SOLARLIST

From a technical standpoint we started with a hugely ambitious goal for the software. We wanted to completely automate the entire customer acquisition process, building a web app that would generate a complete solar quote and financing package for any home in the US without any interaction with sleazy sales guys who we assumed were a big part of the very high cost of customer acquisition (We later leanred a great deal of respect for those sales guys). After a week of non-stop coding we actually had a pretty decent proof of concept and a good idea of what else we needed to build. But we had a big problem. Both us of were pretty much broke. To get our plan off the ground we needed time to finish the product, launch it and ramp up monetization. I sublet my apartment to cut rent from my cash burn, put my laptop in a backpack and flew to Spain (on miles), lived in hostels and Airbnb (charged to credit cards) and worked every day from cafés. We kept pushing the product forward but struggled..