We're national(?)

Next week, with the official launch of the vendor matching feature on Momentum for DC’s Building Innovation Hub, we will have a presence outside New York City!

The Hub is a part of IMT, where I’ve been a board member for the past 5 years, and DC’s version of the NYC Accelerator. Like us, IMT is small, but mighty. Despite running on roughly $6–8M a year and a staff that fits literally into a large conference room, IMT is one of the most important policy shops in U.S. building decarbonization. Many of the jurisdictions around the country with BEPS got there with support from IMT, including DC, Maryland, Montgomery County, Boston, Denver, and St. Louis.

Passing a BEPS law is one thing; helping thousands of DC building owners actually comply is another. Like NYCA, the Hub provides guidance, case studies, regulatory clarity, and importantly, a procurement program that connects owners with qualified vendors for retrofit work.

Until now, the vendor matching was held together by spreadsheets and email. The Hub had a list of 50+ vendors and a manual process for fielding owner inquiries, matching them to qualified providers, and chasing follow-ups by hand. IMT’s recognition that they were stretching the tools to breaking point coincided with our conversations with them about revenue partnership — and so to help them meet a grant deadline, we built them a proper platform — the one we worked on for the past 2 weeks!

Why it matters for us. IMT writes the policy playbook and has relationships in all the places that have BEPS. Helping their flagship local program run on real software — instead of a heroic spreadsheet — is a small thing we built quickly — thanks to the strong bones already in place in Momentum — that makes a real difference for them.

And beyond the investment in an important partnership, getting a foothold outside NYC is a milestone with outsized impact on our fundraising potential and our access to the data we need to test our national hypotheses!

Development

• Bug Count (P-0 and P-1): 2
• Shipped this week:
  • Vendor Matching: Building owners can now find qualified service providers through a short multi-step flow that handles up to 25 buildings at once, creates a real “Vendor Match” project, and gives matched vendors a single consolidated response page (with per-message contact reveals) instead of one page per message.
  • Phase Approval Gate: Program Managers can require projects to get formal sign-off (upload a document, check a box, get reviewed) before moving to the next phase

This Week’s Highs and Lows

• Willdan NYCA team (and yours truly) very impressed at how quickly we rolled out NYCA Service Provider functionality for document upload. This serves a useful purpose for the program and centralizes process in Momentum. (JIB)
• Closing in on 300 NYCA Teams in Momentum. (JIB)

• 9 releases over 14 days in May! It’s finally become a no-big-deal push-button exercise! (BJ)
• Cut down the Momentum issue backlog by ~600. The geriatric issues were making it harder to see what we needed to focus on, and the open issues way exceeded what we could do in a couple sprints. We learned that we’re opening issues at a rate of about 150 per week (BJ)
• Momentum app team continues to refine the rotating leadership execution! Kudos to Ilayda and Chuck this week, and to Ana for her 360. (BJ)
• In the 32 days before NYCA launch (3/10–4/11), users added 224 buildings and created 70 scopes (3:1). In the 32 days after (4/12–5/14), they created a whopping 5,049 buildings — 22× — but only 139 scopes (36:1). No scopes, no RFPs, no data, no repeatable sales motion, no construction. We need to get to the bottom of why… (FH)
• …one hypothesis: we’re under-counting hard-to-model benefits of important scopes, making them look less appealing to non-experts. To fix this, the Calcs team went through a week of careful designs, brainstorms, and rapid baton-passing on whole-building energy modeling, load profiles + rate changes for gas/electricity, and scopes-over-time. (FH)
• We’re making some progress with definining requirements for upcoming customer needs: the ConEd MFEEP affordability screener and the NYCA SP profile directory. I feel like we’re further away on the Momentum-Viewpoint integration, but I guess I’ll take what I can get. (JMB)
• Very constructive BD meeting with Daisy Chain. Our transactional revenue model is being further developed through a partnership with them since their technology could be a good first step for an owner to tackle before doing larger heat pump projects (MZ)

Any missing highlights? Please share in Discord comments.

On Deck for Next Week

• Momentum deep dive webinar for NYCA Owners and Managers on Tuesday 5/19, for Service Providers on Friday 5/22, first week of three with paired OM and SP NYCA webinars. (JIB)
• Coming up in the next sprint–starting to migrate the legacy CPC CFHF program over to the generic program framework. We’ll also start to consolidate and improve messaging and notifications in the app, which I think will open up some much-needed collaboration ability for our users. (JMB)
• Subscription customer Related is moving forward on bidding out works scopes across ~6 buildings. Jon and I have a call with them next week to kick off (MZ)

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?