28 March 2020

March/April 2020 Startup Update

Team: 

KPIs/Core Metrics:

  • Built next-gen product, integrated with PG&E
  • 28 alpha testers of next-gen Chrome extension (see below). Hand-onboarded in 1-hour Zoom user interview sessions with screen capture.
  • 721 followers of original Twitter bot now.
  • 185 users of original California Chrome extension / Firefox Add-on now.
  • $0 revenue, but 1x $70K energy innovation contract, 2x $5K energy efficiency contracts in pipeline (B2B)
  • DM’d 900 users on Twitter, 200 on LinkedIn. 250 conversations, 30 hand-picked to join initial alpha of PG&E lollipop (below).

Product:

  • Due to lockdown, bit the bullet and built “personalized” home-energy Chrome extension / app with the PG&E ShareMyData API.

Experiments/Hypothesis run:

  • Tweet/Linkedin DM user acquisition: If tried energy lollipop california, then respond send them energylollipop.com signup page above.
  • Set up landing page: try personal energy lollipop beta. Tried to get 100 sign-ups through this landing page. This soft of worked - we got 60, and then hand-picked 30 of them.
  • Set up pretend-o-type Gumroad page and tried to pre-sell. This failed. Consumer pre-monetization would have been too good to be true :)
  • Built prototype and 28 users to authorize through PG&E.
  • Showed and did 1-hour zoom interview with 12 users, with 12 more scheduled. Our goal is to measure how much they reduce their home’s energy consumption in 2 weeks.
  • If they do reduce it significantly in 2 weeks, then we can shop it around businesses/governments, Energy companies (aka CCAs or community choice aggregators) and see if they want to use our solution for their users to lower their energy costs (this has already started).

Help Wanted/Asks:

  • Introductions to businesses interested in climate/team programs
  • Introduction to angels interested in supporting climate solutions. This team’s looking to focus on above concept for a few months.

Next month

  • 12 more user onboarding interviews.
  • Measure How would you feel if you could no longer use Energy Lollipop?
    • A) Very disappointed
    • B) Somewhat disappointed
    • C) Not disappointed
    • and get it over 40%.
  • Interviewing / giving some people a trial who work in government or lead businesses. If they like using it at home, then we’ll see if they’re interested in using it at work.
  • Meetings set up with 3 businesses/governments so far, but 0 energy companies yet. Selling a community-facing solution to help them lower their energy costs.

Contact