I’m late on how the result of the canon event went. I’ve thought many times of writing this article but I just got to it. Basically after 2 calls total it didn’t pan out due to lack of bandwith on their side. But the backstory was interesting.

That article was about the second call with the COO. Let’s backtrack a month before the call and before the first call. It was interesting as the COO had seen one of my Linkedin posts, went to my site, and booked a demo. I sent an email following up but it had links so it went into his spam. A week later he saw another post and messaged me on LI saying he had booked an email. After some back and forth he realized it went into spam. I said the demo will be ready a week after as I’m gathering more data on a specific region, and he said let’s have the call anyways to confirm I’m solving the right pain point. He booked for 2 days later on oct 7.

In the call I told him what I’m solving, with the initial phase 1 being about analysis of the grid of today, and a year down the line phase 2 being about the grid of tomrorow. Essentially over the call he told me that his problem is about predicting the grid of tomorrow so he’s interested in phase 2. I said if I pivot the next demo to be about phase 2 if he would still be interested. He said yes, “if you could crack that nut we’d be all over it”. And that I can the book the followup call 2w later when I’m ready.

I did leave the call a bit shaken that I was solving the wrong problem, but he put me on the right track. He was also a generous person in the sense that he could observe I was an outsider, only 4 months into the space, yet gave me a chance. He used to be an investor for a VC firm for a year 7y back so maybe that played into being open to underdogs. And he was only in the renewables space for about 4y total. He had his transmission engineering consultant on the call who said the problem was complex and I seem “young and inexperienced”, and he was curious why I decided to enter the space. I said I found out the problem was a hassle for many developers.

In the second call which happened on nov 4, I was more prepared. I had found a young transmission engineer who agreed to join me on an hourly basis. What he did was extremely unique as he had also created an internal tool at his company to simulate a lot of future scenarios. He showed the results of running that as a csv and the COO said he was intrigued. I also showed a scrappy permitting search tool I made that would be an input to the other tool showed. Basically projects get cancelled all the time due to to not getting permitting, and that affects the transmission upgrades that the grid operator planned expecting that project to come online. Those upgrades can be tens of millions but will then not be done anymore, and that will affect the costs of nearby projects. My analysis once showed a 50% chance of increasing or decreasing nearby upgrade costs.

An interesting story is that I found one of their projects getting vetoed by the mayor at the end stage of the whole permitting process, and the COO confirmed it saying the past april it was cancelled due to it not getting the county permit after the last junction (phase 3), and they lost $1.5 million in deposits. The deposits were required to show they were serious. Plus a few years of all the work to bring it to that point. The mayor was a republican who had a 2y old anti-abortion image on facebook, so go figure.

The COO liked what I presented but realized we were early and I asked him to be a pilot partner we could build for. He said the pushback he expects when floating it internally is lack of bandwidth. The company was only 25 people large and I believe the main decision maker was the CEO, who founded the company 7y back. He said to send an email proposal.

I did so and a week later he said he will have to decline the pilot because of lack of bandwidth. I did ask for a $20k paid pilot to ensure they had skin in the game. In hindsight I made a key mistake in enterprise sales: I should have asked for a followup call with any other stakeholders. It’s much easier to convince them over a call than an email, and handle any objections.

I also put a 2min vid of a demo I had in it and put it behind a dub.co link tracker. It was never clicked.

Shutting down

Soon after that I kind of lost my stride and focus until I shut down the startup officially in mid jan. I had put 3.5 months of full-time work put into the startup, travelled to 3 energy conferences (snuck into 2 of them simply by walking in). Spent $1k each travelling to the latter 2, flying from Detroit to Austin and then Detroit to Vegas, both in sep. Talked to 50-100 people in the space. 1k LI requests sent, 15 posts made. It was a ride.

But I realized there are 2 other startups in the space, Nira Energy (asshole cofounders who ghost you) and Piq Energy, both with industry cofounders, and I was 2y late to the game. There were only a few tens of customers in the space too because utility scale (20MW+) developers who make solar/wind/battery projects are rare. There’s only a few tens of them out there. It takes a lot of expertise and money ($100-$200M per project) to create these projects, even if energy is sorely needed over the next 20 years. Nira had a couple customers already like Doral, Samsung, Adapture, and so on. I talked to people who worked there that used them. The space was getting saturated and the market is not large in terms of the number of players.

Nira’s pricing was weird, an older anecdote says they charged $40k per region (ISO) and unlimited uses.

A more recent anecdote said they charge $10k per region (7 total) and then $10k per project.

Plus I could not find a transmission engineer cofounder. I targeted about 100 young ones across LI and email and only like 5 responded. Hit 40 over email, should have used email in hindsight exclusively as most don’t use LI actively, but they are all comfortable and lack the entrepenerial spirit. They are in high demand due to the grid expanding so finding a job is easy. People who are comfortable rarely do anything outside of work, so finding someone who is intrisically motivated is very, very rare. Entrepreneurs are 1 in 100.