Tyler Tringas

Late 2010 is when I started to... Maybe early 2011.

Yeah.

Late 2010 to early 2011 is when I quit and started...

decided basically that i wanted to uh to be an entrepreneur um you know it was really my first foray into real entrepreneurship um essentially i just i saw a market opportunity so i you know i didn't come from a software background or anything like that but i one of the things i was doing there was um a ton of of modeling so i wasn't a software developer but i was doing you know visual basic and massive excel models and stuff like that and i was running the

the forecasting group, and I essentially saw my own forecast and said, there's a really interesting opportunity here in the solar market, the residential solar market, where the whole industry is focused on bringing the capital costs down, bringing down the cost of the modules and the panels and all that sort of stuff.

And they're doing a great job.

And basically, at a certain very near point, it's going to cross over to where the dominant cost is going to be soft costs, customer acquisition, all of the transaction costs and verifying things and all that.

And we were extremely plugged into the industry and essentially nobody was thinking about that.

And I said, okay, cool.

This seems like a software problem.

I think I can build software that will, you know, create efficiencies and help with customer acquisition.

And so let's go after that.

And so I kind of quit my job, started pulling that thread.

Yeah.

Uh, our first customers, you know, to be honest, we, we struggled with monetization.

We got a couple like proof of concept customers.

But the big problem with our whole plan was we executed really well on product.

This was kind of like the era of like the lean startup had just been published, you know, like a lot of the stuff you heard in just 2012 2011 timeframe.

Yeah, 2011, 2012.

And so, you know, it was pretty normal to be going to tech stars, 500 startups, YC with like a proof of concept and all that sort of stuff.