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October 25, 2024 (Review of Week EOY-10)

I’ve been thinking some more and talking with Marc about our financial situation. We have a couple VCs still in the queue, but I’m considering this raise dead at this point. Although we have (as of Sept close) 12 months of runway, functionally, this means we’re back to bootstrapping, because we need to have about that when we go out to raise in the spring. So we need to “extend our legs to the length of the blanket” as the Turkish saying goes; and at the same time, we need to do more faster to get revenue and/or PMF proof points.

As Jason noted in the comments to last week’s memo, Jason, Marc, François, and I are going to start meeting biweekly to align product and revenue more closely and set joint priorities.

I appreciate the discussions that happened last week and look forward to seeing more of it. I’m off to DC and then to SF this week. See you next week!

– 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 from CPC and $15,164 invoiced to Carleton
  • Outstanding invoices as of today: ?? (@Erika is out this week)

Last Week’s Highlights

  • Psyched about the Massachusetts demo and the generic project demo. I already shared this thing to several people, including Joe Evans at Kresge/OFN. (BJ)
  • I want to give a double highlight to the MA demo and shout out to the product team for their hard work building out capabilities on a deadline that really wowed the MA Climate Bank team. See recording for further detail (MZ)
  • Good feedback sesssions with our partners HPD and Community Sustainability Partners on how to best present deeper and more expensive scopes of work to decision makers.
  • We put in our “best and final” for the CPC Climate Capital RFP. Fingers crossed! (BJ)
  • The NESEA BuildingEnergy NYC conference was great. Lots of good folks to catch up with. Danielle from CPC presented on how CFHF actual project costs have compared to the desk audit estimates, and they’re mostly reasonably close! This initial crop is mostly upstate projects so that may skew things, but it’s still nice to see. And I heard from a few people that “everyone is talking about Momentum!” It’s good to know people see value in what we’re doing–now we need to stay focused on turning those 👍 into 💸. (JB)
  • Last week’s release included a ton of improvements, including induction stoves (which folks have been asking for), expanding the advanced search page to handle states other than NY, and updating utility costs (gas is getting expensive in NYC!). (JB)

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?

François’ list

  • Velocity “Building Science back-end”: We’ve been running yellow lights and burning midnight oil for Marc’s demo, which is scheduled for this afternoon at the time of this writing! It’s exciting to see a ton of progress in a short time: new building data, new measures, new scope builders, new incentive programs, new UI to reflect local data, new fuel prices, new utilities, better local climate modeling, advance search state filter and I’m sure I’m forgetting some. But it comes at the cost of risks both short-term (we’ve introducing quite a few bugs found in staging, and one this morning in production) and mid-term (midnight oil isn’t in infinite supply). Fingers crossed for a successful demo!
  • Velocity “Application”: the “retro” jury will meet early next week to see if the two-weeks sprint is helping with velocity on the application side, and what else we can do to avoid spelunking. I’m optimistic based on the ticket progress, and the quick turnaround on e.g. “state filter” but this remains a core area of risk.
  • 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 and we are still lacking the discipline to e.g. update #tech_change-control prior to modifying prod. Next milestone is next week with a virtual client visit.
  • 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. The risk is hiring the wrong profile (e.g. computer vision if we need LLM) at the wrong time (modeling specialist when we have 0 data or lack of budget). I’ve decided to punt two weeks on hiring a contractor to help us with ML infrastructure, since we might not have budget for follow-ups, and I need to wrap my head around what LLMs can offer as shortcuts. We will have an ML intern in January, who can either help us derisk LLMs path, or try and model “fill in the blanks” building guessing but would have to work around lack of infrastructure.

Bomee’s List

  • Fundraising I think this is dead. RIP.
  • 2025 budget We’re going to go with the low-budget scenario with some spend curtailment where possible. Any additional spend from our war chest needs to be justified by revenue prospect.
  • Revenue team structure & resources We’re not yet at the point where we have a repeatable sale game plan (outreach-pitch-sign, rinse+repeat). Figuring this out is complicated by the death of the raise. We’ll need to navigate these decisions carefully.
  • Big Ol’ RFPs We have two big programmatic opportunities, CPC GGRF and NYC Accelerator, on the horizon. We’re getting closer to having more clarity on CPC GGRF, and NYCA RFP should be dropping soon. Suspense is almost too much!
    • OFN proposal: we’ve made sense out of what was a bit of messy proposal for CPC. Reinforced to me the need for us to be the lead in whatever software-focused bits there are to the OFN proposals. <– @marc

Jason’s List

  • Contractor bid pricing Get this info is critical for our larger vision. Danielle from CPC spoke of the difficulty of this during her NESEA presentation, and about how the program is adapting to try to make it easier for them. However, Jen Leone from HPD, who previously worked as a design-build contractor, isn’t sure it’s possible to get the detailed data we want. She said that contractors don’t like to break the price up, and, if they are required to, typically just make something up that may or may not be grounded in the real cost allocation. I trust her, and we’ve heard this before. I still don’t understand how these folks run a business without doing some kind of bottom-up budget for their proposals. Maybe this will mean getting less granular data and spending more time analyzing and modeling to figure out what drives costs. 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? There was a lot of talk about the GGRF programs at the NESEA conference. 🤞 for good news this week!

Marc’s List

  • NYC consultants will all be sending out owners end of this year to do beefed up annual reporting for LL97 starting in 2025. Important to figure out how they can include Momentum in their offering in a way that helps us increase our funnel for retrofit project transaction fees. Risk of missing this opening if we take our eye off it.

On Deck for This Week

  • We expect to hear about the CPC Climate Capital (GGRF) procurement outcome any day now.
  • I’ll be demoing Momentum Monday at Con Edison’s Multifamily Participating Contractor Appreciation Breakfast. Some of those contractors have already seen it, but there should be some new faces as well. Hopefully I can also chat with existing users to learn more about what they like, or need in order to get more value. (JB)
  • Prep for the NYC Accelerator RFP will ramp up and we need to stir up a a bunch more buildings for bidding before year end (MZ)
  • DOB Buildings Tech Lab pitch deck is due on Thursday! <– @marc and @jason
  • I’m doing the 2.5 min “fast pitch” competition on Wed at Verge (BJ)

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?

Jeff (QA) Oct 28th at 10:48 AM

Requested access to the demo recording in otter @Marc (CRO) TIA. This will help me figure out your critical path and make sure those are bug free, or call out for fixes- on a regular basis.

“extend our legs to the length of the blanket” Not my first rodeo- I’m trying to figure out on my own how to contribute for the push- but if there are specific key items, we’d do as a collective to stop more cost and take off cost, I’m 101% in support. My highlights: So happy the demo for MA went great! Albeit not recommended and it should not be norm, the calc service team doing 101% hard work to make the last pushes happen was great- I was working till around midnight and and the support from the app team, tying the bow on some found issues pre-deploy was such good collab too! Low-light: Still have a backlog / left over GP stuff to sweep i[ - from 82 and 83 - I focused the effort on supporting the push for the MA demo + other general user facing items– more than anything, (looking for possible blockers etc.) My rationale: I rendered these tickets very low in the priority to test- because it’s not user facing - more than Kate GP group said that the approach will be reactive, fix issues as Kate step on any - so that rendered my input’s too late and optional (edited)

Jason (BuildSci Lead) Oct 28th at 1:46 PM

Jeff–we can talk through GP stuff as you look at them if needed

Naina (Generalist) Oct 28th at 3:22 PM

What does it mean to “extend our legs to the length of the blanket”? Highlight: MA demo going well, we put a lot of work in to this, and now it’s good to know that we have a formula that works for getting to other states

Jeremy (Contract Coder) Oct 28th at 4:50 PM

PMF = Product Market Fit Watching Marc’s demo to that MA company was great. I think I’m starting to get a sense of the business side of what we do, but I’m still not there yet. For example, who were these folks we demo’d to? Lenders? I think I still need someone to explain to me as if I were a five year old how this market works.

Marc (CRO) Oct 28th at 5:13 PM

The audience for the demo were staff within the MA climate bank which is a newly spun up org that lives within the state affordable housing division (MA housing) Generally speaking…. Our most engaged early customers have been (1) orgs that have a mandate to get decarb money out the door and need help finding projects and (2) contractor types that want to make some of this money.