Sungevity

Problem/Challenge Statement

The Founders of Sungevity had identified an issue which was keeping the cost and accessibility of Solar high. At each stage of the process from factory to roof someone was taking a cut. It was also identified that the cost and process of sizing a solar array for a property was very labour intensive, and therefore costly. The founders had raised $3million as an initial investment to build a tool to solve this.

Solution

The founders had determined that using google Earth a consultant in India could manually determine the size of the array needed. They had also planned on getting solar delivered directly from the factory to the house where it could be installed. I worked with the 2 founders on defining the online solution which they pitched as ‘The Google of Solar’ to deliver against this brief. Early in the process we found out that there was a cost every time an array was sized in India, and as this was speculative the cost of sales was high.

My team determined that there was potentially a better way and we prototyped a solution that allowed a solar array to be more efficiently sized and sent to a customer, that could be created in a short amount of time by a customer service representative.

Results

The solution we developed not only revolutionized Sungevity’s business, becoming its core intellectual property, but also transformed the way solar is sold globally. Our approach has since become the industry standard, and it continues to evolve under the leadership of Open Solar, founded by Sungevity’s original team and my former colleagues. Sungevity raised over $600million before being sold.

My Role

I partnered with the founding team to bring their vision to life, driving the product strategy and execution from inception to launch. I built and led the product team, bringing together experts in UX, design, project management, and engineering. Working closely with the founders, I defined the initial user experience and designed the first-generation UI, laying the foundation for the product’s success.