When we win, we all win...

Now that we’re on the cusp of taking on New York City Accelerator, there are a handful of things that we need to think more about that we haven’t needed to before: reliability, security, reputational and political risk, etc.

Along those lines, I’ve been thinking about interoperability. Part of being the official platform of New York City Accelerator is that we’ll have a very broad base of access. So there’s a question around how do we use that position to enable better digitization of the industry. How much do we want to be an enabler, and to do that, how much do we need to share?

It’s part of our mission to enable more digitization, better access to tools, and better access to technology. As a startup, a lot of our life so far has been about differentiation in a competitive landscape. Once we become a gatekeeper, though, I think we need to start thinking about how to cooperate and enable other technologies to serve this market so that the entire market can function better.

Marc’s already been doing some of that thinking around building a revenue strategy to provide pipeline access on the contractors and OEM side. We haven’t done as much thinking around the integration of/interoperability with other software technology. We have very nascent conversations with Rockrabbit (part of the Clean Fight cohort), Eli (part of the Urban Future Lab), and Energy Score Cards (Bright Power). Both of the former companies target the contractor market, making it easier for contractors to produce bids and manage project pipelines; their number one customer is contractors, whereas ours is building owners.

The benefit might be twofold. One, there’s certainly revenue strategy potential. More importantly, I think we need to also establish what kind of company we’re going to be. If we want to be plumbing, if we want to be an enabler, if we want to live our values, then I think that we need to think early on about bucking the tradition of technology companies getting into monopolistic positions and then consolidating themselves there.

We win when the industry wins!

Metrics

Traction

• Unique Buildings: 10,857 (Sep, +1,638 MoM)
• Annual Run Rate: $1.5M

Financials

• Monthly net burn (accrual basis): $68,532 (+7.7% MoM)
• Year-to-last-month net burn (cash basis): $59,232 (+8% MoM)
• 2025 Transaction fees to date: $38,658
• Outstanding invoices as of today: $269,507 (-1.33% WoW)

Development

• Bug Count (P-0 and P-1): 2

Last Week’s Highs and Lows

• I had a great time at NESEA BENYC, presenting data from the CFHF program as well as seeing lots of great folks. (JB)
• I went to the Room Heat Pump expo at the Building Energy Exchange for a bit on Wednesday. There were new manufacturers with some really interesting products in development that I hadn’t seen before. It’s great to see more folks jumping into this market and trying new ideas out. (JB)
• Release 105 with 50+ tickets went out mostly on time! (FH)
• On the customer success side, Daniel and I kept CPC Climate Capital happy with analysis of public data on potential repeatable, high impact efficiency and solar upgrades in different regions. Next step is to show them how they can drill down into this with Momentum (MZ)
• Good chats with policy folks at NYSERDA and NYC government about the levers still available to drive more construction in a resource constrained world. Upshot: Momentum vision could be very central to next couple of years (MZ)
• We started the process of bringing more hands to the task on the Momentum side! Welcome Stefan (‘sh’ as in Schnitzel)!

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

There have been too many things on my watch list, so I’m trimming it down a bit:

• Improving clarity around our roadmap and prioritization process–I really want/need to put more time into this.
• We may have won some minds, and we’re winning some wallets, but will we win their fingers? Which users will actually use our software instead of just looking for the outputs and expecting consultant-style service?
• What is our moat in a world and industry where data wants to be free, especially when some of our largest customers are city and state agencies?
• Politics Local is looking better, but national is really scary.

Erika’s List

• Budget and cash management - we’re doing okay and have implemented a process to track spend more closely (13-week cash flow) 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. Right now, the main trend that has emerged this second half of the year is that our accounts receivables (what we invoice) are being paid eventually, which means not on time. It is important that we collect payments in a timely manner and that our customers are conditioned to pay us on time for a few reasons: (1) our predictability in cash flow and (2) in the event of an audit or if we were raising a later round such as a series A, the length of outstanding payments would reflect negatively on us and our ability to collect. The time to fix this is now.

François’ List

(repeats with tweaks)

• Getting ready for more traffic: NYCA will introduce more scrutiny and a lot more traffic to our systems, possibly in the worst possible way: a sudden surge at the end of December. Time to sharpen our load testing skills, and check that Fly.io can deliver on its auto-scaling promises, before we find out from real users.
• Growing the team: two months 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.

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?
• Mamdani!!! Wants to do something biggish and boldish with building decarb… NYC bulk buying window heat pumps has been floated. With a new wave of people in city government… how do we stay relevant and also exert our influence to set up any city scale program for success?

Bomee’s List

• Product development process for NYCA, ConEd Recompete and HPD Don’t want to count the chicks before they’re hatched, but they are SOOOO close to hatching
• 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 We’re welcoming 4!! new folks shortly – data engineer, devops, and two Laravel devs. Whoot!
• 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 and have 16 months of runway.

On Deck for This Week

• I’ll be at the NEEP HEW 2025 conference for most of the week. It’s focused on “emerging strategies to scale the adoption of highly-efficient heat pumps, creating regional opportunities for market transformation” so right up our alley. (JB)
• More new faces joining the team this week, with help on its way for our Data Engineering efforts in the context of the NYSERDA BDP project. (FH)
• Related, First Service Energy and Aurora Customer success (MZ)

• Here’s what’s on the Company Radar

Upcoming Release

106 is

• Team Admin
• SSO (readiness)

107 is

• SSO (public)
• Program admin infrastructure

Please Leave Feedback

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• What are your highlights / low-lights?
• Did we miss a highlight? Something else you want to react to?