Spotlighting the 20% that matters

Momentum has to be clear, trustworthy, and self-explanatory enough that a partner can use it cold. We don’t have access to buildings. Other people do. Property managers run buildings day-to-day. Energy advisors guide capital spending decisions. They’re already trusted by the people who say yes or no to construction projects. We need them to carry Momentum into those conversations, because we’ll never have enough direct relationships to do it ourselves.

They’ll do it if they get paid when projects happen. When a Momentum-scoped project leads to real construction, we split a transaction fee with the partner. No project, no fee. That keeps everyone pointed at actual impact.

We’re testing this right now with Aurora and AKAM. AKAM is the largest property manager in NYC. Aurora is an energy advisory firm that works with them. We identified the highest-opportunity buildings in AKAM’s portfolio, and Aurora is helping us get in front of them. Marc leads the conversations now, Aurora and AKAM learn the positioning, then they start running them independently, then it scales across the full portfolio (~1,500 buildings).

Across a large portfolio, only about 20% of buildings have retrofit projects worth acting on today — financially viable, high-impact. The rest aren’t ready. Finding that 20% is the hard part, and it’s what Momentum does. Everything above — the partners, the fee structure, the phased rollout — is how those opportunities turn into real projects.

– Marc

Metrics

• Unique Buildings: 13,900 (Real time, via Admin panel!)
• Annual Run Rate: $2.9M

Development

• Bug Count (P-0 and P-1): 27 (but nearly all about to be closed)

This Week’s Highs and Lows

• Sentry reliability push — lots of efforts across teams to prepare Sentry for NYCA: concerning performance warnings are being addressed, best practices are established and documented, and we’re removing noise from useless issues, while setting up alarms for real concerns. (FH)
• We demo’d for a large group from NYC Department of Buildings (DOB), who oversees LL97 compliance. Good to expand their awareness in advance of possible BEAM integration for NYCA. Someone asked an interesting question about whether buildings could submit LL97 compliance plans through Momentum - may dovetail with the new HPD/KC3 contract to help afforadable housing buildings with compliance.
• Very positive momentum building with Akam and Aurora as partners per above (MZ)
• We’re really close in on NYCA launch–the team is moving fast! (JMB)

Any missing highlights? Please share in Discord 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:

• To get ready for NYCA launch, we need to project ourselves to a near future were a lot of variables are multiplied by 10-100x. Max number of concurrent users. Size of database backups. Occurrences of Sentry issues. Probability of a malicious actor trying to make us look bad. Let’s be creatively paranoid and prepare the ship!
• We have a lot of “almost there” large features or complex clean-ups that need to land soon: EPA Portfolio Manager v2, new BKB supporting buildings beyond Multi-Family (shipped!), Building Attribute Guesser for NYSERDA BDP (shipped!), improved tariff support, etc.

Jason’s List

• Improving clarity around our roadmap and prioritization process–I’ve started to meet with a PM coach to help me. But I’m back in the cycle of dealing with near-term stuff, so it may be a while before I make a lot more progress on 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?
• Honing our delivery process AI is helping us write new code quickly, but we haven’t unblocked the whole flow. We need to automate more of the testing to keep quality and velocity up, while keeping in mind that we are humans who need rest.

Marc’s List

• There are opportunities starting to brew in Boston and DC – how do we keep them simmering while not losing sight of NYC

Bomee’s List

• Wrapping up the pre-season on NYCA - we’ve done a TON of work on the product so far this year, all in the service of getting a successful NYCA launch. Now that it’s just a couple of weeks away, I’m heads down on dotting i’s and crossing t’s.
• Tooling to scale - Post-NYCA launch isn’t going to slow down as much as spread out. So we need both discipline and tools to transition to going dangerously fast in multiple directions! That’s my thinking behind this week’s Copilot PR review system so AI-authored PRs come in cleaner, and the /land-pr workflow so we get PRs across the finish line quickly.
• Avoiding burnout - Let’s make sure we’re all keeping it sustainable.

Erika’s List

• Compliance and our people policies - we need an update to make sure we remain compliant globally as we scale. Neither the company nor anyone who works for us wants the shock of a tax liability.
• Onboarding and ongoing integration we are about six months in with people having gone through the updated onboarding process - I want to check in on feedback for the process to make sure we continue to have the right tools and guidance in place. We also have people who have been with the company for a while and it would be helpful to check in on professional growth and see how we are doing there.

On Deck for Next Week

• Expecting our 2026 ConED MFEEP SOW with Willdan that should be ready to sign after some negotiation.
• When will the NYCA public launch be? Should be sometime in the next 2-3 weeks. Have heard rumors of April 7, but not a firm date.
• We had a request to quickly stand up a new version of the 321Go! landing page for the HPD LL97 assistance project with KC3. Could go live next week!

Upcoming Releases

• Coming up: new EPA PM pipeline, BKB with LL97 coverage fixes, improved boiler cost modeling, updates reflecting latest MFEEP & AMEEP rebate programs

Please Leave Feedback

Please note your reaction to this update in the Discord 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?