Startups Undeterred Despite Weak Economy

Wattbot:

If residents took a hard look at the numbers, far more of them would install new energy-efficiency and renewable-energy technologies.

At least that’s the idea behind Wattbot, a San Francisco startup founded in July of last year.

The company is launching a Website that will calculate the most financially sensible technologies for residential customers to adopt, depending on their specific location and property and user characteristics, including their appliances and their goals, CEO Kurt Brown said. It will take into account the full range of available energy-efficiency and renewable-energy technologies and services, he said.

The idea is that residential products already exist that would benefit "a whole bunch of people" who haven’t signed on for them yet, he said. "Why haven’t they? In our view, there’s an information gap."

For example, compact fluorescent bulbs make a financial payback for nearly everyone. "The most sensible thing to do is to smash every incandescent bulb in your house now," and not to even wait until they burn out, he said, adding that most people haven’t done the math and realized that.  

The company, which raised a $350,000 seed round in December, is now seeking $3 million to $5 million in its first round of funding, he said. Wattbot hopes to get term sheets in December and close the round in January. 

Last week, Wattbot opened to technology providers, giving them a chance to set up their profiles and also signing up consumers – about 300 so far – for an early beta launch, Brown said.

The company plans to take its site live for its real consumer launch in January, rolling out services starting in California and New York and aiming to cover all the major metropolitan areas in North America in "a year or so," he said.

Essentially, Wattbot hopes to show mainstream customers the bottom line of investing in greening their homes and to raise the number of North American homes – now less than 0.5 percent, according to the Website – that deploy these technologies and services.

"People who are buying now bought the Prius," he said, speaking of early adopters. "But it’s really all about a mainstream market, and that responds to much more concrete things, such as money. We’re looking beyond the niche. ... We’re giving them the confidence to make that decision. We’re trying to convince them it’s really worth it to do something."

The site will generate a free list of recommendations intended to deliver the best bang for the residents’ buck, along with a clear estimate of both the upfront cost and the monthly savings expected from the recommended projects.

It will also calculate different financing options, including the cash flow and total cost that would result from using them as well as a supply a list of potential providers, Brown said.

He added that Wattbot is "fanatically unbiased" in its lists of technology providers and doesn’t plan to offer higher placement to sponsors, for example. It will simply connect users to the best-matching providers that meet the criteria of the projects and the site - they must be licensed, for example, registered with the Better Business Bureau and provide the services required by the project.

That list won’t rank companies based on "subjective" quality ratings, he said.

But the site also will have a place for online reviews and will have a community feature to help residents connect and share opinions, recommendations and experiences regarding different companies and projects, he said. 

"Our whole point is to get people comfortable with the buying decision and to give people all the information they need to make buying decisions," he said. 

The company then plans to sell leads about these customers and projects to technology providers, charging between $20 and $200 per lead, depending on the probability of closing the deal, Brown said.

That probability score – ranked from 1 to 5 – will be calculated based on such indicators as the amount of time the potential customers have spent calculating and considering the project on the site, the level of detail they have disclosed and the number of companies competing for the project, he said.

When a company buys a lead, it will get the whole dossier Wattbot has on the project so it doesn’t have to rehash the same information again with the customer, he said.

Finally, the company plans to provide market research using the data it accumulates about residential demand.

In five years, Wattbot expects to bring in revenue of about $30 million from vendors and about $25 million from market intelligence, Brown said.