Fall is upon us!

October 3, 2025

What’s on my mind lately is foundational work that will position us well for what’s shaping up to be a very busy fall:

Increasing Team Capacity

François has been working toward onboarding a new data engineer; I’ve been working on getting more Laravel hands-on-deck, Jon will be joining us soon to give more capacity to Marc and Jason, and Jeff will be adding a QA intern. Having more person-hours at our disposal will be great – and while I share folks’ concern about making sure we don’t lose too much velocity while onboarding, I am really hopeful that we’ve learned a lot of lessons on that front. I’m looking forward to it!

Clarity in Processes and Handoffs

As we talked about in last week’s staff meeting, we want to build routines that help us stay aware of burnout and stress. Part of that is making sure we have clarity about roles, handoffs, etc – all things that depend on how we communicate so we’re not all stepping on each other’s toes. Everyone – me included – forgets that sending out the signal is only half of the task; you also have to make sure that the signal is received correctly. Maybe it would help if we have a new practice of 10-4-ing: “The message I received from you is …”?

Appreciating Our Wins

François says this a lot: we’re not very good at celebrating our wins, so here is a reminder:

We’ve crossed the 10,000 building threshold
We’ve really had only one unexpected outage during working hours
No clients have yelled at us. By and large, our clients are somewhere in the range of happy to patiently anticipating, which is great.
Our finances and financial management are solid.
Our reputation in the field is high – even during Climate Week, even someone I’ve never met before and who is from MA said, on hearing “Cacence OneFive” said “oh yeah, I’ve heard of you. You’ve been mentioned in our conversations.”

By all of these metrics-—whether financial, client relationships, reputation in the field, or the general stability of our application and code base—-we’re doing really well. These are all great things, and we’ve managed to do them while staying very cost efficient, with a small team, and while taking on the additional challenge of figuring out horizontal self-management! We have a lot to be proud of ourselves for. Let’s not forget that!

Metrics

Traction

Unique Buildings: 10,857 (Sep, +1,638 MoM)
Annual Run Rate: $1.6M

Financials

Monthly net burn (accrual basis): $56,996, +32.9% MoM
Year-to-last-month net burn (cash basis): $60,959, -10.35% MoM
2025 Transaction fees to date: $38,658
Outstanding invoices as of today: $244,026 (+$88,759 WoW, +57.17% WoW)

Note: Annual run rate, monthly net burn and year-to-last-month net burn will be updated for September after books close this week.

Development

Bug Count (P-0 and P-1): 4, at least one of which will be addressed in the next release

Last Week’s Highs and Lows

Lots of good horizontal discussions in the context of Jason’s 360 ; Daniel’s, Jeff’s, and Maksym’s 360 preps ; and decision making in e.g. the Architecture meeting this week. (FH)
I onboarded 4 contractors to the project feature as part of the ConEd MFEEP pilot program. They all said their portion of the flow seemed very simple and easy to use, and they are excited to get some RFPs from the system. (JB)
Reviewing the CFHF project cost data has been super interesting–thank you Naina for working through all of it! (JB
(very long and still somewhat far off?) irons in the fire with a couple of national expansion opportunities: (1) Daniel presented data to CPC Climate Capital to help inform their plans for targeting 4-5 markets in the country to deploy decarb capital; (2) I touch based with Dale Bryk, who runs a “Conveners Network” of 40 states still interested in moving forward on local climate action – many of these stateswould love to learn more about how Momentum will support NYCA (MZ)
Subscription customer Related succesfully used Momentum outptus (with a bunch of outside of Momentum TLC) to update their 2026 capital budgets with a bunch of decarb projects (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?

François’ List

NYSERDA BDP: while the project we were contracted for is going well, we’re still managing our customer’s expectations to steer clear of ad hoc consulting on unvetted datasets internal to NYSERDA, while the scope of the contract is to deliver tooling on subscription. A pattern I’m concerned about: a lot of things we do are really hard (e.g. picking the best possible data from datasources that disagree with each other), in ways that aren’t immediately obvious to outsiders or newcomers to a project.

(repeats with tweaks)

Growing the team: three month to NYCA first deliverables mean we need to be efficient at onboarding and leveraging new talent. With a few folks about to onboard soon (fingers crossed), we’ll need to dust off our onboarding playbook, and learn from lessons learned: tight pairing, accurate casting on the right tickets/projects, regular evaluations, quick decisions.
Lego sets, not Playmobils: we’re chasing multiple deadlines for a variety of customers. Sometimes we’ll have to build a custom one-off (Playmobil) for the sake of expediency, but let’s go after Lego sets when we can, trying to anticipate on user needs that are around the corner. We are learning from CPC -> Generic Project ; BKB -> BDP to build datasets, APIs, and UI components that can scale with us.

Jason’s List

Carryovers with tweaks

Improving clarity around our roadmap and prioritization process–I really want/need to put more time into this.
How will the ConEd MFEEP/AMEEP program pilot go? I’m eager to get actual folks using this new workflow!
We need to move faster, and I hope we can grow the team and integrate more people quickly and smoothly!
We’ve increased our feature set quite a bit lately, and it’s going to continue growing for some time. How can we scale our our testing to keep pace?
AI Document Scraping–will this make it easier for users to find value?
~~Local~~ politics There’s still a lot that could happen between now and the general election in November. At this point, it’s not just local; the boundaries are blurring, and none of it’s good.
NYC Accelerator We have a lot of build for this–and we need to pave the happiest of paths first before exploring the foliage along the sides.
ConEd Recompete Willdan got a 1-year extension–I hope we can better integrate with them over this next year to keep ConEd happy.
Portfolio/program reporting I think aggregating results across buildings is one of the key selling points of our software as compared to a traditional energy audit report. Metabase looks pretty promising, and I know we need bulk calculations as well. Many of our clients will want some version of this, so we need to find the commonalities to avoid building custom features.

Erika’s List

Budget through the end of the year and looking ahead to next year for hiring and operating expenses. We’re trying to track our expenses closely from a cash management perspective and as we grow, it’s important to keep an eye not only on what is being spent, but emerging trends and events that impact our bottom line. Also, while updating the metrics, making sure the budget and how we are spending is clear for all to understand and make decisions from.
Hiring Process - how we will bring people in and ensure they have everything they need and that new hires and the team are aligned on what makes for a successful transition and how we account for a successful transition.

Marc’s List

Carry-over:

Execution We are the dog that caught the car with NYCA and other stuff brewing. Stakes of everything we do will be increasingly high. So many eyes will be on us. How do we best expand the team?
Continuing to stay ahead of the curve that is turning into a hockey stick How much of scope builder will be able to be recreated by an AI native start up in the mid term? What are we doing to build the flywheel so that our customers experience every project making the next one easier and we deepen our moat?
Process orchestration What tasks should be done by AI, what tasks should be done by AI + humans and what tasks should be done by humans? I don’t have as much of a handle on this for our development work… but this framework has gotten me thinking about how Momentum fits into the wider industry. Where and how can we disrupt things? And where and how can we be disrupted?

Bomee’s List

Getting Marc a product he can sell We need Marc to be confident that we can make things he can sell, and I think a big contributor to that is taming our sprint / release practices. I think we’re making progress there. What do the rest of y’all think?
Team dynamics Maybe it’s because we’ve been doing a lot of 360s recently, but I feel like there is a lot of communication going on – another positive trend! Let’s no one disappear into any caves!
Planning for growth on the team I pivoted to trying for short-term help via agencies. Having had the Devsquad experience under our belt, I think we are positioned to make better decisions this time around – and I’m pretty hopeful about the agencies I’ve talked to so far.
NYCA, ConEd Recompete and HPD Don’t want to count the chicks before they’re hatched, but they are SOOOO close to hatching
Uptake of AI tools - I love AI. I’d like to see more of how folks are using them.
Cash. We have deployed about half our cash in hand. We need to replenish soon, but we are cool for now.
Over-all architecture We have started to refactor per DDD - I think when we start to really see the benefits in terms of ease of testing etc, that will be when we really know it’s worth it (but I am all in).

On Deck for This Week

SOC 2 Audit site visit throughout the week (Oct 7-10). We’ll be hosting the auditors virtually, and they’ll interview us to check we walk the talk on our security practices.
Closing the September books, look back on Q3 and look ahead at Q4 (EP)
Check in with the BrightPower team to discuss the potential mutually beneficial opporutnity for us to monetize their utility cost national databse of 158,000 buildings (MZ)
Here’s what’s on the Company Radar

Upcoming Release

Finishing up project flow so users can award contractors
Some fixes for team_scoped_buildings feature (almost there)
Team admin and user approval

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