The transcription of the video is below. 

Introductions & background

Kerim: Hi everyone, this is Kerim, Kerim Baran with SolarAcademy. Here I have with me Jon Bonanno and Nico Johnson of the solar Industry. As many of you probably know we are hosting this session because as some of you might know, Nico and I, and really thanks to Jon, we’ve been collaborating over the past months and talking probably over the last couple of years about joining forces between.

Kerim: My SolarAcademy experiment and Nico’s amazing podcast platform, Suncast. And we are also in the process of creating some additional products for the Suncast platform. And as part of that, we have decided to offer solar conversations, which is a format of content that we have been experimenting and having some success with on SolarAcademy and offering those two platforms and products together.

Kerim: And as such as some questions come to us about what a solar conversation is, we wanted to use a solar conversation to answer what a solar conversation is, which is essentially, A way to describe a product or a service or an offering in the solar industry about what solar companies are doing. to describe, you know, all the good knowledge that usually resides inside a company and that their sales and marketing folks are trying so hard to get out of the company. And that is part of what Nico does with the Suncast platform. And that is part of the vision that I had for SolarAcademy. 

Nico’s reasons for partnering with SolarAcademy 

Kerim: So with that, I’m gonna now pass off the microphone to Nico, who is probably one of the best question askers in the solar industry to ask me in the format that we would be asking you all about your products and services and to describe what you’re doing. But we’re gonna do that about Solar Conversations and the Solar Academy platform.

Nico: Thank you. Yeah. Well, it is truly an honor to work alongside folks that have looked at as both inspiration and mentors in the industry, being you and Jon. And when Jon first approached the subject. How much have you talked with Kerim Baran?

Nico: I was very interested in learning more about what you had been doing since CivicSolar, because I was a big fan of the work that you guys created at CivicSolar, and a big follower when you were all, all were in the thick of it. I was at Trina Solar, as you know, and many listeners probably know that I was at Trina Solar for a while before I started out on my own entrepreneurial journey.

Nico: Back then I met a slightly younger, but still very respectable and seasoned entrepreneur named Jon Bonanno, who was running his I think his last, his most recent, we’ll call it founder story, his last startup. And, I think that so few companies,… really…  and I learned this through the number of companies that I met through Trina… I had a tremendous privilege to meet founders like you, that so few companies who are deep in the weeds digging and trying to really come to what Jon taught me a term called product market fit. They don’t understand how to communicate that message out, and they don’t break the time out to take time to do it and distill it.  And, so we like to believe that over time we’ve learned how to help entrepreneurs navigate those conversations. 

Jon’s endorsement of SolarAcademy

Nico: But before I ask you, Kerim, a few questions. Jon, I’d love for you to introduce who you are for viewers who perhaps are unfamiliar with the I think infamous Jon Bonanno. 

Jon: Well, as you said, Nico, it’s a, it’s really just fun to be here with both of you.

Jon: I have the great pleasure to work with both of you on a regular basis. So I’m, I’m just elated that this is happening and, as an executive running an operation, I think that some of the best wisdom of organizations is buried deep in the catacombs and never gets out into the open. And as an executive, I always found some of my most, insightful findings around customer feedback and product market fit or potential for acceleration, all those kinds of things by just walking around and talking with people within our organization and that bottom-up knowledge of people that are on the phone or emailing back and forth with current clients or potential clients or market participants…  that amalgam of showing and not telling is such a critical part of learning as an organization and that institutional intelligence can only be had the voice from within. And, I found that as an operator by just going around and actively engaging a variety of stakeholders within the organization, what’s happening today, what’s going on?

Jon: And because I was an authority, they would have to tell me. So that was good… but I think that this stands true for almost any organization. So whether I’m an operator, or I’m an investor, or I’m working with a senior executive in an advisor role, or a board participant. It’s always the same story, is that we’re constantly trying to figure out how can I get more joy from doing what I’m doing and how can I expand my impact?

Jon: Now, expanding impact also means expanding abundance because it comes hand in glove. I think that’s, that’s my personal experience and this whole journey around the bringing together of the world’s leading podcast network in solar and quite frankly in energy storage, electrification, and mobility. But, but solar is the starting point. And SolarAcademy, which is this voice within all of these organizations talking about what they do, teaching others this shared collective wisdom. I mean, that is incredible. And now we can AI Power, all of this stuff to really supercharge the learning cycle and ascending process.

Jon: I’m, I’m so excited about this and it’s really a joy to be here. So thank you both for having me.

Kerim shares the founding story and ideas behind creating SolarAcademy

Nico: When I created the Suncast podcast, it was to capture founder’s stories. Jon, yours is among them. And Kerim, I have long pursued to have as a founder who would share his story on my platform,  which I’m grateful we’re gonna be doing soon, but, capturing those founder stories is one thing.

Nico: Capturing the rest of the organization’s stories is quite a different one, and that’s something that you’ve been on a journey to figure out how to unpack, how to actually package in a meaningful way, and lots of the ways that I’ve been thinking about it. Kerim, you’ve also been thinking about on a product level, and so I’d love for you to give the Solar Academy founding story, if you will, kind of give us a sense in two or three minutes of the original nugget of an idea.

Kerim: Yeah, so this came to me. the vision for Solar Academy really came to me so. Back around 2010, 11, 12 timeframes. I don’t exactly remember. It’s a little blurry, whether it was the first or second, or third year of our CivicSolar, journey, which was a 10-year, startup journey, which I did with my two co-founders  Michael Goldberg, and Michael Paler.

Kerim: You know, we were essentially an Amazon marketplace like distribution platform for solar equipment between manufacturers and the long tail of solar installers, residential and small commercial. Mostly thousands of installers bought equipment from us and we built you know, over 10 years with almost no capital, a company of about 80 employees, half of which were salespeople. And the idea for SolarAcademy came to me observing our salespeople on the sales floor.

Kerim: Day in day, day of day in, day out. Especially after someone like you, Nico, who is a representative from, Trina or Canadian Solar or one of the major panel manufacturers or inverter manufacturers or racking manufacturers, you guys would come into our offices, train our sales folks, and then.

Kerim: When I walked he floor the next day, I would hear usually the same 2, 3, 4 key sentences, the key value prop messages that those salespeople observed from the training. And then they would be calling their customers, promoting and talking about these products and trying to get new business.

Kerim: And I would be like, man, there’s so much parallel processing in like, in any education process. And right around that time, Khan Academy had come out and they had really kind of put out thousands of 10 to 15-minute videos for K through 12 education pretty much putting all of the elementary, middle, and high school curriculum on videos.

Kerim: And I’m like, we’re in the business of educating our customers too, so why can’t we capture some of this information on videos and send it in the form of videos or share it in the form of videos with customers, not the whole sales conversation, because the customer is always gonna have more and more information.

Kerim: There’s gonna be many other details to be flushed out, but there was always at least a 20 to 50% of the information exchange that happened on a call could have been documented on a video and shared in another format. And I’m like, we gotta do this. And for many reasons at the time inside the company, it was just, I think humanity was just not ready for it.

Kerim: But thanks to Covid, really, when most of the B2B conversations shifted over to Zoom, just like we’re having it now, it became so simple to record a conversation and to publish it. And so essentially the idea is to capture what a product is about and share, the details of it in video and audio forms where it’s can be consumed wherever, whenever, on whatever platform and, you know, at the convenience of the prospect and the customer when they want to consume it.

Kerim: So that was the idea. 

How do customers see value in and benefit from SolarAcademy?

Nico: Kerim, do you recall, I feel like I’ve watched this unfold and in the process of watching you get more comfortable with what the product itself is, but do you recall a moment where you felt like you had enunciated the product in a way that not just you, but the customer on the other line, the prospect go, oh, I get it.

Nico: Can you take me to that moment?

Jon: I can tell you, tell me. I can tell you our thing with Scott. Our thing with Scott was great. Where Scott was explaining, everyone’s heard of this perovskite, I, you know, the, I can’t even say it, perovskite. Yeah. Yeah. and it’s been this like sort of this genie that we’ve chased for so many years.

Jon: Yeah. And what Scott has done, because of his like superior engineering background, is he separates the generators. And he has a silicon generator and perovskite generator in parallel. And they’re ganging it up on the bus bar in terms of voltage. And so you get more production out of both surfaces, but they’re not, they’re not mashed onto each other like many are trying to do.

Jon: And I thought, thought that’s a super clever thing. And in my mind, he’s taken the technology risk away. And so if I was buying modules and I knew it had Caelux’s technology inside, I’d say, I know exactly what that is because Scott told me about it. Yeah. And I trust Scott and the voice that told me that was trusted.

Jon: And so there’s this trust and knowledge sharing that is an interesting amalgam.

Kerim: Mm. And so I was gonna say, I think the one person that got my vision and the product and what it’s supposed to do the best was you, Niko!

Nico: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have been, I have been saying that there’s a, there’s a goldmine a treasure trove of content and data locked inside of the hardest-to-access minds in a business. The founders and executives who are trying to grow the company and don’t want to or have the time to take, to step back and tell their story, they need customers, but they are willing to spend time with you and me, Kerima, because we can give them feedback and insight, but also if they know we’re gonna distribute it on our platforms for the same reason that Sungrow and, you know, Extensible Energy and Yotta Energy and many other companies, I’m just thinking 60 Hertz and Clean Power Research, a handful of companies to name just in the last six to 12 months who’ve trusted their brand with our brand.

Nico: Because they wanted to be associated with someone who was speaking to the leaders in the industry and who has an audience. You know that they will give us time to capture that story. And they trust me because I’ve interviewed 600-plus people. I remember a very specific conversation that for me sparked this idea and I brought it to you and you were like this is a solar conversation.

Nico: And it was, it was Joe at Segway Infrastructure. I hope he doesn’t mind me mentioning his name specifically. But I said, Joe, what was the best webinar you did last year? And he said, oh, it was with Level 10. I’m like, awesome. Where can I watch it? And it was crickets. I said, but your sales guy knows where it is, right?

Nico: And he goes, I sure hope he does. And I thought, what a tragedy in our industry right now, that we are creating loads of content and it’s siloed on a website or on a YouTube channel that nobody really knows how to search for. Why don’t we have a place like SolarAcademy, where we can create a directory of knowledge that is vetted and validated by industry veterans who understand what it’s meant to be.

Nico: And then give people a platform where they can share that knowledge. They can have others go and look at this third-party website that’s not their own website. We all know there’s sort of a user bias against it. Sort of, there’s a, there’s a credibility marker of it being published on, a Canary Media or a PV magazine or such industry trade magazines.

Nico: You know, why isn’t there a knowledge repository? Like that, where the folks aren’t paid journalists whose job is to go out and sort of get stories, but it’s coming from the industry itself. And we can teach people how to do what you and I have learned to do over the last decade, which is to harvest these nuggets of wisdom and repurpose them for the purpose of taking, not just taking a product that’s at product-market fit to scale.

Kerim: Yeah. And also the other, element of this is, we bring the personalities, the people upfront. Because, and I see this shift happening both in the hiring the HR world, in the process of hiring new employees, but also in sales and marketing. Where, you know, before, going back to when we started CivicSolar if you wanted to buy solar panels or inverters from a solar distributor, it was almost impossible to, they didn’t have websites or they, yeah, maybe they did, but they didn’t really, yeah. List products. Website just listed the brands of products they carried. You were lucky if they answered the phone. Yeah. Most of the salespeople were almost like you know, from the 20th century traveling salespeople or takers.

Kerim: And order takers and not enough information. Whereas what we try to do with SolarAcademy, I’m gonna share screen now just to show what a solar conversation looks like. Here is you know, one of the leading solar, software tools in the market to design and generate proposals, for, installers, residential and commercial in ACT systems is,  you know, one of the companies that we, worked with at SolarAcademy.

Nico: You know, we call those customers, Kerim. He, you have Yes. One of the is a customer.

Kerim: Is a customer. and you know, here, talking to Joe Tanner of you know, director of sales at Enact. And we basically go over, you know, within 35 minutes, we cover pretty much 50 plus percent of the general content that he would cover in an initial sales call with any prospect. Yeah. And we break this conversation down into chapters, we transcribe it. Um, so it essentially replaces partially a content marketing effort that the company would be engaged in. And also it gets the voices out with video. Establishes a rapport and some trust. Yeah. Because of the fact that they’re publicly sharing certain levels of information ahead of time that creates an extra level of,  trust with the customer, and saves a whole bunch of time, not only for the sales and marketing professionals at the company but also for the prospects, too.

Nico: Yeah. So if you’ve been thinking about how do I get started? With content marketing…

Nico’s summary of SolarAcademy’s value proposition

Nico:  You know, you need to be out there. You’ve heard everyone say video and podcasts are the new case studies, right? They are the way to capture that content, but don’t know quite where to start? You don’t maybe have an internal marketing manager or the one that you have is just completely already overworked. Or you have hard time getting your executives to sit still long enough for an outside agency who doesn’t really understand your product or our industry to capture that story and communicate that essence in some, you know, witty blog post.

Nico: If you’ve been wondering how to evolve your marketing services within the construct of what you already do, something that fits with what you already do, which is everybody’s using Zoom and Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, We think that this is, a novel and dare I say, perfect way to capture that content.

Nico: And it’s the start to new blog posts and a blog if you don’t have one. It’s at least in the way that we’ve designed it, for the next year, it’s four pillar pieces of content where we go through exactly how your business serves your ideal customer and I can’t think of a better, I can’t think of better marketing than that because everything else is, derivative of that. A case study is derivative of that. A white paper is derivative of that cuz a white paper just is the 201 to what is the product story, right? It’s drilling down on maybe one specific thing that you have a patent on. It’s equivalent to what we do in a much more comprehensive sort of, produced way in our tactical Tuesdays in our live broadcasts.

Nico:  And this is something that’s very approachable and very easy to bolt on for just about any company in the industry. I can’t imagine a company not having the knowledge to do this and the budget to serve it. 

Who is the ideal customer for SolarAcademy?

Nico: Well, Kerim, there are many ways to sort of package and think about this, but when you think about the ideal customer for Solar Academy as a, as a sort of parting thought? Who, who, who fits in that bucket for you?

Kerim: I think, like you said, it, it could be any company in the solar industry. I see for the first for the next year to two years, it will be primarily be used by, companies to do B2B communication rather than B2C.

Kerim: Right. I see, you know, manufacturers, whether they’re, module manufacturers, inverters, racks, and mounts batteries it’s perfect for them because you will have to tell your story sales pitch once and hopefully through our platforms, thousands of potential customers, installers, EPCs, will be able to hear all of that, very easily and conveniently.

Kerim: Also, very appropriate for finance companies trying to reach these sorts of EPCs as channel partners. Software companies that operate in the solar industry and many other technology companies that serve the long tail of players in  the residential and small to medium sized commercial, maybe even utility-scale, EPCs. 

Nico: I definitely think we’ll have some utility-scale EPCs.

Nico: Yeah. I definitely think that. I mean, virtually every person that I can think of for the last 200 episodes we’ve done on Suncast should be, should be a solar conversation candidate. So, and many of them, they cross the gamut.

Kerim: Yeah. I’ve said the utility-scale last because I think the markets get more and more inefficient as you go to the long tail.

Kerim: I think at the top of the market where the big players are, there’s usually, you know, probably less than a hundred, a hundred companies that move more than 50% of the market. And up there, everybody knows everyone, and information flows pretty efficiently. Whereas when you go down to the long tail, 10,000 plus probably approaching 20,000 if not more now active EPC players.

Kerim: Yeah, it’s a, it’s a lot harder to get the message across there. And, you know, that was essentially one of the. challenges that we dealt with at CivicSolar, right when we were distributing to those types of customers.  And that is why, that inspiration moment is relevant to the product being designed right now, and hopefully rolled out, very, very soon to many others.

Nico: Well, it is coming soon to a neighborhood near you and, we’re working on ways to scale it. You know, it’s SolarAcademy. When I found it was, was a, a beautiful idea. A website in many ways where you had taken risks that I had not taken.

Nico: And you and you were, thinking in more expansive ways than I was thinking. And yet you were still doing all of the editing yourself. So I like to say when someone asks, I say it’s SolarAcademy powered by Suncast. Because our team is now super, super powering all the work that you’re doing, and happily so,  as we continue to build out the vision for sort of creating the central repository for new media in the clean economy.