The transcription of the video is below.

Kadeer’s background in the technology industry

Kerim: Hi, everyone. This is Kerim, Kerim Baran with SolarAcademy. Today I have with me Kadeer Beg of Sunhub. Welcome, Kadeer. Good to have you. 

Kadeer: Oh, thanks, Kerim. Thanks for having me on. 

Kerim: Great. So as usual, today, we’re going to cover a new innovative offering for the solar and renewable energy industry. And before we do that, though, I want to dig a little into, Kadeer, your personal background of how you ended up with Sunhub, and maybe from there, you can jump into Sunhub’s story associated with YellowLite, which is a regional leader in the Ohio area. 

So give us a little bit about how you came to work on Sunhub, which is an innovative new solar trading platform, which we will share with our audience. 

Kadeer: So my background has really been in a lot of the technology space for a very long time, you know, basically automating and re-engineering systems and coming out with some innovative stuff. So I have participated in a lot of innovative types of companies, came up with various products over the years with the tap type of technology where you could tap and you could serve marketing content and then build some order management systems.

And there are some products I had released in my earlier days that IBM used to OEM for me and they used to brand it under their umbrella and sell it and had a whole consulting arm around those types of services. 

So it’s always been in that innovative type of sector I’ve been, and I’ve served as a CTO in various companies. So I bring that technology kind of background, and I also have some financial background, as well, that I had to have to bring to the table. 

The origins of Sunhub and the gap they’re bridging in the current solar market

So to give you an idea how this all started Sunhub is basically a spinoff from a company called YellowLite, which I think you’re very well aware of. I know you’ve known Azam for a very long time, who was the founder. 

Kerim: Yeah, YellowLite. YellowLite used to be one of our customers at CivicSolar, and one of our bigger customers. And yeah, for sure.

Kadeer: Yeah. So you know Azam, who’s the founder of that company and that’s been around for like about 16-17 years now. And in that I think it’s the largest installer in Ohio today. 

Azam and Mitch, they got together, and Mitch comes from a marketing and e-commerce background, and in 2020, they got around to launching a spinoff and they were trying to address the distribution market, where they found a niche where, you know, people didn’t know how to kind of move used products, refurbished products and all that and thought creating a marketplace for that would be a good idea. 

So at that time, they launched that, and it took off fairly well, and then over time, what happened was we also got engaged with the e-commerce side of things where you are becoming a reseller and a distributor for various manufacturers and your portfolio of what you carry grew up significantly. 

And in that relationship, we started getting calls from people on the ground, like installers and who are not looking for equipment because we formed some reputation. And at that time, we didn’t really have a field business of helping our procurement side. And we started getting so many calls that we had to put up a department together, and that area of the business significantly grew. That caused us to look at it. 

And this is where I joined the company as a partner, looking at the current e-commerce marketplace business and looking at the gap between the procurement business where people are doing over the phone call. Right? 

Kerim: Yeah. 

Kadeer: And in that, we noticed that in the industry, there was a significant gap, but every other industry had a brokering type of platform, a trading platform. So if you look at an airline business, they have a travel distribution system, financials, they have a swift network that helps you.

And even if you look at the auto industry, you have the auto traders, all those types of things that help the market, from suppliers to buyers. And we thought that there was a gap. Nobody was on the platform speaking that language. So this is where the trader platform came in and we got together and we kind of built this platform out and we released it, I guess, in the RE+ of last year, and it’s been going fairly well.

Kerim: Got it. Got it. Very, very impressive because you’re right. I mean, as a distributor or as a broker agent not that we were necessarily a broker but in the distribution space of many industries, a lot of the players work with their competitors as partners as well, which is something that we did in distributing solar panels as a pure distributor. But even as a regional leading installer, I’m sure you guys had many buy and sell conversations with your peers, I’ll say, as sometimes as –

Kadeer: So that’s a great point. I always noticed since I’ve joined the industry, I found it to be extremely friendly, as you said, right? Like, I mean, there is still something as a competitor to us, really, frankly. Because if you look at –

Kerim: Because it’s such a rapidly growing industry, it’s, yeah, very friendly competition right now is mostly there. 

Kadeer: Yeah. Because even if you look at a distributor, right, from that perspective, you know, the distributors on our platform, selling their products and their time we buy from the distributor, right? So it’s always kind of everybody is dealing with everybody. You know, it’s very good.

Kerim: Yet, there are some industries, like the airline industry you’ve mentioned, which have a major platform that everybody trades tickets on or there are, I’m sure, other industries where there are industry-wide standards for trading units of goods and such a thing, does not really exist. 

There are some platforms in the industry that I’m familiar with, where you can post what you have in inventory. And other people can call and find out about it, if it’s still in inventory and stuff, but it’s not really a well-integrated, detailed trading platform that takes accountability for what happens on itself.

And I’m assuming that is the kind of platform that you are building with Sunhub, which I’m eager to dive into right now. 

Kadeer: Yeah. So if you take an analogy as you mentioned about the travel industry, you know, people if you see how that evolved, right, and every industry evolves, so if you look at the travel industry in the old days, and I think we’re in the similar kind of age group, where you remember the time our parents used to probably call the travel agents, right, on the phone.

Kerim: Yeah, of course. And I used to do that. 

Kadeer: Yeah. 

Kerim: I used to fly from my home country Turkey to the US for college, every year back and forth. I’ve done that. Yeah. Totally. 

Kadeer: And you notice that at that time, even in the travel industry, people used to kind of price these tickets out and used to just call them and go. And they used to reach out to the travel companies and before, basically, the TDS, or the travel distribution system existed, you had basically, people giving you a price point where you didn’t see all the options, right? So you would get a morning flight for 6:00 in the morning because you asked for the cheapest, but for $10 more, or $15 more, you could have a nine o’clock flight, which is more convenient. So those things were not available. 

So from an inventory perspective, you were not available, what was out there and things were not real time because you have to wait for a code and all that.

Kerim: Yeah.

Kadeer: If you look at today’s world, after those travel agencies, all these airlines are publishing in one place and they’re speaking the industry language, right? They’re telling you what’s first class price, what coach is, how many bags you can check in, those types of things are very industry-related and similar to our world, which we’ve been in.

And solar, as you know, like people deal in Incoterms, right? They do deal in payment schedules, delivery schedules, all that are very specific to the solar way, right? Or even negotiating price per watt, right, which is not per piece, right? So in all those things, every industry needs to kind of evolve and kind of address the industry needs and kind of, you know, make it a little bit more automated and more efficient for people.

What are Sunhub’s key features?

Kerim: Yeah, yeah. So tell us a little bit about those key features of Sunhub that make it unique and valuable for its users.

Kadeer: So one of the main things is it’s a, so imagine the platform to be like eBay, having like a chat interface, an intelligent chat interface, which is like WhatsApp, but on steroids, right?

So the way it works is it allows you to basically negotiate terms, which could be the Incoterms, payment terms, delivery terms, all those things, basically online. And at the same time, it gives you access directly to suppliers where you could negotiate, and it’s a moderated platform that allows you to generate a sales contract at the end, which is a binding contract, and it maintains anonymity.

So there’s a lot of things I mentioned there. So it is basically, overall, if you look at it, it’s a negotiation system that allows two parties to come to an agreement that could not necessarily, like eBay, be where people are looking for the highest bid. It’s not necessary. Because what could happen is people could offer you better terms, like they could say, “Your delivery is included”, and what do you call it? Then you would give them a better price. Or you could say, “I am paying up front a little bit higher. Your payment terms could be 100% up front, and if somebody has a cash flow problem, they may give you a better deal, so not necessarily is it the highest price. It could be a combination of things that a seller can come in, and they can have a variety of people get different deals on the same thing because you could also do partial bidding. 

So if somebody lists like 5 MW, you could go out there and buy 2 of it and somebody else can buy another 2, completely different terms.

Kerim: Wow, got it. And the system creates a sales contract and provides I guess the legal binding contracts for the two sides to transact. Is that –

Kadeer: Yeah. And we moderate that. And the way we do it is, I’ll give you a scenario that you may find interesting. So if somebody comes in and, you know, somebody has like, say 5 MG listed and somebody comes in and, you know, from a buyer perspective, comes in and purchase installer or an EPC buys, 2 MW, right? 

And they make a proposal for it. And basically, from our perspective, we negotiate. So they will say, “Hey, I want delivery included, and we’ll check with the supplier. Can you include delivery?” If you can’t, Sunhub also provides these value add services on top. 

So in other words, we have a logistic arm in the company, we have a warehousing arm in the company, so if a supplier can’t provide, say, delivery, we jump in and we tag on the markup on it, on the price basically, what the delivery cost. And we pass that on to the buyer.

So the buyer is pretty much content because they get delivery from us. In the seller’s perspective, they’re getting a pickup because they don’t provide delivery, they will have a separate term. We have a separate term. So now you have two-way contracts going to both people and both parties are happy because we can bridge that gap when it’s required.

Kerim: I get it. I get it. Impressive. 

How big is Sunhub’s solar marketplace?

So can you give us a little bit of a sense of the size of this operation? And I’m aware that you have an existing field team of broker-teammates on your traditional business side. So are they using this, their counterparts in other companies, starting to use this? 

Do you have – how much volume do you have signed up on the platform? And is it for panels as well as inverters and batteries and racking? How’s all of that? 

Kadeer: Oh, that’s an excellent question. So I’ll just give you a little background on how, when it got started. So we launched it in RE+in September, announced the trader platform. At that time, we came out – 

Kerim: September 2023, right? 

Kadeer: Yes, 23. Yeah. Exactly.

Kerim: Yeah, yeah. 

Kadeer: And we announced that it will work with solar panels. And, you know, the reason for that initial was because there was a lot of traffic on the panel side of it that we were dealing with, with our procurement arm, as well.

And that seemed like the main component to go after. And also, in the industry, that lacked, basically, the communication of the industry language. So what I mean is, people were trading in quantity outside. Nobody was, there was no e-commerce side that addressed the needs of trading in price per watt.

Or, you know, trying to buy pallets and containers at that kind of level, where you could easily work in those terms. So we launched that. And as of this quarter, we launched that, what was it? Intersolar, we announced batteries and capability of inverters, as well. So now you could trade that, as well.

Kerim: Yes.

Kadeer: And if you look at it from a quarter perspective, roughly about, you know, five months or so, inventory-wise from a supplier side, we have about 300 MW. 

And we started a marketing initiative in January now. And we see a significant uptake in suppliers being added to, in all these three forms. And we expect by the end of this quarter, which is the first quarter of 2024, we expect to carry the largest inventory online out of any platform that exists. 

Kerim: Wow. Impressive. Very impressive. 

Preamble to Sunhub’s demo + thoughts on refurbished equipment

Now, it might make sense to dive into the product, the platform a little bit and get a quick demo of the platform and what it feels like, unless you want to cover anything else, before we go there.

Kadeer: Oh, sure. I think there’ll be good topic talking points while I give you that demo. I’ll speak about a certain capability that exists, while I’m in the demo and hopefully, it resonates. So let me share my screen. 

Kerim: Yup. 

Kadeer: So there are two perspectives. One, I’m going to start off from a buyer’s perspective, which is basically a seller. And the sellers could be two people, right? They could be manufacturers, they could be distributors, and they could also be installers and EPCs who have leftover inventory or refurbished inventory. They can all sell on the platform. We allow for new use, as well. 

So on our platform, if you look at the main site, when you go on it –

Kerim: By the way, I’m really curious about this refurbished part of the industry. That seems to be really growing rapidly lately. I hear a lot of people talk about recycling refurbished equipment.

Like what percent of the volume do you expect to be that, as you guys build this platform? Just a curious question. 

Kadeer: So I’m thinking it’s going to be around, I think about 10-15% as we see right now. That’s the ratio it’s been moving with, but at the same time, we’re getting a lot of manufacturers. We’ve noticed the need in the manufacturing side, because there are a lot of people who are trying to penetrate the US market today. So there are a lot of these overseas companies, and as you probably know, that are pretty big outside, but they are not as well-known in America and they have been trying to establish themselves. 

So we see an uptake in that. A lot of manufacturers we’re talking to currently that are kind of getting that market, and this platform is serving them really well, for that reason, because, you know, what we do is some of the things I didn’t speak about is the way people can engage with us there are a couple of ways where they could go on and be, basically, you know, manage their account themselves.

Or we can manage their account, as well. So in other words, we can list for them. They could define the boundaries of what the negotiating parameters would be, what the price would be, this type of thing. And the third is a premium.

Kerim: Yes. And your take rate varies then as a percentage of margin you’re taking for moving that product, I guess, if you’re managing that inventory versus if they’re managing their sales activities on the platform. 

Kadeer: Yeah. It’s a good point. And fairly, it’s a standard for the first two types, which would be, if they enlist it, we mark it up. If we manage it, we mark it up, right? 

Which, when it comes down to the third way, which is a premier partnership with us, because we provide the ability to provide quotes to people, so we could handle the whole sales order process of a company. So it’s actually an e-procurement tool, if you look at it. 

We could do marketing for them because we have a pretty big arm from a marketing perspective because we send out a newsletter to about 30, 000 people or so on a weekly basis. 

We also have new trends that are going out and then we also actually advertise on Google and all these other things, Google ads and things like that, where a manufacturer who’s trying to penetrate or, you know, promote their product could leverage our infrastructure of that whole marketing team that we have in place and can reach out to all those places with blogs and things like that. 

So in that partnership, what we do is we establish more of a reseller type of distributor type of agreement with them. And that’s kind of more like a fixed contract-based agreement, where it’s not per product margin type of listing. It’s this more overall, company relationship. 

Kerim: I understand. Okay. 

Demo of the platform: How to sell solar equipment?

Kadeer: So if you get on our site, basically what you see is ability to sell and a seller, like I mentioned, those are people who are manufacturers, distributors or installers that have new or used inventory, they can actually go out there and list it. So we’ll go over how you go about listing it, and I’ll kind of walk you through it. 

My mouse is slowing down. There you go. So you click on, sell on Sunhub, and you can sell, like I said, solar panels, inverters, batteries, and it gives you that. 

Now, there’s another way of getting to it, you know? Right from there, you could go to my profile after you create an account. And in there, it gives you an option to go to my store, and you go out there and it’ll say the solar trader platform on the left. And you could go and create a deal listing. 

And again, you could you know list panels, inverters, and batteries. It’s the same screen. And the cool thing that we have in our tooling is we have actually all the products loaded, spec sheets loaded, so all you have to do is enter your part number. And then it actually pre-fills everything based on that, the description of the product, the product details, that you see on the right, the specification showed up, all the descriptions showed up. So all these data sheets are already preloaded into our platform.

The other helper tool we provide is an inventory calculator. So when you’re listing, you can list it by pieces, or megawatts. You type that in. It already has the spec sheet, so it could calculate the pieces, pallets, containers, all that for you, the weight. And when you update it, it actually tells you exactly what the quantity on hand is, so it makes it really easy for listing a product. 

The additional thing is we actually allow people to sell future inventory for manufacturers, right? That’s in production. So they could save the availability dates when it’s available. So when people are negotiating and bidding, they can buy it earlier, you know, pre-production inventory as well. 

The other thing is we allow for pricing which could be a three-digit pricing specially priced per watt, they want do a penny, and you could pick the minimum quantity that you want to sell as well, which could be at a pallet, container on all that level.

The other thing is on the IncoTerms that you see we support all the 11 IncoTerms where people could pick up, deposit, all that kind of stuff that you could select and list on the product side of it. 

Now, this is the cool thing part about the platform, which we were talking about, what could be negotiated on the platform, right? And this is where you define your terms, when you’re listing, what you think you want. 

So from an inverter is what comes with it. Also, save the payment terms. So the payment terms would be, you know, in this case, we’re listing 30% payment upfront and 70% paid on delivery. Right? And you could define that as a seller. 

And the delivery could be as well as like in 90 days, you could deliver, you know, the full shipment. Or you can have a whole schedule listed when you would deliver it, and you can negotiate all that along with the warranty. In this case, it says like 25 years’ warranty. You could have your terms what you provide for the product listed. 

And we also collect the banking information because when we collect the money, we kind of will deposit to your account. And now that’s not shared with anybody. That’s for internal use. But, you know, it makes the process easy because we’ll automate all those things as we collect the money. 

Other interesting things is you could also attach UL search, you could attach images to the products. So, you know, we allow for basically, any kind of certifications you think could be valuable for the industry, that a buyer can come on there and appreciate, especially if you have things that require certain laws. Can it make it overseas? All those things could be provided in documentation format. 

Once you do that, you submit the listing. And we have a process on the listing. You see on the right, it says pending. So we have an approval process, and once it gets published it becomes active. 

And the product title shows the type of listing you have with the icons. You know, it’s a panel inverter and all that. It describes and you can manage that listing. You can manage the inventory, all that, as well, after you’ve published it. 

Now once we publish the inventory it goes on our site. It looks like this when somebody searches for it. And I’ll give you an idea. People come in there and search for solar panels or batteries. When they do the search, our deal listings show up, and on the left they have a lot of filters, which I can walk through later in terms of how you can sort it, and they can look at the terms you just defined, right?

The listing has those terms that you listed, people could view those, they could look at the specifications of the product, they could look at the supporting documents like the UL certs, all that, you have attached, we talked about when you listed. 

So from a buyer perspective, they have all this information available to them on their hand, right? And they can also use, basically, an inventory calculator to figure out what they want to purchase and a partial buy, as well. 

Demo of the platform: How to buy solar equipment?

I can walk it in two ways, kind of walk it through the demo and then from a buyer perspective, what I was thinking of doing is kind of slowing it down and walking that interaction from kind of more of a screen, but I could actually do how that process works as well from a demo.

So let’s walk from a buyer’s perspective because we just went through how somebody lists the product, right? So now, we’re going to go over how somebody purchases it. 

So now they’re looking at, basically, the deal listing. They’re looking at the terms. The main thing is the quantity on hand, basically, the price as well as the terms that you’re dealing with. Right? 

And like I mentioned a little bit earlier, you got all the other complementary information that people can look at. And now here’s the inventory calculator, which you could do partial bidding by calculating how much you want to do. It’ll give you exactly in pallets position. 

Now, this is how you kind of bid. You could decide on a partial amount if you want, say, five containers out of the listing. You could actually, you know, say I’m interested in five containers. If you have any other kind of requirements like delivery and all that, which I’ll cover a little bit in a slower pace, how that works, but this is showing you that chat interface we talked about that is unique to our platform, right?

You could go out there and update the offer anytime you want. It looks like a chat format. People make an offer. The buyers and sellers see this chat, type of chat environment. They could look at the contracts. They could discuss with each other. We moderate it. So if there is any discussion on the terms update on a system message, the terms get updated.

If there’s an agreement, I’ll slow this process down on another slide a little bit, where you could see it, but on a fast way, when you’re communicating, the idea is terms get updated, people accept offers, people can view those offers, what they got accepted, and then a contract gets basically generated out of that, right?

And the way you generate the contract is basically, you have the entity name and the address for the legal binding piece of it. As soon as you enter that information, it generates a contract to give you an idea. You can just download that contract, and we’ll just walk over those things at a little slower pace because I know your audience will be interested in how do you purchase off the platform, and I’ll walk through that. So, as you see, the contract is set. 

So now let’s walk through in a slower motion for a buyer perspective, right? And I’ll walk through with some icons in there, so people can see exactly. 

So when you’re searching from a buyer perspective, what’s available inventory, you could search by panels, batteries, inverters, and in a panel, if you decide to pick the panel, you’ll see the type of panel, you could search by the wattage. You can filter by the color. Also, the tier group they belong to and also the brands. Right? 

Kerim: Yeah.

Kadeer: And here is basically the listing that you see where there’s summary level, and it gives you the part number, the minimum quantity, and the quantity on hand that’s available, as well as the shipping time, which is in IncoTerms, right? 

Now, here is really the new thing for the industry, which is related to price per watt, right, concept that doesn’t exist in the industry that you can negotiate because all the projects are planned that way. People are negotiating that way, the industry is selling that way. It’s about time that people can buy that way, right? 

And once they look at the details by clicking on that, they can get to the more of the details, which is, you know, has the same – the critical thing is the quantity on hand. Because for a buyer, the important thing is the price, quantity at hand, and the terms. Right? 

Kerim: Yeah.

Kadeer: And then we have this little calculator that says, “If you want to transfer between watts and quantity figured out how many, you know, panels go in a pallet and a container”, you can easily look that up if you want to do partial bidding. It’s a helper tool. 

Kerim: Sure.

Kadeer: And then you have the specifications that you look in the details, which I was going over earlier. That is automatically loaded because all the product sheets, we have imported for all the products out there, right? So it really makes it helpful for people. If you wanted to compare against another product, look at it. All that is available even from a listing perspective, from a buying perspective, details are helpful.

So let’s look at the terms when you click on it on a listing. And these terms basically list out the product and the quantity on hand, that is in total. But if you decide to bid partially, that would change for you because you’re dealing with a partial quantity.

And the Incoterms are there that people define as the connector type, the payment type, all that is in there, right, that you’re negotiating. 

So now let’s walk through kind of the process of the bidding. So when somebody hits that inquire or make offer button on the listing, you see this type of screen, from a buyer perspective. 

Now what you have is you have the ability to send an inquiry and just start chatting because you may want to discuss maybe to include the delivery. Or maybe you want to have some special terms from a payment perspective. You may want to iron that out before you actually give an offer. 

So it gives the ability to just inquire. Or you could just send an offer or ask for a partial quantity. It lets you know from a desired perspective, minimum quantity. In this case, the seller is expecting at least one pallet bid, right?

And some of them are listed at a panel level, some are at a container level. So it depends what you’re shopping for. At least you’re aware of it, from a buyer perspective, what’s the minimum parts that you can sell. And based on that, you could buy on a pallet, panel, container level, and that’s a drop down. And you could put your, you know, desired quantity. All right? 

And then you could see a price. You don’t have to see a price because you may want to negotiate first. So those are optional. But if you have a price in mind, you could submit that. And then you could change, in this case, we’re showing the original listing was what, 30% down and 70% on delivery. 

And this buyer says, “I want to maybe pay 20% down, a little bit less. And can you do 80% on delivery?” And it makes that request and sends the offer. As soon as you make that offer, you go into this chat-like interface which is new to the industry, and it’s new to any auction site. So, you know, this is the first and we have patented this, as well. So that is a unique offering to be able to negotiate, have a moderated platform that allows negotiations between two parties and generates two independent contracts, as well. 

So this is a unique offering, actually in the whole technology space, so it doesn’t even have to be sold out. It is the fact that, this concept is very new, and I think people so far, that I’ve been buying off a platform have been really appreciative of it because their interaction is fairly quick. They can discuss a lot of these things that are unavailable that, you know, from a coding perspective takes time. 

People don’t know the inventory. They have the live inventory now. They can actually discuss various terms very quickly with the supplier and know the answer. Right? I’ll pause a little bit. Kerim, if you wanted to jump in because – 

Kerim: Yeah. This is really innovative and very, very smart. I know something like this exists in the banking industry, where certain traders’ conversations are recorded and becomes a record of transaction essentially, in treasury and trading rooms of major financial institutions, but yeah, very innovative and new for an industry like ours. Very impressive. Thank you for showing, you know, the amazing depth of thought that you put into this product, this trading platform really for the industry. Very, very impressive. 

And how amazing and obviously natural also, at the same time that it’s coming out of a team that has been engaged in this brokering of moving product activity for probably a decade plus at this point, I’m assuming, with all of YellowLite and its ecosystem of the brokerage arm. 

And I’m assuming, your brokerage team, that’s focused on the procurement activities and trading activities are starting to use this with their counterparts in the industry, as well. And it sounds like you guys have secured a huge amount of inventory already. I’m really looking forward to it. 

Kadeer:, You’re exactly right. It’s a kind of like very complementary services, right? So whatever we have in inventory, or at least from a supplier’s perspective, manufacturers, you know, they could list on there. People have access to that.

Now, if people find that there is something missing, because we’ve been doing this business, we have relationship with so many parties from distributors to manufacturers, we can always get things. So now today, like I said, when our business grew, the procurement side of it, which is the offline businesses, grew so much that we’re serving utility companies today with 250 MW projects today, right?

So we have grown that arm where we provide logistic capabilities as well as warehousing capabilities for people that need that. So that arm is complementary to this as well, because as we are providing services here, we tap into that arm to help out close these transactions that people are even negotiating online.

Kerim: Very, very impressive. Yeah. I think we’ve covered the basics of the platform really in a good level of depth. And thank you very much for this wealth of information and insight you shared with us in regards to this new innovative trading platform for the industry, Kadeer. 

Concluding thoughts: how to reach out to Sunhub?

Anything else you would like to add? 

Kadeer: Yeah. I was thinking to take maybe 30 seconds to just go over the chat, which I think people would find interesting, how that works.

So in this case, it’s a completed chat. So in the first area you see at the bottom is the messaging, right? Just like WhatsApp, right? You type in your chat, your message, and you could send the message, you could update the offer, or you could update the partial quantity as you’re discussing. So whatever you’re bidding for, you could change that in your chat at all times.

And then you could have that message go where people are discussing. In this case, if you wanted to change the delivery, basically, the payment terms, right? And if the seller is in agreement, the payment, so these are system messages that we moderate, we generate in these blocks. So if we change anything, you get a terms updated message. And in that the terms get updated, but you could always look at what terms have been negotiated, updated what you’re bidding on. 

And now you could make that offer update. And if, basically, the seller accepts the offer, then you could see the details of that offer itself and the terms where it’s under, and you can generate the contract, right, automatically. 

So these would be kind of the steps in a chat that you see generally in a common transaction, and here is an example of kind of the contract that’s generated. You see basically the description of the goods, the quantity under the transaction, as well as the terms that you’ve worked out. 

So those are a couple of things. And I think I spoke a little bit earlier about how people can engage with us, as well. 

Kerim: Right.Yeah. I am aware. So thank you very much for all this background, Kadeer. Great insight into the platform and the services you provide around that. 

So obviously, Sunhub is a spinoff from YellowLite, which also has a brokerage activity, commerce activity around, in the same ecosystem.

So what are some good ways to get in touch with the Sunhub team and the brokerage team for local installers, the EPC companies, or maybe even utility scale company developers or other types of large companies to buy mass amounts of solar panels from you guys?

Kadeer: So from a trader platform perspective, if you people are interested in more information, you know, people can book a demo, so we could actually walk towards exactly what people’s requirements are and how they would engage. And we can help them list and all that. So we have a dedicated team to do that. 

And you could always reach us by phone call, as well. Now, that whole procurement arm that, you know, if you’re looking for something very specific, more custom, you could reach out, and in that case, we could obviously look at that utility level, which takes a little bit longer and more contract-based stuff.

There’s a whole dedicated team that’s actually, you know, the offline team that works and servicing that side of it. So that’s one of the great ways of reaching out. 

And if you’re interested in say, you know, basically the industry trends, we publish newsletters. We publish also the deals. So if people are looking to shop, you could sign up on our newsletter. You could get the trends and the deals coming to you and you can interact from the newsletter, as well.

Kerim: Yeah. As this platform grows, I’m sure you guys are going to have such major insight into pricing trends, inventory trends, the whole solar coaster dynamics and everything else. So very, very promising. 

Again, Kadeer, thank you very much for all this information and insight and peek into your platform. And I’m looking forward to making more of these recordings with you. Maybe a future one could be about a customer use case, how they’re using it and further additions to the platform. Thank you. 

Kadeer: You know, I much appreciate you having me on board. It was a pleasure. And you know, we are always adding capability to it. We’re taking customer feedback all the time, enhancing the product. 

We have a pretty good roadmap in place, with additional capability, and I’d love to come back on and discuss some of those. And we will definitely go over some case studies.

Kerim: Great. Thank you. Talk to you soon. 

Kadeer: All right. Thank you.