The Distance Between Zero and One

A couple of years ago, NYCHA completed the first window heat pump pilots in New York City public housing — proof points more than anything else, evidence that this approach could work in real buildings with real residents. The data since has been encouraging enough that NYCHA is now expanding installations in their portfolio and NYSERDA has launched an incentive program to grow the market and bring more manufacturers in.

That arc was on my mind at the Building Energy Exchange room heat pump expo yesterday. There’s still plenty of skepticism — someone raised the fire escape problem, someone else worried about facade inspections. These aren’t fake concerns, but they’re not dealbreakers either. They’re edge cases that require different specs in some rooms, not reasons to abandon the approach. The skeptics who frame them as fatal flaws tend to have some stake in the status quo.

Those early pilots still matter, years later. The distance between zero and one is enormous — and the data from that one compounds over time into something that can move an entire market.

We’re thinking a lot about our own version of that right now. We have more users than ever and we’ve been shipping quickly — notes, questionnaires, in-app messaging, vendor matching — tools that could support a full project lifecycle in one place. But we haven’t closed the loop yet. No project has gone from scoping through procurement and implementation entirely on our platform.

We’ve tried. The early CPC Climate Friendly Homes program is the instructive example — even with consultants nominally required to use our software, we couldn’t get real buy-in. In retrospect, the reason is straightforward: we weren’t making their lives easier. A mandate isn’t enough if the tool isn’t solving the right problems for the people doing the work.

So the proof point we need has to come from users who genuinely want to run their work here — because we’re solving enough of their actual problems that it makes sense to. Once we have it, I think it compounds the same way those NYCHA pilots did. It becomes the thing we point to, it makes the next one easier, and it starts to answer the skeptics — some of whom, not coincidentally, have their own stake in the workflows we’d be replacing.

That’s the push right now: focusing on the right partners who are ready to go end-to-end with us and getting that first proof point on the board.

–Jason

---

Metrics

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

Development

• Bug Count (P-0 and P-1): 2, but 1 ready for testing and the other just filed today
• Merged this week (not all of it shipped; some still in †esting/progress/behind flag):
  • A very nice v0 of the NYCA LL97 public map, including front end and back end contributions!
  • Scope highlights for new scope detail page so users see the most important numbers and benefits without digging.
  • Better financial estimates for energy upgrades — We added guardrails so that projected savings from utility rate changes are only shown when we have reliable, high-confidence energy data behind them. This reduces the risk of showing customers misleading numbers.
  • “Portionable” measure flag with warnings — Some energy upgrades can be installed in just part of a building. We now track and surface that distinction, with clear warnings when a partial installation may affect savings estimates.
  • Clearer, more consistent language — We standardized how upgrade descriptions and savings explanations are worded across all measures, making them more understandable for building owners rather than engineers and removing outdated hard-coded values.
  • New York City area detection on sign-up — When new users register from a NY-metro address, the platform now automatically suggests they connect to the NYCA program, reducing friction for local onboarding.
  • New team-wide Notes hub — Users now have a dedicated “/Notes” page that brings together all notes from across their team in one place — notes left on buildings, projects, RFPs, and more — sorted newest first. Each note links directly back to the item it was written on. The page supports filtering by source type, author, privacy level, and date range, and clicking any note opens a quick read-only preview without leaving the page.
  • Team Messaging improvements — Users can now access project conversations directly from the project sidebar, and the messaging inbox received a round of visual consistency fixes so the folder list, fonts, and controls look and feel uniform across the app.
  • Questionnaires — The questionnaire experience was significantly upgraded this week: responders get a dedicated full-page form, the question builder now supports drag-to-reorder and a two-column layout, the list is searchable and sortable, admins see a warning before deleting questionnaires with existing responses, and a new PII guard nudges users away from entering sensitive personal information in free-text fields.
  • Suggested bid generation for custom-spec RFPs — Contractors reviewing “bring your own spec” RFPs now get auto-generated suggested bid forms, reducing manual back-and-forth at the start of a project.
  • Cleaner inbox navigation — The inbox sidebar was updated with consistent icons, sizing, and spacing to match the rest of the app’s navigation
  • First phase of migrating the legacy CPC CFHF projects into the new platform architecture.
  • Various visual polish — Button fonts, hover effects on program pickers, and secondary screen card layouts were all cleaned up for a more consistent look and feel.

This Week’s Highs and Lows

• So much new code. And we had a lot of hands helping with testing it all! (JMB)
• Room heat pump expo at Building Energy Exchange was good. Nice to see lots of friendly nerds. (JMB)

Any missing highlights? Please share in Discord comments.

On Deck for Next Week

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?