New (again) Handbook

April 4, 2025

The Handbook is dead; long live Handbook. When Almanac announed they were killing their documentation product and leaving us high and dry, I moved us over to a hacky site based on our marketing website. It never worked all that well because our marketing site wasn’t designed for documentation. So the new Astro/Starlight-based “intranet” should be a big improvement. Aside from having way better UX, because it’s a proper platform, we can look at things like slurping in our code documentation there. My intuition is that we started documenting more with Almanac and we’ve fallen off since – so hopefully this will help put us back on track!

Starlight is used by the likes of Cloudflare and FontAwesome, so maybe in a future where we have more user-facing documentation than we can handle in our little in-app system, having our handbook on Starlight will make it easier for us to build more full-featured user documentation as well.

For the moment, the new handbook is at https://handbook-36z.pages.dev. As soon as I figure out why the custom domain isn’t working, it will move to https://internal.c15.io.

Enjoy!

Metrics

Unique Buildings: 6,060 (February, +64 MoM)
Annual Run Rate: $1.31M
Monthly net burn (accrual basis): $85,920 (3-month avg through March, -7.6% MoM)
Year-to-Last Month net burn (cash basis): $140,356 (-19% MoM)
2025 Transaction fees to date: $3,420 (invoiced, no change WoW)
Outstanding invoices as of today: $299,559 (-$109,566 WoW or -26.78% WoW)

Last Week’s Highlights

Release 92 is out, getting us most of the way towards closing a deal with First Service Energy! (JB)
Release 92 included a bunch of font-end clean-up that I feel good about (BJ). Hopefully, the UI update will continue to be bug-free!
Good retro! I think we’re making progress on process stuff also. (BJ)
Good initial discussion at perm staff meeting on who are users are (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

Largely carryover from last week:

NYC Accelerator RFP–this would be a big contract and have impacts on revenue plan and product roadmap.
Who are going to be our users outside government programs? Service Providers? Owners? Contractors? We need to align on this and soon. Marc’s presentation was very helpful for this.
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.–> Jeremy’s proposal will hopefully bring us closer to this.
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.
More chatter about adapation > mitigation. This feels both scary at the macro scale–have we missed the tipping point?–but also I think more difficult to streamline with software than decarbonization.

Erika’s List

Carrying over the Justworks Comps from last week - one update is that the goal is to have a shortlist for team feedback by the end of the month and choose a new platform by early May so we can get favorable rates on the insurance market. If we wait and are within 60 days of our employer open enrollment, brokers will either be unable to get quotes or be limited in what plans they can quote. By mid-May we should have an HR/Benefits partner with healthcare solutions that can scale with the company.
Speaking of scale - I am creating scenarios so the team leads can start to think about budget and how they can scale their teams this year. I will be meeting with each lead to review monthly so we are all on the same operations page. Leaving these discussions until year-end when we’re trying to think of a bigger budget becomes a larger and more onerous task than it needs to be. Plus, we make decisions year-round and should be able to make more informed decisions year-round.

Bomee’s List

Getting Marc a product he can sell It will be nice to get FirstServcie under out belt. And then more to come!
Level of Code debt I don’t know if we’ll ever get to a place where we feel good about this, but I hope so.
Documentation Some of this is tools and some of this is discipline. Open to folks trying “safe to try” stuff!
Cash. Getting paid for Q1 by Willdan is great! But still keenly aware that we have a net burn that we need to minimize.
NYCA – waiting…
ConEd Recompete Will need to help Willdan win this!
The background hum of uncertainty for the housing/construction industry.

Marc’s List (largely 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
And we need to decide sooner rather than later which types of users will be our primary focus for Q2

On Deck for This Week

Marc and I talked with NYSERDA about the “PTAC app” last week, and there’s a little change in direction from when we first talked with them back in the fall. i’ll get them a revised SOW this week and hopefully this will move quickly going forward. (JB)
Building on and complimenting the PTAC app… excited to continue to drive more public facing awareness of our brand and technology as we work with our partner the Urban Green Council to finalize their market facing website intended to drive standardized scope of work packages powered by Momentum (MZ)
Have some content marketing stuff planned on linkedin to further raise our awareness as major RFP’s are being decided – one for this week based on nerdy building science analysis – one for next week that will leverage data from BKB that Robin is dumping into a spreadsheet for me – can’t wait for a layperson like me to be able to do this kind of analysis within the app! (MZ)
Regroup with KC3 on how they could use a reskinned generic projects to support Con Ed bidding (MZ)
Going Electric: Operations and Maintenance in Electric Buildings (aka Nerdfest 3). The previous two Nerdfests were full of great people and discussion, and I’m sure this will continue that trend. (JB)
Plan to plan JS framework. This will be PR’d today. (BJ)
Hopefully GP will be testable this week (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?

Erika (Growth Lead) Wednesday at 7:15 AM

I like the new handbook - it is easier to navigate and should also be easier to make updates.