What We Are Learning About Deployment?

This week I have been thinking a lot about how utility rebate programs actually create project volume in NYC — not to replicate them, but to understand what drives behavior in the current marketplace.

The structure turns out to be simple. A small number of highly active contractors do almost all the work: they find customers, scope projects, get owners to commit, execute, and handle all the paperwork to satisfy utility program requirements. The program provides the incentive (money) that makes projects easier to sell. However, strings attached to the money to make sure public resources are not wasted also create significant drag. The paperwork process that contractors need to jump through is cumbersome and there are artificial limits imposed on the amount of volume any particular contractor can do (maybe to make sure no contractor gets too big and the program always has the leverage?) The role of the utility program implementor is to twist contractor arms as necessary so specific utility goals are met and to track outcomes.

The takeaway that stuck with me: throughput isn’t created or even greased by software. It’s created by participants who have strong enough economic motivation to push projects through friction. Programs like NYC Accelerator can educate and support, but they can’t drive execution themselves. That has to happen somewhere else in the market.

What’s also true is that most of the current market isn’t really built around owners. Existing systems are optimized for utilities, program implementors and contractors — not for owner simplicity or confidence.

So the hypothesis I’m now testing is whether we can build owner-facing offers compelling enough to aggregate real demand — and through that, gain market leverage over contractors.

The more I sit with this, the less I think we’re building “retrofit software.” The real problem is reducing uncertainty, simplifying decisions, and helping owners feel confident enough to say yes.

- Marc

Metrics

• Annual Run Rate: $3.4M
• May total active users: 375
• Programs: 353 teams in NYCA, 5 registered since launch in BIH

Development

• Bug Count (P-0 and P-1): 0 🙌
• Shipped this week:
  • Vendor matching improvements — Fixed several issues in the process of connecting building owners with vendors, including better validation of match requests and more reliable email links in owner responses.
  • Building address & street view reliability — Improved how we look up and store building addresses, including better Street View photo handling and preserving unit/qualifier details that were previously getting dropped.
  • Phase gate & project workflow fixes — Fixed issues where projects couldn’t advance phases correctly, supporting documents disappeared after submission, and file uploads failed under certain conditions. Program admin stability — Fixed a crash on the Teams tab when a team was soft-deleted, cleaned up incorrect SP lookups, and made team assignment views more accurate. New: Phase-change email notifications — Program admins can now configure whether teams receive email notifications when a project advances to a new phase.
  • More accurate energy calculations — We audited and corrected the default physics values used to model heat loss through building envelopes (walls, windows, roofs). Estimates are now grounded in better baseline assumptions.
  • Improved operating cost attribution — Operating expense savings are now computed at the right scope and correctly tied back to individual efficiency measures, giving cleaner financials results.
  • Various other bugs and performance and infrastructure improvements

This Week’s Highs and Lows

• IMT launched the new Momentum-hosted vendor matching for Building Innovation Hub with a mass notice to their participating contractors (BJ)
• Monday’s internal NYCA sync meeting spun off into bigger a strategy discussion and provoked a lot of thinking. I’m glad we’re going to have some dedicated time to focus on these strategy questions coming up in July. (JMB)
• The pace on momentum releases has really been picking up–we’re pushing daily now, just like calcs! (JMB)
• Continued customer success learnings from embedding myself in Willdan’s office every Wednesday to support them on NYCA and bi-weekly calls with our customer First Service Energy. They both need more than software to make their respective programs a success (MZ)
• Setback with our customer Related – they may not really need our workflow to bid out their projects based on implementation direction they are taking – I was looking forward to it as a good test case for this workflow (MZ)
• We’ve prepared (thanks Erika!) a budget for an agent to help Willdan users answer LL97 questions in the context of NYCA. If accepted, it would help us explore agentic features on a small scale. (FH)
• Presented a “deep dive” Momentum webinar for NYCA Owners and Managers Monday and for Service Providers Friday. We’ll be here all month folks! (JIB)
• Talking with a group of KC3 case managers (and Momentum users!) at the NYCA happy hour on Wednesday, while standing on a roof downtown in a thunderstorm, their consensus was that NYCA is in “the calm before the storm.” (JIB)

Any missing highlights? Please share in Discord comments.

On Deck for Next Week

• The momentum team is working working through the features needed to finally migrate the legacy CPC CFHF program over to the new program framework. We’re so close! (JMB)
• A new BKB that includes developments based on ownership, along with a host of other improvements (JMB)
• (lawyers permitting) Finalization of energy program manager channel agreement with First Service Energy (MZ)
• Folks should start to see work-life-growth invites on their calendar - this will be done in waves through mid-July (EP)
• Talking to Boston about next steps for launching a BEPS hub for them. Yay! (BJ)

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?