Meet the Real Estate Tech Founder: Amro Naddy from SolarStory

In our latest real estate tech founder interview, we’re speaking with Amro Naddy, founder of SolarStory.

Without further ado…

What do you do?

I’m the founder of SolarStory, a data-rich residential solar marketplace — think Zillow meets TrueCar for solar.

What problem does your product/service solve?

Solar panels are an incredible option for American homeowners — they turn power generation from an ongoing expense (average U.S. energy bill: $1350 per year) into a productive asset owned and controlled by the homeowner. The $200b per year industry of utilities providing energy to American homes is facing huge disruption. 2% of American housing units already use solar as their primary source of power, and as the economics, local compliance and consumer understanding of residential solar improve, that number is going to skyrocket. (Given many of the changes we’ve seen this year, such as California mandating all newly constructed homes must have solar panels by 2020, I see 2018 as a turning point for the industry.) Elon Musk has predicted that the energy market of the future is likely going to be about 1/3 distributed and 2/3 centralized — and the path to get there is going to be exciting.

Even though there’s an incredible road ahead, there’s some big roadblocks today that SolarStory endeavors to solve.

First, the industry is remarkably opaque and homeowners are underserved by good information. There’s a whole lot of cheesy lead-generation platforms out there — go ask Google some questions about solar and you’ll see what I mean. No marketplace currently exists to make understanding local solar costs, and connection to a qualified professional, easy.

Second, because homeowners are underserved, there’s remarkably high price dispersion in local markets. That’s a fancy way of saying that huge rip-offs and price swings happen every day of the week. SolarStory did a proprietary study where we found that Los Angeles homeowners paid between $21,000 and $47,000 for equivalent solar installations in 2016, depending on which solar installer they worked with. TrueCar made a billion-dollar business out of solving 10-20% price variance across auto dealerships — we feel there’s a durable business solving this pricing problem as the industry grows.

Third, because of how many opportunistic lead-generation companies are sitting in the middle of the consumer and the industry, the customer acquisition costs (CAC) for solar are through the roof (…no pun intended). My view is that when an industry has a high CAC and there’s a ton of intermediary / arbitrage players present (vis a vis 3rd party lead-generation companies), there’s something really deeply broken about the way that consumers are getting addressed. These websites are generating tens of thousands of leads per month, selling the consumer information for $50 or $100 to 3-5 companies, and then the consumer gets a barrage of 20 or 30 phone calls over a few days. SolarStory is a better way for homeowners and industry to connect.

So, to recap, SolarStory uses data to bring together consumers and the industry, and solve some big problems that are getting the way of a bright future of distributed solar.

What are you most excited about right now?

This is still early days for the company and our product so every day brings something incredible to be excited about. We’re about to release v2 of our consumer product with a much more immersive interface. We are about to raise some seed funds from some really neat capital sources — including some repeat investors in projects I’ve worked on, which is always good. Also, our relationship to the industry is starting to materialize, as we start to understand the product potential of the proprietary data held by some of the biggest installation companies on the market. The great thing about working on a start-up is that it’s all exciting — every day brings new opportunities and challenges.

What’s next for you?

Next for me is to keep building an incredible team for SolarStory, keeping them inspired in new ways to solve important problems in residential solar, and building more industry and consumer partnerships.

What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?

As a Los Angeles resident for six years and the proud owner of three rescue animals, I love the work that No Kill Los Angeles (NKLA) is doing to help make every animal shelter in the U.S. a no-kill shelter. Without NKLA, my wife and I might never have been able to adopt our miniature-pinscher / chihuahua mix, Pompeii.

Thanks to Amro for sharing his story. If you’d like to connect, find him on LinkedIn here.

We’re constantly looking for great real estate tech entrepreneurs to feature. If that’s you, please read this post — then drop me a line (drew @ geekestatelabs dot com).

The post Meet the Real Estate Tech Founder: Amro Naddy from SolarStory appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

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