Folks, and welcome to this latest episode of the Small Tech Podcast. Today, we have another amazing guest. He is building GridBid, the platform to simplify your heat pump retrofits. He is Matt Lanigan. Hey,
Hey Raph, thanks for having me.
How's it going?
good. Summer in Vancouver is finally kicking and excited to get on my bike again.
I am also very excited to start biking around some more.
my, my tires are still completely empty. So I think that's my Friday night activity tonight is actually sitting down and giving it the TLC it needs before I go on a ride this weekend.
Awesome. Nice. So you are building GridBid and I'm of curious, I want to ask you some questions on how you ended up here. What was the journey, not just right before GridBid, but just how, like career wise, what led you eventually to know, I'm going to start this company and I'm going to start it around heat pump retrofits and building a tech platform
Sure. Yeah. So originally my academic background was in civil engineering. I did a technology diploma, an undergraduate degree. And as soon as I was out of university at 21, I started working in consulting. So did engineering consulting for municipal land development. So the roads we drive on, the bridges we drive on, the pipes that feed our buildings, water. And I continued to evolve in that space.
I worked in construction, I managed construction projects, I worked in government with policy team and putting together strategic policies around net carbon zero buildings, as well as other infrastructure projects. During this time, I started to hear a lot more. Buzz around heat pumps and just being someone who loved and always followed decarbonization.
I started following it a bit more and then I started to hear a whole whack of problems from contractors who I knew, homeowners who started to get heat pumps retrofitted and that's what enabled me to start to take the deep dive into what the problems were.
It's funny, because I think since I met you, which was what, like a year and a half ago? Something like that? I feel like I've heard now the word heat pump just keeps popping in my life, and I'm, It's funny like, once you get exposed to something, you start recognizing it, you start seeing it around you. okay, so you decide to the heat pumps are this thing that is, that makes sense to you why build a tech platform?
Sure. So one of the main challenges with home decarbonization, particularly detached homes, it's very clunky and currently we rely on homeowners and for a lot of enterprise SaaS tools and so on, it's super easy to scale.
You build a stack, you work with businesses and it takes an organic growth for homeowners to, to understand the process and to be able to actually go through it simply, we can apply project management, best practices and first principles, which is something that I've had a ton of time with. into something that can guide homeowners through a retrofit.
So rather than acting as a consultant and, calling them, sending lots of emails, you can automate a lot of practices that guide homeowners through the practice. And this is what makes something scalable and allows the tens of millions of homes that will ultimately make the switch to make it sooner and easier.
Nice and is this, is your first time building a tech
It's my first time building a tech product, and it's very different than building a bridge or a building, which is what I had done for nearly 10 years.
Yeah, a little bit. I assume the iteration cycles are a little faster.
One thing that's been, one thing that's been such a challenge is with infrastructure and projects, you spend so much time getting it right the first time. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it, right? And, my, my co founder he's brilliant. He's been such a help because he's nope. Matt, we ship it. And then we figure it out. Then we iterate. And man, I remember the first couple of times we did that. I literally had a tough time sleeping.
Oh, no you hear this, Agile, right? Like, Agile product development practices it makes a lot of sense if you come from the tech world, but then I see Something like a bridge or any kind of infrastructure, and I'm like, oh, I feel like the things, the ways that I've learned to build things just do not apply to so many things in the world.
Yeah, and you know what? When I was in the last year of working in infrastructure and project management, I took an accreditation exam called Project Management Professional, PMP. And 50 percent of it is Waterfall, which is that type of project delivery, and the other half is Agile. And that's when I was starting to tinker and think of ideas for applying software to some of the problems that I saw in the built environment space.
And I'm like, okay, on paper it makes sense, and then, you tie together the kind of underpinnings of Waterfall that I've had for so many years. And then bring it into software is has been quite the learning curve, let's call it.
But it's been fun.
It's been a lot of fun, man. I mean, it's great to build something that you hope will support people decarbonizing homes. We've had customers go through who have just been so thrilled and such big champions of what we're building. It's been incredibly fulfilling, obviously a huge challenge as you and many other listeners know, but the fulfillment and excitement and energy you get from it is like nothing I've ever experienced.
And, you're doing all of this with, so you've got a, a business partner, you've got a CTO and you've got other people you're, or is that it's the two of you and you were in an accelerator, right? what's, your ecosystem? Who are you building
are we building with? So it's myself and my co founder, Jacob, who has spent a lot of time building software The better part of a decade. And he's been a great guiding force in how to develop and deliver this thing. And it's been very complimentary with my background in built environment and project management and his in software. So we make a great team.
Otherwise, it's really just him and I. We do work with a number of freelancers and the Accelerator that we were a part of, Foresight Canada, has been a tremendous help. So we started working with Foresight In the fall of last year through sort of different schools, Launch Deliver, which are CEO and CTO school, respectively, investor readiness programs, access to capital. And now we're a residency company. So we're working with tons of different mentors on different subjects.
And they've been, it's, I only have great things to say about Foresight. It's been a great program.
Anything in particular that you learned that was just, I don't know, something mind blowing or something that just like completely changed the way you think about what you were doing?
I think a lot of things were particularly in the CEO school. I mean, I know and I understand the problem very well. But a lot of programs and lectures and processes as part of Foresight allowed me to zoom out and better understand that, okay, there's a pain point here, but if you look at the entire value chain, it's actually a byproduct of another pain point elsewhere.
That was obviously a process that we understood when we did our customer discovery, because we did a lot of customer discovery, but Foresight and its programs did a very good job of allowing me to zoom out and look at the big picture and how we can best fit in what is a very nuanced ecosystem and evolving space.
Out of curiosity what does that mean? What did you find out about this like broader ecosystem?
main issues that made me look into this problem were issues that homeowners faced.
Okay.
Spending a lot of money, not getting the right system installed, perhaps it was the system that was too big. If you have a system that's too big, it cycles incorrectly, it costs more on energy, and they tend to die sooner.
And a lot of this is actually A process of struggles that contractors are having with assessing homes, the calculations that can be given to them at certain times, and to be able to solve homeowners problems by also solving contractors problems at the same time was something that required a ton of massaging, and we're still actively doing.
But that's one of the biggest takeaways was with some of these two sided things, or when you look at the longer value chain, there's Issues littered everywhere. And in some cases, if you help someone someplace in the beginning, it actually pays dividends in the end to potentially another user, another customer.
That's super cool. With that in mind, like, so the mechanics of how you're solving these problems, right? So you've got this, interface. I got to hop on, on a call with you guys a little while ago and check it out, which was pretty fun. How did you come up with that UI, that flow? What's it been like talking to, users and getting them to walk through this? Like, how's that whole process worked out for you
Yeah, you were one of the very first people to set eyes on the MVP, which is now live and being used by homeowners. What we ended up doing was the latter half of last year, we actually brought on some homeowners and we managed the project for them manually. From day one, what they were looking to do, what they wanted to get out of it what challenges they saw what things were.
Absolutely no brainers in what things we could potentially do, and I honestly just did it as if it was a project I was handed to at a previous role, so I had some hypotheses on reports that we could generate and things that we could automate right away, and we started to do that with the first few customers, and then as we saw more and more, we got more feedback, We better understood what we could automate right away, what we should hold off on until, we get more volume or perhaps some more
developer help. And that's what sort of built this first iteration, which is really a, as you saw, a dashboard for homeowners, where they can. Store documents, we can store documents, there's bidirectional communication, and depending on what step in the retrofit they're in, there's new reports and insights based on contractor quotes, or walkthrough and commissioning summaries, or rebates that they may be eligible for.
And we're excited to build onto that, but this first iteration is something that we can confidently say was built through lived experience and feedback from actual customers.
That's cool. And so I'm curious, like when you did this like very manual work, did you still have like a digital interface? Like they would submit something, but then you go do the work or it, was it completely face to face or like, how did you do that? of curious, specifically with the context like, what is an MVP, right? Like people like have so many thoughts about like what that means, but to me, this is like, this sounds like an MVP, right?
Like testing the value of the thing that you're hoping to deliver, not by building it out, but by doing something else. But I'm curious, like how much of the sort of testing the built assumptions, if that makes sense, like the, or the assumptions around the end product where you're doing versus like just the value that you're hoping to deliver.
First days, it was primarily just emails, phone calls, I'd send them articles we'd call. In some cases, we had a FaceTime and they'd walk me around their house and point out certain things that, that they felt were like cold spots in their home or spots where they'd like to hang out in their home. And really, it was just like a Google Drive. They drop in some things. I would share some things with them. They'd take a look and then we'd hop on another call.
And through that, we got more confidence in saying, okay, this is a report we can actually standardize, or this is a process that happens in every case. And that's what's actually allowed us to build what you saw last month, I suppose.
yeah, something like that a few weeks ago, a month ago, two months ago. I don't know. Okay, so you do all of that and then you put this thing out or to, to some people before you, you actually launch publicly and then you launch publicly. What's the feedback been like?
What's the feedback been like? So obviously the, I think we had six to 10 people with varying backgrounds, people in product, people who are in management consulting, we had so many different people take a look at it before it went live. And what's great is there are a lot of things that were consistent from one person to the other. And then there were some things that were unique about each individual person, right? Someone who focused on product had a couple interesting things to say.
Someone with an engineering and construction background had a couple of interesting things to say. Now we have this list, which is something we're excited to tackle, but also difficult to prioritize. Um, first, first few customers that are now on, on the platform it's always a unique conversation to have because it's a completely new way of going about a home retrofit. It's always been call a contractor who's been recommended to you through a neighbor or Google reviews.
Or a friend and start to do the song and dance with them. Whereas now it's sign up on this platform to get physical work done at my home. Like what? So there's always a conversation there and it's been interesting to share the value and the process and why it's so valuable with Efficient Homes today, and what happens today and what happens next, and once when we do have that conversation, or they read the messaging on the platform when they log on, It makes a ton of sense.
But the education of the value while trying to deliver value is a tightrope that, that we're always trying to work on. Yes.
So I'm really curious about that too. So what's your strategy to, to bring people into the platform? Cause I mean, if know, this doesn't exist, then you, how do you, are you doing Google ads? And if you do Google ads, how do you convince someone who's presumably just looking for a contractor or whatever to come in? Like, how do you do that education? How do you do that sort of massaging that journey so that it makes sense for your product and for that customer?
is very much a real time thing that we're working through. We do have a small SEM budget strategic marketing budget. We do see quite a bit of volume through SEO as well. We do have Geographic specific landing pages for Burnaby, for North Vancouver, for Richmond and so on. We do publish a lot of blogs. We are pretty active on the socials. I do spend a lot of time at home trade shows. We do have a booth and that's an opportunity to speak to hundreds of people.
Whether or not someone I actually speak to wants to work together or they know their neighbor wants to, we have gotten customers through actually every single one of those channels. So SEM, SEO. Ory Kratos and word of mouth which is great. But the actual education component is tricky. Our, we have a cost calculator on our landing page and that's where a lot of people end up going to get an idea. And then from there we'll do a follow up or there's an educational email.
And with our platform now, our landing page has a two minute explainer video of my floating head. Which one, I think instills a bit of trust that, there's an actual person and there's a service to do with it, but it also shows basically a fast forward of an entire project lifecycle, which takes around two months and it's actually compressed into two minutes. So it shows the plan report, it shows the quote compare, it shows the rebate summary, it shows the walkthrough summary.
And it shows why these things exist and what problems exist today and how this process is alleviating them of those pains.
Awesome. And what's next? So you've got it out in the wild you're you're getting some clients you, what are you building next or what are you doing next?
right now it's just building that, that trust with products like this. They rely heavily ultimately on, on word of mouth and network effects. So we're spending a lot of time here in the lower mainland. It's only been launched here in the lower mainland of Vancouver in the Fraser Valley. So a lot of time spent with grassroots organizations at home trade shows. Working with homeowners in the region.
We're focused on heat pump installs right now, primarily because these are the things that have at least a big benefit from a consumer perspective, significant rebates, home cooling reduced energy bills, assuming that the system was installed well. And from there, we want to start to include other home efficiency retrofits, so EV chargers and solar panels, and window insulation upgrades.
We want to be that one stop shop that can guide a homeowner through any sort of energy saving or energy efficiency retrofit.
I love it. That's awesome. That sounds like a pretty, pretty epic mission for like the longer
It's a big goal because we do have homeowners and contractors on either side, and we want to make sure we make life easier for both of them. And heatpumps is the language we're speaking right now. And once when we expand, whether it's regions or scopes hard to say what's going to come first. That'll be dictated by feedback. But yeah, each and every one of those scopes have their own set of challenges. But it's very exciting to think that we can start to add more locations or scopes.
Totally. I'm curious, like, what's, like for you, what, would you prefer to work on next? Is it adding scope or is it adding regions?
Ah, that's a good question. I think adding scopes would be a lot of fun because We could see one customer completely transform their home with our platform, which would be a very
That is
right? Someone could go from a oil furnace and a fairly like leaky, inefficient home that purely relies on the grid for energy to a home that could potentially be self sustaining with solar panels. Have a backup battery and have a heat pump and they could effectively be their own little micro grid, right? So I think including other scopes in the short term would be incredible to just completely be able to transform an individual home.
Yeah. That sounds super compelling. What would be your like top, top thing to, to tackle next? If it, yeah. Out of those scopes.
It's a function of what happens with our energy provider here in BC. There's a lot of shifts in the world of how they charge homeowners per kilowatt hour of energy use. If when it changes there may be a very compelling business case for homeowners to start to switch to solar and get smart electrical panels electrical panel panels that are smart in the sense that they understand what the grid's demand is at any given time.
And when a home should actually be taking energy from the grid versus when it should actually be feeding energy back to the grid. Um, that would be something that would be a lot of fun to, to tackle. Again, very challenging, but I think depending on how energy rates roll out in the foreseeable future, that may bring a pretty compelling business case to homeowners to start to look to that.
Yeah. That's cool. I actually, that makes me think too like the funding that's available out there. how do you interact the funding and bringing. Like government funding to, to support these projects.
the funding is probably the most mobile target of everything.
Okay.
been around, which has been a bit more than a calendar year, there's been a federal rebate program that has been pulled, the Greener Homes grant has been pulled as they ran out of funding, and there's been new funds that have been handed over to the provincial government.
So currently these programs have independent portals that only homeowners can access, which we can help to some degree as we move homeowners through this process, we pull out the necessary and relevant information to make those applications and that portal easier for them to navigate. Now, ultimately where we'd love to be is to actually plug into these systems and just feed them the information when the homeowner has done their retrofit and the contractors. Have the work signed off.
Of course, these programs are a tough egg to crack. Let's call it that, but We've chatted with a few folks. They're aware that we're around and hopefully we can demonstrate the trust and productivity to be able to show that we can actually help them with their back end of managing rebates.
Awesome. Cool. If you had to talk to yourself, a year and a half, two years ago, what would be like the main thing you would tell yourself? Okay, look out for this when you hop into this project yeah, what would you, what advice would you give
Man, that's a very good question. I haven't been asked that. I would say, you know, honestly, take care of yourself. It's it's a marathon, not a sprint. And sometimes you feel like you're sprinting a marathon. And to be able to Get outside, take a deep breath, go on your run, go on your bike ride. I, during the winter and fall months, I love yoga. So I've been doing a lot of yoga. I think it would just be, there was a period in time, about a four month stretch where I completely neglected that.
There was just RFPs, there were customers, we were in a pretty, pretty heavy sprint just with the two of us. And that stuff can go by the wayside. And it can, Really wreak havoc. So just take care of yourself. Take a deep breath. Like it's a struggle. Absolutely. And yeah it's just being aware that you do need to take a bit of time.
awesome. Sweet. That sounds like great advice to pass to you. and know, hopefully anyone who's listening can take that into account if they're hopping on a journey that's like yours. So with that, this is the small tech podcast do you have a small tech product that you want to shout
Yeah, I think staying on the subject A app that I use, that I've used for several years, Insight Timer, it's similar to Calm it's effectively like a guided meditation app that you can plug into and listen to. And it chills you out a bit. It sends you some friendly reminders at a time that you would typically do it. That's been something I've used for years and will continue to. So that's a product I've always have and always will. Love and use.
Fantastic. Matt, this was amazing. I, really appreciate you coming on the podcast and super fun chatting with you as always. And yeah, I feel like I learned a lot from this conversation. So yeah, I appreciate
No, I'd love to be able to share the story and any insights, and thanks for having me.
Cool.
Take care.
Bye. Folks. That was my interview with Matt Lannigan of grid bid. You can find him and GridBid at gridbid.co. And I want to thank him so much for coming on the podcast. I learned a lot. I hope you did as well. You can find the podcast at smalltechpodcast.com. Where you can listen to this episode past episodes, you can find all the links to all of the different apps where you can listen to the podcast that Spotify that's YouTube.
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EC at ec.io
io. so if you need any help building a platform, a tech product, a cloud enabled service, anything like that, shoot us a message. We would love to help. And thanks again for listening. I feel like I have not been telling you who I am anymore, so I am Raph. I'm one of the co-founders of EC and yeah, I really appreciate you listening. And with that, we all want to do some good in the world. So go out there and build something. Good folks. I'll see you in the next one. So yeah.