Tyler Tringas

So we built product, we built one of the, you know, now this is pretty common, but we built either the first or one of the first because, you know, I would literally like hired some PhD in Bulgaria to like write the code for

that translated some of the spatial geometry to Google Maps, but what we ended up building was this thing where you put in your address, pulls it up on Google Maps, you can draw your own roof, and then we do a bunch of things to figure out how many panels could fit, what direction is it facing,

What's the, you know, solar insulation in that area?

And we basically give you an instant quote.

Prior to that, it was like people would have to come to your house before you would have any idea what switching to solar would cost.

So we built that product.

We started taking it around.

We got some proof of concept like, oh yeah, we'll pay you, you know, a couple hundred bucks to use this.

Or, you know, we did some trial like lead gen based stuff where we would pay, we would run some ads and then they would pay us, you know, 20, 30 bucks a lead kind of thing

And we pretty quickly determined that the right business model was actually closing sales, which was a long sales cycle, which meant we've decided we need to raise money.

And so that kind of set off a experiment in early stage fundraising.

Here we go.

We've been pitching probably 400 VCs basically.

400?

Yeah, we pitched everybody.

Everybody you can possibly think of.

Wow.

Yeah, like everybody that was famous in early stage venture, we literally pitched them.

We had basically, I mean, well, so the meetings is maybe an overstatement.

I mean, some of them just said no by email, but the list of people was 400 and all of them were closed in some way or another.