What Kind of Company Are We?

Every so often we ask it again: What are we trying to be? We had a nice discussion about it in Jon’s 360 last week and I think it’s worth sharing with everyone:

The Two Paths

Path A: Software-enabled consultancy. Use software to do consulting more efficiently. Maybe you get to $20M/year. You have 90 people, 40 of them consultants. It’s a fine business. The exit is…you sell to someone who wants to acquire your customer relationships, or you run it until the market changes and then it dies. We have the ingredients to do this if we wanted to.

Path B: Venture-backed product company. Build a product, find product-market fit, prove you’re at the inflection point where more money in = hockey stick growth out. Investors come in after you’ve done the hard work. They want to talk about marketing spend and customer support headcount, not whether the product works. This requires proving we have a repeatable sales motion. Works if the market is huge; requires taking “bigger swings.”

Where We Are Now

Functionally, we are a service-enabled software company. Almost all of our revenue comes from enterprise program customers. We’re not a software-enabled consultancy because we don’t have consultants; we just have Marc. But we’re not yet a post-PMF product company because we haven’t proven the repeatable sales motion.

The market for program administrators - the enterprise customers - is maybe 10-30 firms in the entire country. If we dominated that market completely, it could be an amazing $20-50M business. But that’s what it is. It’s limited by definition.

On the other hand, our customers think about retrofits all day. That’s what they do for a living. On the retrofit machine side, the customers never think about retrofits except when forced to. And we think winning this side of the market will help us achieve the Retrofit Machine.

The Retrofit Machine

The venture-backable path is transaction revenue: getting paid when people actually do retrofits through our platform. Large number of smaller customers. This market is huge - every building owner who needs to do work once every 10 years per property, to the tune of $63 billion multifamily rehab spend per year. More importantly, the only way that we get climate impacts is by doing climate-responsive construction. Every single opportunity for construction ought to be an opportunity for improving climate-related impacts. So the reason we need to do the venture-backable, big market thing is that it’s our mission to drive market-wide change.

Worst Viable Enterprise Software + Retrofit Machine PMF

Marc’s job this year is to figure out if/when we’ll get to the PMF/repeatable sales motion inflection point. If we can prove people will run projects through our platform and pay transaction fees, we’re on the Retrofit Machine path.

But it’s not ONLY Marc’s job – The rest of us have the job of delivering the product so Marc is well-supported. He can’t figure out PMF without the right P.

Part of the challenge is to commit to happy path, not happy highway and deliver the “worst viable product” for enterprise: good enough that our enterprise customers get what they need – and supporting NYCA is no small potatoes, mission-wise – but not sinking all our development capacity into existing customer fulfillment.

How are you going to defend headspace to work on the Retrofit Machine?

Metrics

Traction

• Unique Buildings: [X] (Real time, via Admin panel!)
• Annual Run Rate: $1.54M

Financials

2025 recap coming next week. Descriptions of each metric live in the handbook

Development

• Bug Count (P-0 and P-1): 0

Last Week’s Highs and Lows

• Jon’s 360 was very engaging! (JMB, +1 BJ)
• We had a good discussion with the KC3 folks about the AMEEP workflow, which will help us better support their program needs. (JMB)
• The rebate updates for MFEEP/AMEEP for 2026 was a pain in the back game of whack-a-mole, but it uncovered ancient bugs and the exercise helped us organize for future extensions. (FH)
• Hairy release, but good teamwork! (BJ)
• 360s scheduled! We should be caught up in 2 weeks! (BJ)
• Ana joined us! And we re-upped for this week! (BJ)
• Development of potential partnership with the Insittue of Market Transformation to help us expand nationally is starting to get much better defined (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

Repeats with tweaks:

• It’s again (always?) hat-shedding season… and hat-shedding is hard. I’m thankful to folks for picking up on infrastructure and operations tasks that grew to consume too much of my bandwidth. Our systems and coding practices need hat-shedding too! Having agents handle document scraping, transitioning EPA PM to the back-end, delegating more coding and design work to agents: all these transitions are necessary and difficult, and we (always will) have a lot of them to balance with regular work.
• Balancing short-term / vision Agents are fundamentally a combo of a/ a LLM (largely commoditized, but needs selection and possibly tuning), b/ a prompt (context + generic instruction), c/ tools (access to information and APIs relevant to perform a task), and d/ an architecture (orchestration of the above, evaluations, analytics). Even if we don’t put agents in Momentum right away, we have to make sure that what we build today prepares us for c/ and d/.

Jason’s List

• Improving clarity around our roadmap and prioritization process–I’ve started to meet with a PM coach to help me.
• 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?
• Getting a clearer sense of our delivery velocity. I anticipate we’ll need to be more responsive to ad hoc customer feedback this year, and this will help me better plan and prioritize our product needs.

Bomee’s List

Just to vary it a little this week:

• Momentum team engineering management. We’re in round 1 of our “rotating tech lead” experiment! Looking to Stefan to set a high bar, and for the rest of us to nudge him even higher :)
• Momentum PM still requires a lot of effort from me and Jason and I’m still hearing cries of pain from Jeff. I put up a PR for a SDLC revision that I think will help, but I need more input from the team on root causes.
• Browser testing. Two failed attempts at end-to-end testing. Still a gap in our quality infrastructure. Third time’s a charm?
• Cash. Still OK, but would be nice to get that L+M payment and the first NYCA payment!

Marc’s List

• Speed There is such a vacum right now both in NY and nationally for what we are trying to do. But that won’t always be the case. But nature abhors a vacum. In this tough environment for may climatech start ups and with the resources we have lined up, can we move fast enough to fill the white space before it gets really crowded?

Erika’s List

• Cash Flow Still watching this closely and maintaining a lean budget until we start to receive income from our latest agreements. Our spend is relatively consistent and predictable, which helps with budgeting. However, if there are any anticipated needs, they should be shared as soon as possible.

On Deck for This Week

• Rel 112: it had some delays, but it’s got a lot going on and it worth the wait to do it right! (JMB)

• More measure specs for our quiver–we’ll have PTHPs and ventilation overhaul this week (JMB)

• Attending a NY policy meeting to brainstorm what to do about smaller buildings < 25k SF (MZ)

• Bomee 360 (MZ)

• Analysis / re-engagement of First Service and Aurora portfolios (MZ)

• 2025 finops recap (EP)

• Here’s what’s on the Company Radar

Upcoming Releases

Release 112

• Scope builder refactor
• ConEd MFEEP/AMEEP/Clean Heat 2026 rebate udpates, at least the ones we have so far
• Finally getting Microsoft SSO!

Release 113 (so far)

• Making Momentum more accessible!
• New BKB
• System Admin, Team Admin, and User Registration flow fixes

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