What the new UI unlocks

March 21, 2025

Feels good to have the new UI out, seemingly no new issues introduced by the transition!

IMHO, the new UI, aside from looking nicer, unlocks a few things:

Ability to co-brand (initially for FirstService Energy in our usual hacky way). It is looking like third party property managers and service providers are going to be a key part of whatever we do going forward, and the co-branding ability is a small, but important, box to check for them. These folks have to prove their value-add to their customers pretty much every year, and part of how they do that is to make sure that their branding is on everything that they are sendinog out to the owners. The FirstService cobrand is our first bite at it, and there will be more!
Easier to build on / test because we now have a more consistent UI language and components that make sure the implementation is consistent. Hopefully, making it easier is half the job or more, but we’ll need to deal with documentation to have it really deliver on the promise.
Broader customer appeal this might be just my take, but I think the software looking more in line with what folks are used to seeing means we can put it in front of more people. Although the scope builder has always been pretty streamlined (and looks just its on-paper counterparts), I think the over-all UX has really only been adequate for folks who are really motivated to overcome or overlook its shorcomings.

What are your thoughts on it?

Metrics

Unique Buildings: 6,060 (February, +64 MoM)
Annual Run Rate: $1.28M
Monthly net burn (accrual basis): $92,959 (3-month avg through February)
Year-to-Last Month net burn (cash basis): $173,252.90
2025 Transaction fees to date: $3,868 (invoiced, no change WoW)
Outstanding invoices as of today: $326,239 (-83,333 WoW or -20.358% WoW)

Last Week’s Highlights

Release 91 and the new UI! Looking sharp, Momentum! (JB)
We’ve turned on the AI Building Guesser for all internal users in Prod (and of course in staging too). (FH)
We received our first payment from Willdan - the next two should come in first week of April and then we will be caught up! (EP)
The Con Ed recompete for 2026 was released just as the NYC Retrofit Accelerator RFP was submitted…. (MZ)
Interesting learnings from customer success with Related on how information needs to be packaged up for their asset management decision makers. Documentation here (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?

Jason’s List

Mostly carryover or tweaks to last week’s:

NYC Accelerator RFP–this would be a big contract and have impacts on revenue plan.
Who are going to be our users outside government programs? Service Providers? Owners? Contractors? We need to align on this and soon.
How can we continue to reduce the barriers to giving users useful information? I’m eager to try scraping data out of pdfs and other documents so we can make it easier to get non-public information.
Figuring out a sustainable sprint planning routine that allows us to reliably ship on time and to know what will be in the release–and move faster. WIth the mega-sized Release 91 now out the door, I’m eager to get back to a more regular sprint cadence.
Updating our project workflow. We have a better idea of who will be using this now, which is a great start. Now we need to confirm what features they need and those they don’t need.

François’ List

Fly.io flakiness: we continue to pay a “Fly tax” every few months/weeks, with service flakiness and odd behaviors. It would be a mistake to look into switching providers (would anyone else be better?), so let’s harden our mechanisms for rapid response: staying on top of Sentry, documenting fixes in tickets/slack/docs, improving logging when possible, engaging Fly support quickly (they’re nice and responsive). Big thanks to Jeremy for figuring out our latest mystery.
NYSERDA data RFP / Building Data Platform: we’ve been in set position on the starting blocks for so long on this that we’re beyond getting cramps. In the meantime, we’re trying to keep our chosen contractor engaged and patient, and not forget what this whole thing was about to begin with.
Moving bugs to the left: the hard work for release 91 was a good stress test for our development framework. It didn’t do so great: while good tests help you save time by quickly alerting you when you introduce a regression, we have slow tests that explode in your face on unrelated changes. OK, Maksym is right: not all our tests are bad (but we do have some terrible ones, and it’s unacceptable only one person in the team can run them locally). I trust Maksym as our elected testator to right this wrong.

Erika’s List

Looking at our past NYSERDA agreements to make sure we have been compliant - I think we have, but a yellow flag was raised after signing the agreement last week. We will, however, be compliant moving forward.

Carryover (and focus going into Q2):

I’m exploring how we can make health care more affordable for us as the employer and for employees. Our plans should be able to scale in a cost-efficient manner without sacrificing coverage or benefits. This would also be tied to an exploration of another PEO (Professional Employer Organization, which is a third-party company that provides HR services to businesses).
Not losing sight of our onboarding process either - a next round of updates is coming up and then we’ll just have to refine with actual new hires. I will be pulling in specific team members for their feedback on some sections- without input, I hesitate to leave in some of the updates because it contributes to a lack of clarity that we want to avoid.

Bomee’s List

Getting Marc a product he can sell, starting with FirstService. Marc pointed out that FS has been ready to sign a contract since November and have been waiting for us to deliver on the three things they feel they need before they can start paying. Fair ’nuff!
Level of Code debt – less easy for me to be sanguine about it now that I’m looking at it and it’s sending me on wild-goose chases.
Documentation keeps popping up intermittently on my list. It’s here now because we just made a bunch of changes and if they’re not documented now, they will be papercuts tomorrow.

Carry-overs:

Cash. That’s a lot of outstanding AR.
NYCA – the RFP is finally submitted; fingers and toes crossed, everyone!
My pile of things I’ve been ignoring is getting ripe. I’ll need to give it some love soon.
The background hum of uncertainty for the housing/construction industry.

Marc’s List (carryover)

Macro economic impacts on our business and busineses in general from shit that is going down
We need more and better feedback from users and potential users

On Deck for This Week

Revisiting onboarding practices with Chelsea and making sure language is clear and compliant around terminations. (EP)
debt repayment sprint! I’m eager to see a bunch of stuff get cleared out in our first quarterly(?) one of these.
Discussions with Willdan and KC3 about Con Ed recompete strategy (MZ)
Meeting presenting interim results of pilot project that our partner the Urban Green Council is leading to drive more awareness on standardized retrofit options that will be powered by Momentum (MZ)
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?

Naina (Generalist) Mar 25th at 8:05 AM

New UI is great! And I’m excited for unlocking things for FSE. AI Building Guesser being turned on internally also feels like a good step forward - lots of moving pieces but exciting ones

Jeremy (Coder) Mar 25th at 10:39 AM

Who are going to be our users outside government programs? Service Providers? Owners? Contractors? We need to align on this and soon. Can we take a best guess and go after them? Then if that doesn’t work out, pivot and go after another segment? I don’t have the product-focused clarity to say for sure, but I would guess that the type of product we build will differ somewhat based on who are users are. And we may have a better chance of being excellent for one segment than to try to build for all segments at once. Or maybe that’s just me being lazy about having to grok the mindset of all these user segments! :laughing:

Jeremy (Coder) Mar 25th at 10:40 AM

Figuring out a sustainable sprint planning routine that allows us to reliably ship on time and to know what will be in the release–and move faster. WIth the mega-sized Release 91 now out the door, I’m eager to get back to a more regular sprint cadence. Hear hear! :+1::skin-tone-2:

Jeremy (Coder) Mar 25th at 11:46 AM

a yellow flag was raised after signing the agreement last week Is this shareable info? What was the yellow flag?

Jeremy (Coder) Mar 25th at 11:49 AM

waiting for us to deliver on the three things they feel they need before they can start paying Similar question: what are those three things?

Robin :handshake: Mar 26th at 9:29 AM

NYSERDA data RFP / Building Data Platform: we’ve been in set position on the starting blocks for so long on this that we’re beyond getting cramps. In the meantime, we’re trying to keep our chosen contractor engaged and patient, and not forget what this whole thing was about to begin with. Regarding the NYSERDA data platform contract - I am happy it takes so long for NYSERDA to move. We have lots of other work to do and a lot of the NYSERDA work is additional. I think it’s been good to make progress on other things before getting another big project to work on.

Erika (Growth Lead) Mar 26th at 11:35 AM

@Jeremy (Coder) the yellow flag was that there is a tax form that needs to be filed by state contractors with contracts over $100K. We hadn’t filed one previously so it prompted me to check because failure to file could bar a contractor from any future contracts in the state that are $100K+. :open_mouth: 1

Jeremy (Coder) Mar 26th at 11:46 AM

Good thing to catch!