Zero

Today, all of the technology needed to decarbonize buildings, in terms of building components, exist, but are not being widely deployed due to the archaic, clunky business practices in the industry that make it challenging and expensive for homeowners to upgrade their homes. In fact, according to UNEP, building emissions hit their all-time high in 2020, and the rate of improvement for building efficiency decreased. At the root of this issue is the inaccessibility of data and information, both from building owners and service providers, that has created a high friction ecosystem, stifling any sort of scalable action to reduce building emissions. Today, homeowners are spending upwards of 50 hours meeting with a dozen different experts and contractors to “figure out what to do” and contractors are each spending 3 or more hours just to provide pricing proposals. This is a broken process and in its current form will prohibit us from reaching our decarbonization goals – being net zero by 2050 – and eliminating emissions from the 65 million residential single family buildings that use fossil fuels in the US.

Zero is focused on simplifying residential electrification by building tools to automate assessments and empower homeowners to understand the health of their home, without all the hassle. Our solution provides homeowners with a holistic analysis that helps them understand all of the energy efficiency, electrification, renewable energy, and health and safety opportunities in their home without ever stepping foot on site. Today this happens in three steps:

1. We send out our diagnostic toolkit to a homeowner and spend an hour with them to scan their home, answer some questions over video chat, and educate them about the challenges we see. (They send the kit back at no cost)

2. The same day, the information is put into our software to create a customized decarbonization plan. These plans outline which projects to do with accurate costs, estimated bill savings, local/state/federal incentives, and carbon impact and contextualize the projects to help homeowners understand not only what they should do, but when and in what order.

3. We connect them to trusted service providers that can help them complete their projects. 

For homeowners, we are reducing the time intensity of the planning process from 50+ hours to a single hour, by quickly collecting all of the information needed, instead of having to meet with individual contractors that can only offer partial solutions.  Additionally, we are reducing cost by providing them with the most cost-effective solution to achieve their goals.

Our solution is built specifically to help single family homeowners in the U.S. navigate the complicated retrofit ecosystem and simplify procurement of electrification and decarbonization solutions. Today, these homeowners are stuck trying to “figure out what to do” with little time and few resources, but are having to interface with dozens of companies to design solutions, cost projects, and find incentives. It is an enormous lift to get one of these projects completed, nonetheless 65 million of them, and due to their complexity homeowners are simply not doing them. With Zero, a homeowner is now able to scan their home, answer some questions, and immediately receive a custom built plan for their home, along with contractors that can get the work done, drastically reducing the work they would have to do otherwise. 

For contractors, our solution reduces their customer acquisition cost and shortens their time to delivery, which in turn substantially reduces the complexity of their business. By eliminating the need to conduct in-home consultations our solution not only improves their margins, but also improves the homeowner experience.

As a previous contractor, our CEO has deep experience confronting the challenges that both homeowners and contractors face getting residential retrofit projects completed. Having previously delivered solutions to hundreds of homeowners he has an intimate experience with what homeowners need to execute a project. Today, we are delivering those solutions, working with homeowners on a daily basis, conducting assessments, delivering solutions, and intensely studying how to make our solution ever more effective.  Additionally, we are working with the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center to power their Decarbonization Pathways Study with our software and next month will start working with up to 100 homeowners through their study.

As a sole founder that has bootstrapped a business to its first revenue, I need all the help I can get. I’m specifically looking for help refining our go-to-market strategy and building better messaging and marketing materials to reach out to these potential customers. I need significant help putting together materials to build a hiring pipeline and create role definitions, as well as appropriate compensation packages and on boarding materials. I’m looking for advice on legal and protecting the technology that I have built. Most importantly, I’m looking for partners that believe what I’m doing can change the world and will help us get there.

Our approach is innovative in that it solves a problem that has proven intractable and is prohibiting building owners from electrifying their buildings: it’s too complex and expensive to figure out how to get it done. While the approach of using software to design buildings is not new, designing retrofit solutions for buildings is truly novel. The key reason being that the data required has never been cost effective to obtain from an already existing building and therefore the modeling tools available today are limited in their capabilities. Unlike in the solar industry where a wealth of information about rooftops is available, information about facades, mechanical systems, and appliances in the house are not. Our diagnostic toolkit not only makes capturing this data possible, but makes it inexpensive, costing ~$125 per home. And while today we are shipping our kits to homeowners, our goal is to make it possible for them to use their own devices, making it even cheaper for us to collect this data and more accessible to homeowners. Our current roadmap will allow us to lower the cost to less than $50 per home as compared to thousands of dollars today.

Our solution is going to democratize access to quality information for homeowners and remove the barriers that stand in the way today. This will not only unlock their ability to confidently understand how to retrofit their home, but also allow them to simply procure solutions without having to meet anyone. We’re making it possible for homeowners to quickly eliminate their emissions in a cost effective way.

We need to eliminate the emissions from 100 million buildings in the US by 2050 and more than 500 million globally. To put it lightly we need to scale incredibly fast and have designed our solution to be able to scale to that level.  

Our impact goal for the next year is to pilot with 250 customers and help them start their journey to full electrification. 

• We will use these initial pilot customers to further develop our software solution and get it ready for much wider deployment. We are currently piloting and already have more demand, through our partners, than we’ll be able to meet through the remainder of this year. By the end of the year we will have demonstrated our solution end-to-end and will have the proof points necessary to design a self-serve assessment system using a homeowner owned device.

Our impact goal for the next 5 years is to help 100,000 homeowners decarbonize their homes. 

• As we roll out our self-serve assessment system, we’ll be able to dramatically reduce the barriers for homeowners to procure electrification solutions. We intend to scale deployments through existing energy efficiency programs that provide hundreds of thousands of assessments annually and are already in talks to demonstrate our solution with these partners. Going forward we will look to build pathways directly to homeowners and scale beyond the energy efficiency programs.

Currently we are measuring the capabilities of our software, specifically how many components it can model, the projected ROI or payback period of each retrofit design, and the number of building typologies it can design for. However, these are short term goals related to how quickly we will be able to more widely deploy our tool. As we continue to work with customers we’ll be tracking metric tons of CO2 emissions avoided, number of buildings retrofitted, number of people impacted, and the ROI of projects completed and projected.

Our long term goals are to improve the quality of life for communities at home and to create a more sustainable way of living to avoid a climate catastrophe. To get there we are using computational design methods to help owners improve the energy performance buildings and electrify them faster and more cost effectively than ever before. We engage with homeowners on a daily basis to understand the challenges they face with their homes and provide solutions to help them overcome their challenges. This allows homeowners to more quickly implement changes, which results in quicker carbon emission reductions, healthier environments for residents and more robust buildings. This helps us more quickly achieve our goal of avoiding a climate disaster and providing a better quality of life for the folks that need it the most.

The core technology that we’ve built to design a cost-effective, fully electric retrofit solution for a home is a software package. Our software leverages a collection of open source tools developed by the DOE, two examples would be energyPlus and PVWatts. Our technology is a wrapper application that is built on top of these tools to extend their functionality and provide a tailored solution to a building owner using proprietary models. In addition, we have a diagnostic toolkit that allows us to conduct high quality remote assessments that gives us an incredibly rich dataset about a building today and makes it possible for our software to deliver such solutions. Unfortunately we are unable to disclose more detail about our diagnostic toolkit or software at this time.

The power of different viewpoints is extremely important to us and causes us all to be better and more thoughtful people. Even though our team is small, we come from a diverse set of cultural, gender, technical, socioeconomic and geographic backgrounds and specifically designed it this way. Our goal is to continue to build diversity into the fabric of our organization not just from the folks that we employ, but through the customers that we serve. Our primary motivation is to help combat the global emissions problem, but there are so many other challenges we can solve for people through this effort that can combat social, economic, and environmental injustices that we are passionate about and are not leaving behind or pushing to the wayside.

Today we are utilizing a B2B2C business model, working with channel partners across the ecosystem to connect us to homeowners (community solar providers, non-profits, energy efficiency programs). We provide assessments to these homeowners and charge our channel partners to perform the assessment. If we are able to convert a customer we charge a referral fee to our service provider network for the right to perform the work. In essence, we have a “loss-leader” or break-even service as is monetized on the backend through our service providers. 

Our value proposition is to lower the delivery cost of electrification solutions for our channel partners and lower the customer acquisition costs for contractors by streamlining the discovery, scoping, and quoting process for single-family residential electrification retrofit projects. Long term we will explore additional models to monetize through our service provider network such as: through a SaaS product or becoming the prime contract holders, but for today we are keeping it simple with referral fees. We have signed referral agreements with each of our service providers.

Today we are continually applying for grants, both from private organizations and government agencies, and utilizing some small streams of revenue to fund our operations. However, this is insufficient and we are actively looking to bring on larger clients that will provide much more meaningful, long term revenue streams and support additional team members to run operations. Additionally, we are looking to put together our first round of institutional capital to support team expansion and additional technology development. We anticipate announcing the closer of our first funding round within the next 3-6 months.

We have currently raised $60,000 in grant funding from MassCEC, Greentown Labs, and MIT. Additionally, we have generated $25,000 in revenue from customers procuring our software solution. We are currently in talks with a number of different funders to raise our first round of private capital and in talks with additional customers that will drive future revenue.