Why 'How Did It Perform?' Is a Hard Question

This week I attended Show Me the Data, a gathering where practitioners shared real performance results from building electrification projects — the kind of ground-level evidence our work will increasingly depend on. A few themes from the room are worth flagging for our whole team, because they preview real challenges we’ll face as we start tracking and comparing pre- and post-retrofit performance in our own platform.

Terminology isn’t shared — yet. Even among experienced practitioners, basic terms mean different things to different people. “Electrical upgrades,” for example, could mean bringing new utility service to a building, upgrading the panel in the basement, running new wiring to individual apartments, or all of the above. When projects report costs using the same label but mean different things, comparison becomes meaningless. We’ll need to be deliberate about how we define and track cost categories in our system.

Comparing before and after is harder than it sounds. The intuitive way to measure a retrofit’s impact is to compare energy bills before and after the work. But a lot can change between those two points in time — most obviously, the weather. A warmer-than-average winter after the retrofit will make savings look bigger than they are; a colder one will shrink them. The industry uses a process called weather normalization to account for this (essentially: adjust both years to what a “typical” year looks like, then compare). But there’s no universal agreement on how to do it, and the choices matter. Layer on top of that the fact that utility rates are rising every year regardless of what a building does — separating “savings from the retrofit” from “savings that are partially offset by rising electricity and gas rates” gets complicated fast.

Percentages can mislead. Several projects were presented as achieving 40–50% energy savings, which sounds impressive. But if a building starts in terrible shape — burning through energy at nearly twice the rate of a well-run building — cutting that in half still leaves you with a mediocre building. Absolute numbers tell a clearer story than percentages, and we want to build toward presenting performance in absolute terms so we can honestly assess how far a building has come and how far it still has to go.

Simple systems perform better in practice. A recurring theme: ambitious central heating and cooling systems — with heat pumps and gas boilers sharing a common loop, complex controls tying it all together — consistently underperformed. Most teams reported still troubleshooting controls months after construction wrapped. One building spent a full year running gas as its primary heat source because a control setting was wrong, completely undermining the electrification investment. Complex systems require ongoing expert attention that most building owners simply can’t provide. The projects that hold up over time tend to be the ones with simpler, more self-contained equipment — less to coordinate, less to break, less to babysit.

For us, these aren’t hypothetical problems — they’re the measurement challenges we’ll run into as we build out performance tracking. The definitions we establish now for costs, energy metrics, weather normalization, and utility rate adjustments will determine whether the comparisons we eventually surface are ones we can stand behind. Getting that foundation right is worth the upfront investment.

Metrics

• Unique Buildings: [X] (Real time, via Admin panel!)
• Annual Run Rate: $3.4M

Financials

April monthly report below. Descriptions of each metric live in the handbook.

Metric	Value	Takeaway
Revenue (YTD)	$1,070,644	YTD revenue is up 125% YoY
Transaction fees	$18,608 (1.74% of YTD revenue)	No transaction fees received in Apr
Annual run rate	$3.4M (+18.3% MoM)	Expected - Invoiced for HPD
Cash	$526,836 (+0.3% MoM)	Building back reserves will be slow until all new revenue comes in
YTD Cash In / Out	$1,076,167 in / $939,977 out	More money in than out = good, not burning through cash
Accounts receivable	$410,230 (+39.8% MoM)	Expected - includes new invoice for HPD ($200K) and monthly invoices for Willdan
Runway	-	We are generating cash
Net burn (monthly, accrual)	$34,345 (+259% MoM)	Accrual positive in Apr - no burn
Net burn (YTD-to-last-month, cash)	$45,397 (-3.2% MoM)	Cash positive in Apr - no burn

Details

• Revenue: Gap closing between accrual revenue and cash revenue - accrual revenue is currently $33,567 less than cash revenue.
• Annual run rate: Continued stability indicated by growth in subscription revenue, which was expected once HPD agreement was finalized.
• Cash and AR: Our cash inflow is okay for the moment. Reminder that our quarterly and bi-annual payments as well as the start of new revenue collections, create lumpy months where we are seemingly flush with cash. It is important for us to ensure our cash out does not outpace our inflows in lean months. Additionally, this is why we want our AR collected on-time by our large customers.
• Runway: Our runway is positive, but the majority of our cash reserves are in a buffer account, which we need to replenish to maintain a 3-6 month cushion against lean months, slow-paying customers, etc. This will be slow to rebuild until Q4 when we will have more cash on hand.
• Net burn: The net burn this month is actually a net gain - cash inflows are exceeding our outflows indicating we are accumulating cash.

Current expenses by department

Department	Spend	Explanation of MoM Change
COGS	$20,326 (3.1% MoM)	Changes in salary and benefits
G&A	$82,971 (+24% MoM)	Expected due to quarterly retirement contribution and Kirkpatrick Price SOC1 payment
R&D	$147,337 (+0.8% MoM)	Flat MoM; increase in consulting spend balanced increase in salaries and tax contributions
Sales	$21,610 (+9.7% MoM)	Changes in benefits and payroll expenses

Development

• Bug Count (P-0 and P-1): 6, with 1 already in PR

This Week’s Highs and Lows

• Robin led a well-received orientation session on the Building Data Platform (BDP) for Steven Winter Associates. They will drive the market segmentation analysis requested by NYSERDA as subcontractors: new “pilots” on the BDP “car” we have built! (FH)
• 4/30 Momentum demo for returning NYCA service providers, 5/5 Momentum demo for returning NYCA owners and managers, 100+ attendees (JIB)
• User metrics were off the charts for April: 223 new users, 5,414 monthly actions, 5,290 buildings created - see admin dashboard. (JIB)
• The new vendor matching for IMT looks great! And we’ll make a NYCA version of it soon. (JMB)
• The new building lobby v0 is in and behind a flag–it’s looking good! (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 w tweaks:

• NYCA has so far multiplied our traffic 4x. While we’ve successfully handled the extra load, we need to set up the right mechanisms to identify user issues, understand where they get stuck, and deliver improvements fast. We only get to make first impressions once per user.
• We have a lot of related but distinct technical opportunities to explore: improving modeling of buildings, tariffs, energy usages, rebates, exploring agentic features, leveraging ML to improve our guesses, etc. How do we decide that we’re “good enough” in one particular front, and need to move investments to another one?
• We’ve substantially improved the pace of delivery of “contained” features, as in “Momentum only”, “Calcs only”, or “Data only” features. Can we do the same for “fusion” features that require baton passing, like AI doc scraper, rebate explanations and messaging in general, LL97 pathway determination, tariffs, cost breakouts / RFP generation, agentic experience?

Jason’s List

• Improving clarity around our roadmap and prioritization process–I’ve met a handful of times with a PM coach to help me, which I think helped a little up front. 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? Let’s see what happens with all the new NYCA and other program users! 🤞
• 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? I think related to this is how can we better embed our revenue model in the product?
• 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. I feel like we’re moving in a good direction, but there’s more to go.

Erika’s List

• Planning ahead for 2H 2026 and 2027 important so we can identify areas to invest in. 2027 seems a long way out, but we want to start to develop sensitivity analyses around revenue and understand how this may impact operational planning.
• People are still on my mind and in June I will start having check-ins with folks on work/life/growth to see how we can continue to support the team as we scale.

Jon’s List

• Can we truly support retrofits? - Our users to date run a lot of searches, make a lot of buildings, make a good number of scopes. To realize our full vision we need users to stay in the tool after scoping through retrofit implementation. We’re pushing the project/program/RFP features to move in this direction, but how many users will stay through implementation?
• Clarifying our service tiers - With NYCA and ConEd a large number of users in NYC now have access to Momentum for free. How can we clearly distinguish what NYC users get for free vs. more powerful paid offerings? We want the big programs to be successful and also a funnel for other Momentum sales. How can we deliver value to all users but not compete with ourselves?

On Deck for Next Week

• Meeting with Willdan to discuss integrating Momentum and their Viewpoint system. Hopefully this time we finally do it! (JMB)

Upcoming Releases

Lots of things, including:

• SP profile submittal with document upload
• Finishing up vendor matching for IMT
• Updating RFP contractor invite to match teams, not just users
• Allowing project runners to invite collaborators via email, not just picking from a dropdown list
• Allowing program managers to request access to projects
• Various bug fixes

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?