The transcription of the video is below. 

Introducing Sunvoy

Al: Hi, My name is Al Vasquez, and I’m an executive coach after spending 20 years in software. And I’m here with Joe Marhamati. Joe and I go way back all the way to college.

Joe has launched and built an incredible piece of software for the solar industry, and I’m here to interview him about it. 

Joe, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and about Sunvoy? 

Joe: Thanks, Al. Yeah, I really appreciate the opportunity. I’m a big fan of SolarAcademy and really, I’m here today just to talk about my background in starting Ipsun Solar and how that led to Sunvoy. 

So it’s an interesting story, and lots of twists and turns, but really, I primarily want to talk about Sunvoy because I think that’s what SolarAcademy is interested in.

Al: Cool. So just so we can orient, Sunvoy and the things we already know about the solar industry, what is Sunvoy and what is its position in the market? And why should people care?

Joe: Well, Sunvoy is the first and only solar customer portal and fleet management system built by a solar installer, for a solar installer. So it’s branded with the logo, the colors of the solar installer, hosted on their website with the custom URL.

So it really looks like it was built by a solar installer for their homeowners. And it came out of our lived experience as a solar installer. You know, we’ve spent the last seven years, my business partner, Herve and I, building Ipsun Solar. 

Actually, I even have the mug right here. Check it out, just to prove that we’re a real solar company, too. It’s even worn down and everything. 

So Ipsun Solar is a seven-year-old solar business serving the Washington DC, metro area, and we do mostly residential and some light commercial work, but what we’ve realized a few years ago was that we were sending all of our customers to third party manufacturers’ monitoring websites, particularly from the inverter brands. 

You know, they all have their own communications device and monitoring platforms, and they really don’t have any relationship to the brand of the solar installer. So the status quo for solar installers is, you educate a homeowner on solar energy, get them to sign a contract, you kind of go dark for 3 to 6 months, and the homeowner really doesn’t know where they are in the process. You flip the switch once the system is installed and inspected and turned on. And then you basically hand over the customer relationship to a manufacturer and their monitoring platform, which doesn’t show the brand, the colors, the logo of the solar installer. 

And so you’re really just kind of handing over that relationship to somebody else for 30 years. And we realized that we had homeowners who were literally forgetting who installed the system, or who had no obvious way to refer their friends and family, or you know, would come to us at tax time and ask where their paid-in-full invoice was.

And it just made no sense to do this. We were really self-commoditizing in a sense, right? We were turning ourselves as a solar installer into a commodity that anyone could do, and that really is just no way to build a brand. It’s no way to reduce the cost of acquisition. It’s no way to upsell to the homeowner, for energy storage, or an EV charger, or more solar panels, or a smart main service panel that you would want to sell them over the course of 10, 20, 30 years. 

And so that really was the conception of Sunvoy, was giving homeowners a single point of truth, where they can track their project, where they can see all of their energy data in one place, where they can see all their project documents, where they can open a service ticket, where they can track their project from the minute they signed the contract, and they can live within one single place through the 30-year life of the system. 

Al: So that sounds like taking what used to be sort of a once-and-done sort of relationship where the installation is done, and we walk away, to something a lot more long-term. Am I having that right? 

Joe: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

I mean, most contractors in general, like home improvement contractors, they’re time and materials, right? They’re coming in. There’s a scope of work. They’re doing XYZ. They’re sending you an invoice. You’re paying the bill. And I don’t know about you, but I probably had 50 contractors come through my home in the 10 years, since I’ve owned this house.

I think it’s been exactly 10 years this week that I’ve owned this house. I don’t remember just about any of them. There are, you know, maybe one or two, I have some ongoing maintenance relationship with, like my HVAC contractor. But I don’t really remember most of them, and, you know, maybe in some of these industries, that’s fine, right?

If you’re a plumber, you’re doing plumbing work, you’re doing, you know, ongoing service work, and that fits your business model. For the solar industry, you know, the cost of acquisition is extraordinarily high. There’s some parts of the country where it’s up to a quarter of the cost of the system, is the cost of acquisition.

So it’s a real problem because solar is not normalized. And I heard it put well the other day. People don’t buy solar. They are sold solar, right? It’s not at the point like of just about every other technology in the home, where you know you need it, and you’re going to go find it on your own. You know, you have to be educated about the value proposition of solar.

And so there’s a lot of work to do in reducing that cost of acquisition, in building trust in the technology, in the installer network. And one way that we want to do that with Sunvoy, is to build the customer relationship. Right? So the solar installers are not commoditized, so that they can see all of their energy data in one place.

A perfect example of this is, you know, there are homeowners, including myself, who have solar. They have a home energy consumption monitoring. They have a smart main service panel. They have EV charging, they have energy storage, and they might be going to five different apps, literally, that have nothing to do with the brand of the solar installer, to track all their energy.

Al: Yeah, it gets really messy, gets really messy. Are you saying that Sunvoy can solve that?

Joe: Oh, yeah. Not only do you have one place to see all of your energy data now, as a homeowner. It’s all under the brand umbrella of the solar installer. So it’s in their colors and their logo. It’s in their customer portal.

And that brings a lot of legitimacy to the entire industry, right? Because now it’s like, Oh, okay. This is one system that’s all working together. And it’s a reminder of who did the work, that sold the system, developed it, installed it all in one place.

How Sunvoy Can Be Integrated into a Solar Installer’s Business?

Al: Does that mean that the solar installer needs to become an expert in all of the different devices that a homeowner might need?

Joe: Yeah, and you know, there’s solar installers that they just install solar. They don’t do any of that other stuff. And there are installers that they do solar and they do EV charging. So yeah, you could be an expert in all of it. You could be just an expert in solar. It’s kind of modular, right? It’s like we can integrate with basically any piece of equipment.

We have not yet met a piece of hardware that Sunvoy cannot integrate with. So if you want to install all the stuff I just mentioned, and you want to show your homeowner all that energy data in one place, you can do it. but you don’t have to.

Al: Got you. So what happens if a homeowner wants to add a device after the fact, you know, sometime later, after the solar has been installed? Can they add that to their Sunvoy portal?

Joe: Yes. So that’s the brilliance of it is, say you’re a solar installer. And, you know, five years ago, maybe you were just installing solar, but now you want to install energy storage because everybody’s asking about energy storage. Or you want to do home energy consumption monitoring. You can actually sell that to your homeowners.

And then you can add that to their platform, to their portal. So now, where they were just seeing solar production, but maybe you sold them an EV charger after the fact, right, because now you have that customer relationship, you have the ability to sell them this additional equipment as the industry is evolving. 

Well, you can add that EV charging data to their Sunvoy platform. You can add the circuit level consumption. You can add the energy storage data. So it’s kind of additive over time where they have one single place to see their entire energy profile at home. 

Al: So does that cost the homeowner anything to have access to Sunvoy?

Joe: Well, you know, it’s actually totally up to the solar installer. So what we’ve done at our company is we actually mark up the cost of Sunvoy by 10x. We resell it to the homeowner at 10 cents a watt, which is essentially 10 times the price of Sunvoy. And the reason we do that is because we use it as a way of building up our service division.

So we sell active monitoring with Sunvoy for the life of the system for 10 cents a watt. And that just means that we have eyes on your system. We can see if there’s an error, and we could also automatically send out instructions for simple stuff like Wi Fi disconnected. Well, we have an automatic email that goes out in our Sunvoy to tell a homeowner how to resolve that.

But if there’s a bigger issue, like a production issue, we can call them and we can try to troubleshoot it, resolve the problem, and so that’s an added service that we provide to homeowners. Now, it’s totally optional, but we’ve had 85% attachment in reselling Sunvoy to homeowners at a 10X market.

So it’s actually a big profit center for our company.

Al: And you think all solar installers could, you know, follow similar models or make up their own to also generate revenue? 

Joe: No, not all solar installers. And we don’t actually want to work with all solar installers. We want to work with solar installers that are vertically integrated, right?

So they’re doing sales, marketing, and construction, all under one roof, who care about their brand. I talk to solar installers. You know, sometimes, they don’t care about their brand. They are a commodity, and they’re fine with that because maybe, they’re just doing construction. Right? And they’re doing high-volume construction. And they’re not as focused on sales and marketing.

Maybe they’re outsourcing their sales and marketing. So we’re really looking to work with well-established companies that are doing everything under one roof that have a CRM, right? Because we have to find the data somewhere, right? The data is coming in from the CRM, like a HubSpot or a Salesforce or NetSuite or Zoho. It’s coming in the other side from their inverters, like an Enphase or a SolarEdge or a Fronius or an SMA.

And then it’s aggregating all of that data in one place to overlaying it. So now the solar installer can see all of their systems in one place, and the homeowner can see all their energy data in one place. But it may only be, you know, 20%, 30% of solar installers that have all of that. They care about their brand, they’re vertically integrated, they kind of want to build something like this. So it’s a section of the industry.

Al: Thinking about that, you know, if I were a solar installer, which I’m not, but if I were a solar installer listening to that, and I did care about my brand, I might think maybe I’m not big enough yet, to be able to afford Sunvoy. What stage of development would I need to be in, before I would consider bringing Sunvoy as a SaaS platform into my business practice?

Joe: Well, you need to have CRM, and we try to look for installers who are doing at least 50 to 100 installs a year and that want to grow. Right? So that’s the other piece is, you know, sometimes we talk to solar installers that they don’t want to grow. Right? They’re happy with where they are.

Maybe they’re 100% referral base, which, by the way, congrats to you, if you have figured that out. Usually, those companies are about 20 years old, and they’re just like cruising and they’re happy. 

Now, there’s a whole lot of other value that can be provided from Sunvoy, besides just referrals, which we’ll talk about today. But I would say, you want to be doing at least 50 to 100 installs. You want to have a CRM. You want to have a growth mindset. You know, you want to build yourself to be a referral-based business, reduce your cost of acquisition. 

So I’d say that those are usually the minimum required. And I would just add, you know, we want to have a minimum standard of ethics, too, which sounds kind of like a throwaway, but it’s really important to us.

It’s kind of in our DNA. At Ipsun Solar, you know, we are a certified B Corp and we really value openness and honesty and transparency with our customers. And the reason that really matters is because long-term, part of the vision is to build out a platform where solar installers can also receive new leads, new business from a network, almost kind of like a lead gen platform that’s for a very narrow subset of high quality installers that are willing to sign a code of ethics. 

So we really are looking for the best of the best installers. 

The Benefits of Using Sunvoy for Both Homeowners and Solar Installers

Al: Yeah. Got it. All right. Well, it sounds like the homeowner is going to get a huge benefit. You’re a homeowner, you mentioned. How do you use Sunvoy as a homeowner?

Joe: Well, I actually have Sunvoy in my living room, believe it or not. And I encourage all solar installers to do this. You can literally put a tablet next to your Nest thermostat that has all of your energy data in one place. And it’s super convenient for a homeowner, right? Because now they’re not logging in to five different apps to see what’s going on with their energy profile. They can literally see it at any time, right next to their Nest thermostat. 

And think about it from the perspective of the installer. Now, the installer has their logo, their colors, their brand in the living room of their customer. That is the ultimate referral machine because now everybody that comes through is going to see this amazing conversation piece and ask what it is and who installed your solar? And who installed your batteries and your EV charger? 

So it’s a value from both sides, for the homeowner to be able to see all their energy data in one place. I can see my solar production, my energy consumption, my circuit level consumption, my smart main service panel, my load control, my EV charger, all in one place.

And, you know, all under the brand umbrella of the solar installer. I can open a service ticket, right on this tablet, anytime I want. So it is super convenient. 

Al: So this sounds a lot like, you know, where the confluence of hardware and software have been going and sort of consumer electronics for a long time.

Why is Sunvoy, you know, so special? It almost sounds like it’s the only one that’s doing this.

Joe: Well, you know, there are a lot of tinkerers out there using their raspberry pie to create like, you know, you’ve seen the smart home stuff, right? Like, I can turn off the lights in my backyard and I can, you know, check the camera on my front doorbell all in one place.

It’s kind of like that. You know, there’s been some of that. I’ve never personally seen it in the energy industry. It really is the status quo to have all these disparate sources of energy data, having no relationship to the guy who did the work. So I’ve seen stuff like that in the smart home Internet of things world, which is cool, but I’ve never seen it for energy data.

And I think it’s just, there’s never been a marriage of all of this information in one place. And I think that’s part of the reason why solar is not yet normalized. That’s part of the reason the cost of acquisition is so high, because it’s just spread out all over the place, and there’s no one single point of truth that’s linking it all together.

Al: Well, maybe the solar industry is just, you know, flushed with cash and doesn’t need to solve this problem.

Joe: Oh, I don’t think so. No, it’s actually the pretty low-profit margins. You know, the little guys, the Ipsun Solars of the world, you know, are eking out small profits. The national public companies, most of them are not profitable.

They’re still running massive losses, trying to take market share, trying to bring the cost down, and everyone’s wondering, what is going to be this magical inflection point, where solar becomes like HVAC? And everyone’s just like, I got to have it now. And you know, no one knows exactly what that point in time is going to be, when it’s going to be, what it’s going to take.

Obviously, some of it is bringing the price down, and there’s a whole lot of other factors to that, but personally, I think it’s just seeing that your neighbor has solar, and your neighbor’s neighbor has solar, and your mom has solar, and your best friend has solar, and feeling left out, kind of like, you know, the first guy that got the flat screen TV. And you’re like, Oh yeah, I need to do that. I need to get a flat screen TV. 

When is it going to be that point in time? Well, I think that this is going to be a big piece of the puzzle, right? It’s like seeing the app from your neighbor. Oh, you have an app from XYZ solar company, showing all of your energy data? 

Like, what does it mean? Like, how much are you saving by having an EV? How much are you saving by having solar? What does it do for you by having a battery? It’s a conversation piece that opens it up to your whole network. And that, to me, is what normalizes solar, brings down the cost of acquisition. 

Al: So Sunvoy hasn’t been around for that long. Why should solar installers look at it now?

Joe: Well, I think you have to look at the status quo for your company. I mean, if you’re comfortable with the status quo of your customers not having a way to track their projects, of kind of handing over a third party app to your homeowners, when the system goes online, and you’re okay with that, and some companies are okay with that, and you don’t feel like you’re losing anything in doing that, then, you know, Sunvoy is not a good fit. 

But most of the time, when I talk to quality solar installers, I show them what their platform is going to look like. I show them everything it can do, which I know we’re going to do today. They really instantly see it. You know, a picture’s worth a thousand words. 

You see your brand and your logo and your colors in a customer portal where, you know, you’re going to own the customer relationship. From the minute that homeowner signs a contract for solar through the 30-year life of the system, it’s a lightbulb moment for every solar installer who cares about their brand, wants to build their company, cares about the mission of fighting climate change, they can see that they have been commoditizing themselves, as a status quo because they never knew there was another option. 

Al: Sure. Yeah. I guess why now, though? Why, you know, the fall of 2023? What’s going on that would drive a solar installer to decide to change what they’re doing? And as opposed to waiting to see how many other people picked up Sunvoy before they take the risk and become an early adopter? 

Joe: Well, you know, this year has been a difficult year for the solar industry. I mean, it’s been a difficult year for a lot of construction companies because of the higher interest rates. I mean, we’ve literally seen interest rates just about double in the last 12 months, which I’ve never seen in my lifetime. We went to college, so I’m guessing you’ve never seen it in your lifetime. 

And you know, I didn’t really know what the impact of that would be. I’ve seen the personal impact because I have some variable rate loans in my life. But yeah, the impact on what’s called a bill swap, you know, now it’s harder for homeowners to finance a solar system at 7% to 10% interest and pay less for that solar system than they would pay to the utility, right?

So that makes it really, it’s a lot harder to sell solar than when interest rates are 2%, 3%, 4%. So there’s been a slump this year. There’ve been less sales in residential solar and everyone’s asking the question, where can I get more quality leads? Where can I get more referrals, right?

Because those are the folks that are trusting the technology because they’ve heard about it from their friends and family. But it’s hard to generate referrals organically. You know, you can ask for reviews, you can ask for referrals, but it doesn’t mean that they’re going to come naturally. 

So Sunvoy is one of the very few ways that you can organically generate referrals for your business because now, every single person that you’ve installed solar for, over the last 5, 10 plus years, has access to your app, right?

They’re seeing it every single day instead of something else. And that it’s working. So with our company, we’ve seen a 284% increase in our referrals since we started using Sunvoy. We launched individual landing pages for our homeowners that show all of their project information, they can share with their social network. And we’ve seen deals come through as a result of that, that just wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t have individual landing pages in Sunvoy. 

We set up a broadcast feature, where you can broadcast to your homeowners what’s going on with their energy system, with their solar. 

And those are the kinds of things that generate referrals organically in the background, automated. And that’s what solar installers need right now.

Al: Yeah, wow. And almost tripling your referral basis is pretty, pretty impressive. 

Sunvoy’s Features for Solar Installers and Homeowners

So one of the other things that’s happening that I think everyone is feeling the pinch on is finding talent and good workers and workers that have the necessary skills to do the work. 

How much does Sunvoy add, to the burden to the labor burden of a solar installer? How many people need to get trained on how to use it? How to install it? How to sell it? Does Sunvoy provide support? Like, what’s the burden on the installer to try to pick this up?

Joe: Well, that’s the great thing about it is that there’s very little technical onboarding involved, and all of it is taken care of by Sunvoy, right? So there’s about a single hour of technical onboarding where you have to bring in some of your IT folks to connect all of these disparate systems and then bring the data into Sunvoy. 

Beyond that, it’s 99% view only. It’s running in the background, taking all of these data sources, presenting them both to the solar installer and the homeowner. But it’s not like a CRM. It’s not like a field service tool or a project management tool where you have to do something. There’s really no work to do in Sunvoy.

It’s just running in the background, providing value every single day, and most of the onboarding process is just educating the staff of the solar installer on what Sunvoy is and what it does and how to present it to homeowners. 

Al: And you provide that kind of training, so the owner doesn’t have to do that?

Joe: Yes, exactly. Yes. So we provide a hands-on training to the staff. We show them what it is. We provide for the salespeople how to talk about it to homeowners, for the service team, how to talk about it. For legacy customers, so we provide hands-on, white glove onboarding and training. 

Al: Now you mentioned a mobile app that the homeowners would have. Is that going to say Sunvoy on the phone screen? Or is that going to actually have the name of the solar installer on it? 

Joe: It actually doesn’t say Sunvoy other than in nearly invisible ink at the bottom. I think it says, made with care by Sunvoy. It shows the brand, the colors, and the logo of the solar installer. And it’s hosted on their website, with a custom URL.

So it literally looks like they built it. It’s 100% white labeled. And I personally think that only a solar installer could come up with this, right? We’re really kind of built it by solar installer, for solar installers because we saw the impact on our business and the confusion that it was causing for homeowners to be sending them to all these different places, right? 

Like, why are you having me log in to five different apps? You know, what is this payment platform over here? What is this other thing I have to log in for? It’s very confusing and homeowners get frustrated by that. 

So once we saw the impact it was having for us, tripling our referrals, that was the lightbulb moment for us that we need to white label this for solar installers worldwide. Because they’re really going to see a lot of value from it. 

Al: Cool. So why don’t we do a demo? I’d love to see the software and understand a little bit more and put some meat on this skeleton here.

Joe: Yeah, totally. Let me dial this up here. Just a second. Okay. All right. I’d like to share my screen. Okay. Oh, great. Can you see my screen? 

Al: Yep.

Joe: So this is actually Ipsun Solar. I’m going to move around tabs here a little bit. These are our friends in West Virginia, Solar Holler. You can see it’s their brand, their logo, their colors, hosted on their website with a custom URL, my.solarholler.com. 

Here is Solar States in Philadelphia, same thing. Their colors, their brand, their logo, app.solarstates.com. It really looks like they built it for their homeowners.

But coming back to ours, this is Ipsun Solar, the company we’ve built for the last seven years. This is the installer side of Sunvoy. So there are two sides, which I may have mentioned. You know, the first side I’m going to show you is the installer side, which is bringing all the data in from the CRM and from the inverter platforms and displaying in one place.

And then I’m going to take all that data, and I’m going to flip it around, so you can see what it looks like from the homeowner perspective, right? So these are just analytics around who’s using Sunvoy. You know, how many tickets have been opened, what customers or admins are using it the most, just basic analytics.

I’ll show you the reporting side. This is the dashboard with all the reports, allowing an installer to really track their company. One of my favorite questions for solar installers, you know, when I’m at the conferences or on a demo, I love to ask them how many systems they’ve installed. I can’t remember a single solar installer, who has ever answered this question, at least, with specificity. 

Now, you have somebody that says, ah, around a thousand or something like that, but no one actually knows how many systems they’ve installed because the data is so spread out. So now, a solar installer can see how many systems they’ve installed and signed under contract, how many kilowatts they’ve installed and signed under contract, lifetime, last 12 months, and in the last month. 

They can see the growth of their company year over year and month over month, all of their systems’ health. Right? What’s normally operating? What’s in development? What’s having minor communication issues or major physical issues? They can see systems by inverter platform and by state.

They can see all the environmental benefits they’ve generated over the lifetime of their company using the EPA’s calculator. They can see how many gigawatt hours of production have been produced over the life of the company, annual, last month, and today – across all of these inverter platforms, right? Because it’s aggregating all that data in one place. 

They can also see average and median system performance to the 100th decimal place. So this has never been possible before, to be able to see, how your entire fleet is performing to the 100th decimal place across your entire installation base, across all of your inverter platforms. 

We can bring in the numerator of that of that formula, which is all the production, kilowatt hour production and then the denominator, which is what you promised in your contracts.

So we have integrations with all the proposal tools, so you can seamlessly bring in whatever you promised in your contracts, on your proposal tool. And now you can show the homeowner, Hey, I’m not just telling you you’re going to produce 12, 000 kilowatt hours in the first year. I’ve actually got something to back it up, right?

This is how our fleet is performing right now. We have an A or an A+ in terms of what we promised and what’s actually being produced in the real world. You can see all your problematic systems, systems having major physical issues that are underperforming, having minor communication issues. Now, your fleet team has a way of seeing all that in one place.

You can also see all of your tickets in one place. So these are tickets that are submitted by homeowners. The installer can now see them all in one place, collated, and aggregated, with priority levels and who they’re assigned to and what stage they’re at. That is really useful for the service team because these used to be spread out all over the place.

You can also see a list and a map view of all your systems in one place. So this was not possible before Sunvoy, specifically to see across five or ten different inverter platforms, every single site, with a real time status. 

So the reason this is powerful for a service team, just as an example, is now they can see, if we go here to a specific neighborhood in Northern Virginia, they can see all of these systems.

And even if one is an Enphase system, one’s a SolarEdge system, one’s a Fronius system, or an SMA or an eGauge, they can see them all in one place, and they can go knock out all these systems in one day. Where previously, this was not possible. You might have had to log in to all five of those different inverter platforms to see the location, and some of those inverter platforms don’t even have a map.Right? 

So this is super helpful for the service team, and all of this information is available on mobile and on tablet. So now all the crew members, all the installers, all the service techs can see the name, the address, and the phone number of any customer, anytime they want, on mobile. So that’s the service side. 

You know, obviously, our sales people get questions all the time about whether we’ve installed in a particular neighborhood, and now, they can pull up any one of our installations. And they can share exactly where that system is, which gives a lot of confidence to new homeowners, who are just taking a look at solar for the first time.

Now, I’m just going to – 

Al: Yeah. This is great. 

Joe: It’s super helpful. This was actually the hardest thing to build in Sunvoy, right? Having all of your systems in one place, this is something that took us well over a year to build. It was really a big logic problem of how to bring all this data that was spread out all over the place into a single map.

So it’s something that we’re super proud of. Let me see if I can share a site here. This is actually, Herve’s house, my business partner. And I’ll show you some more on the installer side. You can send a text message asking for a five-star review, directly from Sunvoy, with a local area code from that phone.

So it’s a trusted phone number that the homeowner is actually going to recognize and be responsive to. So this is a great way to ask for reviews and referrals. It’s totally customizable. You can create an Enphase site. We have integration with Enphase, so you don’t have to go to Enphase to create a new site, re-enter the name and address and phone number. You can click a button, create a site, without ever having to log in to that third party site. 

You can order an EagleView report, right? So you don’t have to log into EagleView and re-enter the name and address and phone number, and number of panels. I think you see the pattern here. 

There are 15 different places that we counted that our project managers have to go to, to re-enter the same information, over and over and over, and it’s so redundant, and it adds so much extra time to their lives to have to do this. This saves us hundreds of hours a year by clicking a button and performing the same function that you would have had to log in to a third party site to do. So that’s really nice. 

For the service team, they can now see site level production and consumption, so they can actually track how a system is doing. That is really helpful. And this is a feature we launched recently, where you can send automated, every single month, in the first of the month, a report with all of the energy data summarized from the past month to the homeowner.

So this previously was coming from the inverter platform, right? And there’s no relationship to the brand of the solar installer. Now, it’s coming from the solar installer, right? With the environmental benefits, all the energy data. There’s a call to action for referrals. This is in the voice, in the brand of the solar installer, which is obviously going to help the sales and marketing, obviously, help referrals, bringing down that cost of acquisition. 

So I’m going to switch over now to the homeowner side and show you what it looks like once the system is online. So we developed a project, we built it. Now the homeowner can see all of their energy data in one place.

They can see their production, their consumption, their battery flow, all their circuit level consumption, all in one place. So this might have been five different apps before Sunvoy, right? One place for the solar production, one place for the whole home consumption, one place for the battery flow, another app for the circuit level consumption, another app for what your EV charger is doing. That is just totally unacceptable, and it’s confusing. 

For homeowners, now they can see all that data in one place, including all their historical energy data. They can see their system details. They can see their environmental benefits. They can see how many panels were installed and what was installed.

They can share it on social media. They have a direct line to their project manager. They can see all their project documents from contracts to change orders to spec sheets to paid-in-full invoice to warranty information. They can see all their referrals, right? 

So there’s a unique landing page, which I’ll show you here. This is something we actually launched, just in the last couple of months, which is really amazing because it’s basically like a personalized landing page for that homeowner, that they can share with their social network, and it’s great for picking up referrals. 

So I’ll actually just finish this portion of Sunvoy and then I’ll show you that. They can refer people directly through this form. They can leave a 5-star review in 7 sites at once, right, which is really good for the business because now you don’t have to ask the homeowner to literally write a review on seven different sites. They can see it all in one place, and they can fill them all out at one time.

So this is the landing page. I love this landing page for the homeowner because they can see all the number of reviews, from multiple, all those different sites I just showed you, aggregated in one place. 

They can see that their neighbors are going solar, right? These are literal pins of all the solar installations in the neighborhood of this homeowner. There’s a call to action for their friends and family that they send this to, who can now give us their information and see the value of solar for their home.

And you can see at the bottom left here, it’s kind of like a little bit of social pressure, like, look at all the advantages, the environmental benefits that are going to this homeowner. 

So this is kind of a combination of a summary of the solar installation for that homeowner that they can then share with their social network to kind of again, normalize solar for their network too, to provide their information and generate referrals.

Enhanced Communication and Transparency Between Homeowners and Solar Installers Using Sunvoy

Al: So, thinking from a sales perspective, do those referrals go directly into my CRM, so those referrals become prospects or leads? And if the referral takes an action, clicks through the link, that the homeowner sent them or registers any interest, does that automatically feed into my CRM?

Joe: Exactly. Yeah. So those leads go directly to the solar installer, and that way, it’s just like a new lead source. Right? There are solar installers out there right now that are paying hundreds, or sometimes, tens of thousands of dollars a month for new leads that may not be high-intent leads, to put it modestly.

Like, you know, there’s a lot of deceptive advertising out there for lead generation, and imagine spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on low-intent leads, when you could be generating more referrals from your existing customer base. So that’s the exact idea. They’re filling out a form. It’s going straight through to the solar installer.

That’s getting into their CRM, and it’s just part of their normal flow of business. But now, it’s essentially free, high-intent referrals. And that’s really helping solar businesses become referral-based businesses over time.

Al: Got it. And then from an ops perspective, am I able to see what the homeowner sees, through my vision, so that if the homeowner reports an issue and they look at their data on their side of the app, I can see exactly what they’re seeing?

Joe: Yes. So we encourage all homeowners, both at our company and through our other Sunvoy network installers, to encourage their customer base to submit support tickets directly in Sunvoy. And this is how they do it. They can open a ticket. They can see their closed tickets. 

There’s a knowledge base, with answers to basic questions about, you know, what do I do if my Wi Fi goes out and I can’t see my solar production anymore? That way, the homeowner is basically resolving situation for themselves, before it goes to the solar installer. Right? And then if I go back here on the installer side, to more directly answer your question, once that homeowner has submitted the ticket, they can see all of those tickets in one place, right?

And they can literally see exactly what that homeowner has requested, all the system details. So it’s basically the same data. It’s just being displayed in a different way to the solar installers, kind of like aggregating all that information for the solar installer, in the same way it’s aggregating all that site specific data for the homeowner. 

And now I showed you the energy data kind of on the back end when the system’s online. The beautiful thing about Sunvoy is you’re sending a login to that homeowner. From the minute they sign the contract, they’re living in this platform for the 30-year life of the system. So on the front end, they’re actually seeing our little dominoes pizza tracker, where they can track their project from beginning to end. 

Let me see if I can get you a sample of exactly what that looks like here. So we’re looking for somebody whose project is in construction. Right? So they’ve signed a contract for solar and now they get a login because there’s a web book associated with the link between Sunvoy and the CRM in the proposal tool.

So now the customer – and I’m having a tough time finding exactly one customer that has just signed up on SolarEdge. Be patient with me here. But the idea is, you know, they can literally track their project from beginning to end. So they can see every single step from the CRM in real time. So here’s a perfect example.

This is literally every single step from our CRM, synced one-to-one to Sunvoy. So whatever our project managers know internally, now our customer knows. Right? And so they’re getting an update every single time that project moves from one stage to another. They can see what every single stage means, where they’re in progress, what’s coming next.

And they’ve chosen all these logos, right? These little logos here, it’s obviously their color palette. So this syncs to your CRM, and it updates instantaneously, within milliseconds, when your project manager moves it from one stage to another in your CRM. The customer sees it, they get an email or a text message, or a pushed notification, whatever you want to send them.

So we used to have hundreds of customers calling us through that six-month development period, asking us what stage their project’s at. And we even, for a while there, every Tuesday, we would literally call every single one of our customers to give them a project update because of how long it can take to develop these projects.

Now, we don’t have to do that. We don’t get those calls anymore because our homeowners know exactly what stage their project’s at because they have the same visibility as our internal staff. 

How Data Brings Bragging Rights and Normalizes Solar Energy

Al: Yeah, yeah, that sounds like it would cut a ton of person-hours from the work. 

Joe: Yeah. 

Al: So if I’m – if – go ahead.

Joe: No, please. 

Al: I was going to ask, if I’m troubleshooting a ticket, let’s say I got a ticket. Am I able to see the historical operations? So, let’s say something happened late at night that they’d noticed, right? And they saw a symptom that made them submit a ticket, and I don’t get to that ticket until the morning, can I see what they saw at that moment, by looking at the system history? 

Joe: So you still need to go into the kind of guts of the system if you want to see like the voltage of a particular microinverter or what the exact production issue is. So it’s not meant to show all of that, and it’s not even really included in the API because it’s just too specific. 

But most of the time, 9 times out of 10, service tickets are not that complicated. You know, if somebody’s Wi Fi went out and they need to know how to turn it back up. Their scroll guard fell off, something very binary, right? Can you come put my scroll guard back on? It fell off. It’s stuff like that. 

I think 1 time out of 10, there’s something really technical you got to dig into and get your hands on. You need a history of what’s actually going on with the specs of the system. But most of the time, it’s kind of smaller stuff that the homeowner just needs help with.

Al: But I can just jump into the already-provided apps that your products provide if I need to get access to that data.

Joe: Exactly. Yeah, there’s always going to be times where the installer needs to go into Enphase and see what’s going on with one particular microinverter, or SMA, and see what’s going on with the central inverter has something malfunction, and needs to be replaced or particular piece of information on a string. That’s always going to happen. And I don’t think installers expect to see that in Sunvoy, because that’s something that you really need a technical person to dive into. 

And we’ve actually gone out of our way not to put too much technical information in here, both on the installer side and on the homeowner side because we think of Sunvoy as kind of an at-a-glance, single point of truth.

And I’ll give you a couple of examples. So I’ve had installers ask, Hey, where is the panel level monitoring for Enphase in Sunvoy, right? Because if you log in and you can see that, it’s a microinverter. There’s an inverter on every panel. You can see what every panel is producing. 

Now, about five years ago, Enphase made it free for homeowners to see their panel level monitoring. They were previously charging for that. And what we saw, as a direct result of that was we had a lot of homeowners calling us, asking us, Hey, why is this panel producing 2.5% less than the panel next to it? 

Al: Right. Exactly. 

Joe: And it was a real pain for the service team because, you know, the answer is it’s the angle of the sun and your chimney, and you know, there’s bird poop on that panel, whatever. And it’s just kind of nuisance errors, essentially. 

So you’re kind of reeducating the customer on the panel level monitoring. We stripped that out specifically because it was costing us so much time in reeducation and person-hours to be able to explain that to homeowners.

So we don’t show panel level monitoring at Sunvoy for that reason. And as a result, installers don’t get questions about it. You know, that saves them a ton of time. So we were very intentional about only putting data in Sunvoy, reporting data through the APIs that was necessary and valuable, and not providing every single point of data that’s just unnecessary.

Al: Well, talking about necessary points of data, bragging rights is always a big deal. As an installer and as a homeowner, do I get to see like my total lifetime power generation and be able to start comparing that with my neighbors and see whose is bigger?

Joe: You’re talking about from the homeowner perspective?

Al: Yeah and from the installer. Sometimes I just want to see how much I’ve done across my whole fleet just to say I’m saving the world. 

Joe: Oh, totally. Yeah, you absolutely can do that. We have a term for that. Actually this is, yeah, I just learned this year, Al. It’s called bragawatts. So now, you can brag about your bragawatts in Sunvoy because you can literally see how much your entire fleet has produced over the life of every single system you’ve ever installed. And I guess they’re bragawatt hours actually. So that’s nice right, because you know –

Al: Yeah. As a homeowner, can I make that into a tweet or a Facebook post, right from here and just be like I want to put this number up and shame all my neighbors?

Joe: Well, so this is the installer side, but yes, you can do that from the homeowner side. So I’m going to show you a system here that actually, Herve and I helped to install this battery system a few years ago.

This is one of the original Enphase batteries, and I’m going to log in as the customer and I’ll show you. So this customer can see their solar production, their whole home consumption, their battery flow. They can see that the system performance is excellent. And yeah, they can share on social media on Facebook or X or LinkedIn or by email. They can show all of the energy data and yeah, they can brag about how their system is performing. And again, it kind of brings to normalizing solar energy for the broader community, right? 

So this person did that right now. They’ve just normalized solar for all their friends and family. Like, oh, solar actually works. Solar actually saves money. It actually provides value because now I know someone who has done that. And on the referral side, it’s the same thing. 

So that landing page that I showed you, now this person can literally share that landing page with their entire social network. And the thing I love about it, I’m going to go back to it because I just love sharing this.

It shows all of the pins of all the installations we’ve done in that neighborhood, right? So it’s like, I’m looking at this as a new homeowner without solar, and I’m thinking, Whoa, all my neighbors have solar? All these people just from this one company have gone solar? Maybe I should really take a look at it. 

It’s kind of like that flat screen TV moment where you’re like, you realize you’re the last guy without the flat screen TV. That’s what we’re trying to do is make it –

Sunvoy’s Ethical Approach and Vision for an Unconventional Lead Generation Platform

Al: It sounds like a very different strategy than lawn signs. It might be more effective, too.

Joe: Yeah, the lawn signs, you know, we’ve done lawn signs. The lawn sign stays out there for a week. And then, you know, someone in the house was like, that lawn sign is ugly. It’s got to go. Or it flies away in a hurricane or whatever. So, yeah, basically, Sunvoy is a lawn sign that lasts 30 years. Right? 

Al: Yeah. Well, this has been a great demo, Joe. Thank you. 

Joe: Oh, yeah. There’s so much more to it. And obviously, you know, we talked to installers that they want to focus on the referral and the sales and marketing piece. They want to focus on the service piece. So I try to tailor every demo to what that installer needs, but I appreciate you allowing me to show it to you at a high level, Al. 

Al: Yeah, that’s great. That’s a lot of great insights in there. And I think the bragwatts is a cool term. I haven’t heard that term before, but it sounds like, you know, based on that last piece you’re showing around the social media, the referrals, the bragawatts in general, that you’re seeing sort of a different approach here for solar installers to enter new markets and expand into existing markets.

Am I reading that right? That this is more strategic than just problem-solving?

Joe: Oh, totally. Yeah. I can’t tell you how many solar installers after I’ve shown them the demo that I just showed you, their first question is, can I have exclusive rights to Sunvoy in my territory? I don’t want my competition to have this.

And, of course, you know, I have to say no. Actually, we even sell it to our competitors in the D.C. Area because we believe that this is going to have a big impact on the solar industry and spread solar all over the place. 

So, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of companies that are using this as a distinguishing feature to say like, Hey, we have this app, we have this customer portal where you’re going to be able to get all your information, all your energy data, track your project. And that’s a unique value proposition to those homeowners. And now they’re expanding into multiple states with that value proposition. 

Al: Now, if I have to get into a new market, what it’s going to show on some of those mapping tools is that there’s nobody in that space. How do you think Sunvoy helps enter into new markets or adjacent markets?

Joe: Well, imagine that you’re in a state in the Midwest and you’ve installed a few thousand systems and you want to go into, you know, another state that maybe hasn’t been very solar-friendly. Maybe it doesn’t have one-to-one net metering. Maybe it doesn’t have SRECs or solar subsidies, but the utility rates are climbing, and you see an opportunity to move into that state.

Well, this is to me, one of the biggest value propositions. You go into that state with Sunvoy and you’re legitimizing yourself as a vertically integrated installer that cares about the brand, that has other systems in other areas that you can show, that is a distinguishing feature, in my opinion. 

Because a lot of times, solar installers, you know, little companies will go into a new market, and they won’t have a whole lot of brand equity built up, right? They’re just two guys and a truck with a spreadsheet going out, knocking it out every day, which I’ve been that before, and it’s fine. It’s a tough slog, but if you’ve got this infrastructure behind you and you can show that to customers, which we do, our sales team shows Sunvoy to prospective homeowners, every single day, and it provides a ton of legitimacy. 

That is the kind of thing that can help you really grow in a new market, without having to invest in billboards and TV commercials and digital ads. Maybe you want to do that stuff, too. But this is basically a marketing engine in a box that you can just roll out and do a new market.

Al: Yeah, it reminds me of an adage, right, with the two guys and the truck. There are two types of companies in the world. There are companies that are good at what they do and companies that are good at saying that they’re good at what they do. And it sounds like Sunvoy, you know, especially with its kind of ethical alignment and its focus on transparency and sharing information, it’s trying to merge those two together a little bit more, make it easier to be someone who’s good at what they do and also good at telling people that they’re good at what they do. 

Joe: Well, and that’s the reason that we have that reporting dashboard. So we’re not just showing homeowners what it’s going to look like from their perspective. We show them the installer side of Sunvoy and say, look, we’re going to actively monitor your system for 30 years. 

I can show you demonstrable proof that your system is going to produce what I say it’s going to produce because I have that data to the 100th decimal place. And so you can see what our entire fleet is doing in real time, right now.

That is radical transparency. That has never existed in the solar industry. And that’s the kind of thing that we need to legitimize and normalize solar so that, you know, you’re not just going in with a concept, right? You’re not just going in with an idea or explaining something narratively. You are showing them an entire infrastructure that’s been built, and that makes solar seem normal and functional. And that’s something we’re really proud of. 

Al: So put your hand on a crystal ball, and what do you think solar looks like as an industry in the next decade? And what role is Sunvoy playing in that decade?

Joe: Well, that’s a great question. You know, it’s funny. We kind of have a crystal ball, in a sense, because we can see what’s going on in Europe and Australia, right now.

Did you know, in Australia, they’ve got something like 20%, 30% of people have solar? I mean, it’s just – 

Al: Oh, wow. 

Joe: It’s like a normal appliance. You know, go over to Europe. In Europe, it’s half the cost of many of the markets in the United States. Now, some of that we can control, some of that we can’t, right? Some of that is tariffs. We have a lot of tariffs on solar panels here in the United States, which is a big reason that we’re seeing more domestic manufacturing. 

That’s not going to be related to Sunvoy, at least, not today. You know, there’s a lot of things like ease of permit. Right? So in some of these countries, like Germany, as I understand it, in Australia, they have a central permitting system, or a set of policies that makes it a lot easier for solar installers to get the approvals that they need from the county or the local authority and the utility to install a solar system, and interconnect a solar system. We have 18, 000 authorities having jurisdiction in the United States, and all of them have different rules and different systems and different procedures.

And sometimes they change their mind every day. That increases the cost a lot. Now, there’s a little bit Sunvoy can do with that. We want to automate the permitting and interconnection piece for solar installers, and we’re going to be working that over the next decade, to make that easier. But that’s a huge lift.

That’s our pie in the sky vision. So we hope to help with that a little bit, but I think the piece that’s probably as important as anything, obviously, those are going to bring the price down, which just organically makes it easier for people to go solar and find an ROI from it. 

But I really do think the big piece is sharing with your friends and family you’re going solar. Right? And so, you know, what we’re going to be working on over the next few years that I am just so excited about is we’re going to be building an unconventional lead generation platform. Right? And I’ll give you a little sneak peek at it, conceptually, you know, just a new announcement to the world. 

We’re going to build a platform called Sunvoy.solar that is going to be an unconventional lead generation platform for this reason. It’s not going to allow anyone and everyone in the world who can pick up a hammer and buy a truck, to be on that platform.

It’s going to be top tier installers within the Sunvoy network, right, who have signed the code of ethics, who have at least 4 stars on multiple platforms, who have a track record of profitability and solvency within their companies that whenever a homeowner goes to that site, they know that they’re getting a reputable solar installer.

And that doesn’t exist today. There really is nothing like that. And that, to me, that’s my life’s work for the next decade because I’ve seen how much predatory behavior is out there in the solar industry. And it is, at least in the United States, I can’t speak for other countries, but it is absolutely egregious.

And part of the reason is because homeowners don’t know where to go to find a reputable solar installer because it doesn’t exist. So as we build this Sunvoy network, as we get more and more reputable solar installers, well, now we’ve got a place for homeowners to go to find a reputable solar installer, right, where they can put in their address, they can get a value of solar for their home based on the amount of sun that’s hitting their roof and shade and the angle of their roof and their house, they can get an indicative level of what solar is going to do for them and maybe energy storage. And then they get connected with a solar installer in the Sunvoy network that is vetted.

There is literally no place right now to go to find a vetted solar installer, in this way. So that’s something that I think is absolutely critical beyond the tariffs, beyond, you know, cutting some of the red tape, a lot of which is out of our control. 

I think that homeowners would want to have a reputable place to go and find a good solar installer that they know is going to do good work, that they know is going to stand behind their work for 30 years because that just doesn’t exist, right now.

Creating a Legacy of Solar Transparency Across Generations

Al: Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And that Sunvoy will play a pretty big part in that, it sounds like. It also sounds like part of what the goal here is with Sunvoy to create almost a social movement where through the sharing of information and through their ability to move it into social media, which most people are just taking photos of their roofs after the install is done.

And that’s the extent of solar social. That there’s an attempt here to really change the nature of kind of that viral factor of solar here is, is there more in the pipeline for making solar go viral?

Joe: Oh, yeah. No, I mean, the landing page that I just showed you is just the tip of the iceberg. Right? We’re going to build an actual production data. So you can share with your network exactly how much performance that system has produced, how many environmental benefits, what the ROI is, you know, maybe what they’re saving from having a battery, if you have a time of use rate, or what they’re saving from having an electric vehicle, if you have an EV charger.

We want homeowners who have all this stuff to be able to share with their network what they’re gaining from it. And that is kind of the next step is imagine being able to share all of that energy data. And this is actually inspired by one of our customers, who I know won’t mind me sharing her name because she did this publicly.

Lena Salins. I’ll never forget this. This wonderful woman who works at the Kennedy Center, and she’s got a big house in D. C. and she installed solar. She installed one of the biggest solar systems I’ve ever seen in D. C. It’s even bigger than mine. And it was a really high building. I remember in, I believe it was in upper northeast D. C. 

And after the system was installed, she wrote something on Facebook that was something to the effect of, like, I just went solar with Ipsun Solar. And I installed 50 solar panels. And I’m taking 50 cars off the road and plant the equivalent of 100 trees. And it had the graphics and the emojis and it was so perfect.

I’ll never forget it. I still bookmarked this thing. So I was like, how can we get every single person who’s gone solar to send that to their social network? Right? Well, we can do that now. Sunvoy can do that, right? Because all those data points are in Sunvoy. So imagine if you could have every single one of your homeowners send that to every single person they know in their social network.

That’s just mind-blowing. Right? Because now, you’ve made solar viral just by that one thing. And that was generated by one of our customers who really cares about the environment and wanted to help legitimize and normalize solar. So now we can take that little snippet, and we can help solar go viral for all solar companies in the Sunvoy network.

Al: Thinking in the long-term, the idea that we’ve been talking about here with the homeowner has been about the homeowner who wanted the installation, got the installation, and has been tracking the results of their installation. 

But over say, multiple generations of homeowners, will Sunvoy going to be able to aggregate sort of a lifetime value in the lifetime stats of the solar installation at this house? So that it’s almost like the shade of a tree that I didn’t plant. Right? 

The next people who will buy the house will benefit from my foresight and as much as many trees as I may have saved or as much CO2 that I may have prevented from entering the atmosphere, after the house has changed hands two or three times I mean, it’d be really amazing to see just how big that number gets.

Joe: Oh, yeah, and we do this every day, by the way. We have requests to transfer Sunvoy  profile to a new homeowner. It’s very common and it’s very easy to do. So you can click a button. 

Al: Oh, okay. 

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s tied in with the CRM, right? So you’ve got to be able to kind of transfer the warranties and change the name in the CRM and have that port over to Sunvoy. That’s not hard to do at all. And it’s very common. 

So the new homeowner, they get to log in the Sunvoy, and now they are getting full transparency into all the energy data that they have inherited. 

Al: Wow. Wow. Yeah, game changing. Absolutely game changing. 

Joe: Yeah. And, you know, I mentioned earlier the idea of putting a tablet next to your Nest thermostat? Imagine you just bought a house and you walk in the door and maybe you didn’t notice this on the walkthrough. There’s a tablet right next to your Nest thermostat. And it’s got the logo of the solar installer, and it’s got, you know, it’s just been running since they sold the house. 

Well, first of all, that’s going to help sell that house. Let’s be honest. That’s pretty cool, right? You walk into a house – 

Al: I mean, I was buying a house recently. I was looking for houses and yeah, looking at their solar and their inverter and what they have installed and how effective it is, yeah, that was part of the review process, for sure. 

Joe: Well, and here’s the other side of the spectrum. So I know someone recently who bought a house. And that house came with solar. Now, it was on a lease. So it was more complicated, and they had to read a 100-page lease agreement. So there’s some nuance there. 

But the point is, they had no damn idea what was going on with this thing, right? They just knew there were solar panels, and it was a ground-mount, so they could see it pretty clearly, but they didn’t know what it was producing, or doing, or saving, or anything. Right? To them, it was just like a sculpture in the yard and they had to go through layers of detective work to figure out what the hell it was doing. Right? So that’s one end of the spectrum. 

The other end of the spectrum is you sell your house. Now you’ve got Sunvoy in the house to show what all the energy systems are doing in one place, helps sell the house. And then as soon as you walk in, you got full transparency into what they’re all doing. 

Sunvoy’s impact on the real estate market and contribution to environmental sustainability

Al: Yeah, yeah, that’s incredible. I mean, it absolutely is, more and more a part of the buying process in real estate, and the ability to communicate what has been happening previously, what will be happening in the future, they really do impact kind of the feel and the level of confidence that a buyer has when thinking about this home versus that home. 

And, I mean, since you aggregate service tickets and you’re focused on transparency, it seems like there might even be some way to talk about level of maintenance. How often maintenance needs to be done and to give people who are trying to sell their home with solar on it, even more data to make it clear this was a great investment, and that investment is not going to cost the new buyer anything. In fact, it’ll save them. It’ll save them money and it’ll save them headache. But here’s how we prove it. 

Joe: Well, it’s funny, you mentioned that, Al. I’m trying not to get out too many exciting announcements in one conversation, but we are working with the wonderful people at Pearl Certification who do exactly this. 

So they help installers convey the added value of solar energy to their homeowner customers, using a full certification process that started in solar and now is getting into all energy efficiency. So we want to basically systematize and automate that process for installers who now manually have to go in and create those certification in the Pearl portal to automate that the same way I just showed you a couple of different systems where now Sunvoy installers don’t need to re-enter all that information. We want to do the same with Pearl, have a seamless process where you can convey that certificate to the homeowner. 

They give it to an appraiser, right? And it says, this is how big the solar system is. And they have energy efficient hot water and so forth. And now it just lands in the document section of Sunvoy, and the installer literally didn’t have to do anything, other than enter the right data points in the CRM in the first place, but they didn’t have to reenter them in another port.

Al: Yeah. Yeah. Well, Joe, this has been great. I’ve learned a ton. I hope that people watching have learned a ton. Is there anything else that you want to share with us before we wrap up? 

Joe: Well, I had a question for you, Al. I mean, you’ve been in software for 20 years. This is my first foray into software. I’ve been in solar and I’ve worked in the government.

What do you think about everything that I’ve shown you today? You mentioned a little bit about some anecdotes, you know, other similar types of things you’ve seen. How do you think it fits in? Or does it remind you of any other products you’ve seen out there? 

Al: I’m shocked by the intuitive place that it holds in the market, and that there aren’t alternatives yet, that no one else has seen this opportunity before. And it’s pretty explainable when you think about the just plethora of products out there and the various components that installers need to install and needing to work across too many of them. That’s a pretty high-barriered entry for anybody to really take a look at it. 

Construction also has some history with software and software not really doing all that much good in the construction space and with solar being construction-adjacent are really overlapping. 

I can see why no one’s done this yet, but it’s striking just how well it fits into the marketplace, and the role that it plays is clearly a role that needs to be addressed and be filled by somebody because in every other market, something like this exists, for whatever reason. 

We have it, you mentioned Nest. Home automation needs a central clearing house, and there’s a marketplace where there are dozens and dozens of different types of physical products, of electronic products that people can buy, but no one wants to have an app for every single little thing. So you need a cloud-based service that aggregates all that data.

It’s primarily for the homeowners, when you do those sorts of things. It’s primarily for the consumer market. So to see it at the installer space and see this sort of two-sided model, I think, shows both the reason why no one’s done it yet, but also why this is so sticky and why this is going to continue to grow and continue to be a really important component to the market.

That’s just from my experience in software. This plays pretty classic roles in the flow of information, the flow of control, the flow of money, the flow of relationships. This is just, I’m just – you’re showing me something, and I feel like it’s always been here. It’s just so natural.

Joe: That’s very kind. It’s funny how many installers have come up to us at conferences and said, I had this idea. I wanted to build this, but you guys are two years ahead, so I’ll just buy it from you.

Al: That’s the first-mover status. First-mover status is great. Yeah, and I think that the focus on that market that you’re targeting of the size, of the maturity, the vertical integration, right, I think from a clarity of message standpoint, I think that message is really clear. This isn’t for everybody. 

It’s not just that every solar installer, every homeowner is just going to get Sunvoy. It doesn’t make sense unless there’s really sort of a set of attention being paid to what’s really going on. And without that attention, the data is meaningless. 

So I think there’s a clear market for this. And, you know, as somebody who lives on this planet and wants to see our lives still thrive, I really hope that it’s part of the movement that really takes off in terms of greening our homes and greening our businesses and our structures here and greening our grid because I think we desperately need it. And looking at Sunvoy, it gives me hope.

Joe: Well, thank you, Al. I can’t think of a better person to do this interview for SolarAcademy. Because you’ve brought a fresh set of eyes to it, which just makes it more fun, right? I got to show it to you for the first time, and you’ve worked in software for most of your career. So I really enjoyed this, and I know the whole SolarAcademy communities really, you know, enjoyed it, too.

Al: Yeah, I hope so. Well, thanks Joe. Thanks for the time and maybe we’ll do another one of these sometime, soon.

Joe: Yeah, maybe next time I’ll interview you. 

Al: That sounds great. All right, man. Take care. 

Joe: Thanks, Al.