle this week. We’re still in the transition period, but feel like my calendar is starting to look less overwhelming, and I get the sense others are finding more time to plan out upcoming projects.
  • We’re putting the finishing touches on Momentum’s new features for Marc’s upcoming demo next Friday to a possible MA customer, who shared a few buildings in Massachusetts that they’re most interested in reviewing for the demo. We feel that we’ve covered all the bases (rough local pricing for measures and energy, local climate, new incentives and building structures, new building performance standards, new scopes) for a v0 in MA, and are excited to hear feedback! (FH)
  • Bids came in and were reviewed with the Acacia affordable housing portfolio. This was our largest bidding round yet, by far… $700k+ in construction (MZ)

Any missing highlights? Please share in Slack comments.

Crow’s Nest

Looking out for icebergs: What are the risks on the horizon that we’re watching for and navigating around? (Please be sure to articulate what’s at stake, too!)

Bomee’s List

  • Fundraising I now have just a handful of first-choice VCs active. I’d like to start a bridge raise in 2 weeks, at Verge. We’ll see if the remaining folks get back to me by then! The risk here is that being in limbo too long extends the time needed for the raise at the cost of being able to work on other things
  • 2025 budget We’re trying to make steady progress on getting the budget scenarios nailed down. The risk here is that if we don’t account for all the needs in a realistic way, we’ll be undercapitalized and forced into heroics to meet growth goals.
  • Revenue team structure & resources We’re not yet at the point where we have a repeatable sale game plan (outreach-pitch-sign, rinse+repeat). Marc and I are trying to figure out what kind of sales personnel we need to get us through this adolescent phase in 2025. The risk here is that we could end up not being able to sell at the pace we need to.
  • Big Ol’ RFPs We have two big programmatic opportunities, CPC GGRF and NYC Accelerator, on the horizon. These are each revenues in the million dollar range, so we really want them. We need to land at least one of these going into 2025. The risk if we don’t is that we will be struggling to show revenue growth and we’ll continue to have revenue concentration. We ALSO have a Coned re-bid in 2025, so we need to start thinking about what we can bring to the table that will be value-add and keep our position on that program. Losing Coned will be a pretty significant blow to our resources!

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 :).
  • SOC 2: Our 3-month audit period begun 9/1, and our auditor started engaging with us to review our processes throughout the audit (Reuben leading). Reminder that now more than ever, we need to “walk the talk” on a number of processes we document, including onboarding/offboarding, production changes, and of course development lifecycle. The risk is being flagged by the auditor and require time consuming follow-ups. Next milestone is a virtual client visit 10/28-10/31.
  • Preparing for ML: We’ve discussed applications of ML including predicting measure costs, filling-in gaps in our building data, and parsing documents like bid forms efficiently. With uncertainty on which applications to prioritize and which budget scenario to consider, getting ready in terms of data, infrastructure, and talent is complex. To reduce the risk of hiring the wrong profile (e.g. computer vision if we need LLM) at the wrong time (modeling specialist when we have 0 data), we will start with heuristics as baselines, then define metrics of success -including cost!-, and prepare collecting data when needed. In parallel, we’re getting started on hiring, reviewing a possible contract candidate for ML infra, and evaluating ML interns for January. For ML as for everything else, we might be able to take shortcuts for a v0, e.g. by leveraging Anthropic’s API for some of the tasks we have.

Jason’s List

  • Making it easier for contractors to submit bid pricing is critical for our larger vision. The spreadsheet parsing we have for generic projects should be a step up from the in-app bid form that most CPC CFHF contractors avoided. That spreadsheet bid form is still very structured though, and eventually we’ll need to figure out a way to pull in and make sense of whatever format contractors want to send us.
  • Which RFPs will we win? Not only will this affect budget and hiring, it will impact our product roadmap. What features will we need to deliver and when?

Marc’s List

  • The Acacia was so big because it involved some more complex building types with 3-4x higher construciton costs per apartment than our previous bids. And ater the debrief process step with ownership, moving forward with one of the bidders did not feel quite as “automatic” as previous rounds. Especially since we want to be going in the direction of facilitating even more captial intensive construction, we will need to figure out how our platform can help give decision makers confidence that they are getting the right scope at the right price with all available credits and discounts available in the market.
  • We have had a lack of direct competition around us for a while but that will not always be the case. Speed matters and 2025 will be critical to getting the traction needed to really establish our model while there is still white space.

Erika’s List

  • We will have an audit of our HR practices and policies this quarter to ensure they can scale to accommodate ten or 20 more employees and to identify any blind spots that will need to be addressed. Areas I would like to prioritize a deep dive are onboarding and integration to set these up to scale and measurement of our practices so we can assess improvements later on.

On Deck for This Week

  • Short week for me, but will be evaluating platform alternatives to Airbase and working on a scope with a HR expert via the Climatetech Entrepreneur Network (EP).
  • This should be on everyone’s radar - take a look at the 360 Review Schedule and if you have a date in November, try to schedule your 360 or 30-60-90 day review by 10/31. (EP)
  • Another one for everyone’s radar - the next Perm Staff meeting on 11/7 will be a Quarterly Review meeting. We all have homework - catch up on all the details in Slack. (EP)
  • I’ll be attending the NESEA BuildingEnergy NYC conference on Thursday. I love a day hanging out with a bunch of energy and building geeks, especially when I can get there by subway. (JB)
  • Folks are starting to plan out our next big development projects: a new and improved building details page (Luke) and improving our scope builder logic to take advantage of user-submitted data via the CPC CFHF loan applications (Jeremy). These upgrades will deliver some wins for both Willdan and CPC today and help us with the national expansion. I’m excited to see how some concerted planning up front can improve our speed and results. (JB)
  • On Friday, we are debriefing with our partner NYC HPD on patterns and trends across the 300 buildings from their portfolio that went thru the 321Go! program with Momentum scopes (MZ).
  • Our sub-contractor Jessica Luk-Li is heading up our response to another GGRF RFP due at the end of the month for the Opportunity Finance Network (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?

Luke (Coder) [they/them] Oct 22nd at 12:39 PM

Outstanding invoices as of today: $79,803 (-$83,333 WoW) What does WoW mean? …Marc’s upcoming demo next Friday to a possible MA customer… Is there going to be a “debrief” after so we can get some insight into what the potential customer liked and what was missing? …Losing Coned will be a pretty significant blow… Do we know how they feel about us now? Are they asking for more, or happy, or?

Naina (Generalist) Oct 22nd at 12:50 PM

I like the idea of a debrief after the demo, especially as we are starting on building out other locales, so it’s good to know what we missed the first time

Erika (Growth Lead) Oct 22nd at 1:50 PM

@Luke (Coder) [they/them] WoW means week over week.

Bomee Oct 22nd at 2:52 PM

Sorry @Erika (Growth Lead) I was still not done.

@Naina (Generalist) @Luke (Coder) [they/them] go back and read the memo. It was posted before I was done with my frontmatter.

Luke (Coder) [they/them] Oct 22nd at 3:23 PM

  1. What’s gone right that we need more of? Do we know what it went right? Is it “Do we know what went right?” or “Do we know that it went right?” @Bomee For engineering, we are still learning to take shared responsibility for project management and making sure our work is aligned with the needs/values of the overall org. I think its due time to have this shift kicked into overdrive I know its in the right direction because we are having less misalignment and time wasted w/ working on the wrong things (but not perfect yet…)
  2. What boulders have we been pushing up hill, and is it worth it? If it’s worth it, will it resolve in time for us not to be dead as a company by the time it’s resolved? Same answer as #1. I believe that by solving that; keeping each other accountable and individually connecting our work to why it matters; is the biggest blocker for velocity in the engineering team.
  3. What discussions moved us forward? What discussions aren’t happening in the open that should be? we’ve been talking about above mentioned ideas as well as bringing back 360s and quarterly goals meetings; that has been worth it IMO

Jeremy (Contract Coder) Oct 23rd at 7:45 PM

@Luke (Coder) [they/them] I’m curious what “keeping each other accountable” looks like. Is there an instance where you saw the tech team keeping each other accountable that worked well that we should do more of? Is there a time when more keeping each other accountable would have sped things up, and what would that have looked like? (This would be a good retro tropic IMO).