Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
https://youtu.be/wcTP2wXrlHM
Matt interviews Grant Gunnison, CEO and founder of Zero Homes, about their innovative approach to home electrification. Grant shares how his background as an MIT engineer and NASA contractor, combined with experience running his family's contracting business, led him to create a platform that uses smartphone photos and AI to generate accurate home energy assessments and quotes without requiring in-person sales visits. They discuss the challenges of retrofitting existing homes, why contractors resist new technologies, and how Zero Homes is expanding across multiple states while partnering with utilities to streamline the path from energy audit to installation.
Matt interviews Grant Gunnison, CEO and founder of Zero Homes, about their innovative approach to home electrification. Grant shares how his background as an MIT engineer and NASA contractor, combined with experience running his family's contracting business, led him to create a platform that uses smartphone photos and AI to generate accurate home energy assessments and quotes without requiring in-person sales visits. They discuss the challenges of retrofitting existing homes, why contractors resist new technologies, and how Zero Homes is expanding across multiple states while partnering with utilities to streamline the path from energy audit to installation.
Follow us on X: @stilltbdfm @byseanferrell @mattferrell or @undecidedmf
Undecided with Matt Ferrell: https://www.youtube.com/undecidedmf
★ Support this podcast ★
Creators and Guests
What is Still To Be Determined?
Join Matt Ferrell from the YouTube Channel, Undecided, and his brother Sean Ferrell as they discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart technologies, and how they impact our lives. Still TBD continues the conversation from the Undecided YouTube channel.
Sean Ferrell: This week on Still to Be Determined. We're talking about the next generation of home energy assessments and how a former NASA contractor took a wandering path to build a tool you can use in your own home. Welcome, everybody to Still to be Determined. This is normally the podcast that follows up on Undecided with Matt Ferrell. This week, a little different. We're not going to talk about last week's episode of Undecided with Matt Ferrell. Screw Matt Ferrell.
No, that's not right.
This week we're excited to share a long form interview that Matt had with a gentleman who is responsible for developing a new tool that you can use in your home to assess how your home uses energy. Before we get into that, just a reminder, I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi. I write some stuff for kids. And with me, as always, is my brother Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives very quickly. Matt, how are you today?
Matt Ferrell: Doing pretty well, but I'm glad we have this interview, Sean, because I'm feeling a little funky because yesterday I got some vaccines and today I'm feeling a little rundown.
Sean Ferrell: Okay, so Matt's a little under the weather and I'm literally under weather as I have been enjoying some waves of migraines as the weather here in New York City continues to change from clear skies, thunderstorms, clear skies, thunderstorms. And Sean's response is, please make it stop. So I think both Matt and I are very excited that we're not going to do a lot of talking today. Instead, we're going to jump into Matt's conversation with Grant Gunnison. He is the CEO and founder of Zero Homes, and they talked about Grant's innovative approach to home electrification. In their conversation, Matt and Grant discuss Grant's background as an MIT engineer, a NASA contractor, and how he combined this with his experience running a family contracting business to create a platform that uses smartphone photos and AI to generate accurate home energy assessments and quotes without requiring in person sales visits. That means, yes, you walk around your home with your phone, taking pictures of your home, and then, toodlee, toodlee, toodly. Computer says, here's what we think your home is doing.
Matt Ferrell: It's a very cool piece of technology that they've built out.
Sean Ferrell: So that's the discussion that they're going to have. The discussion was about the challenges of retrofitting existing homes, why contractors resist new technologies, and how Zero Home is expanding across multiple States while partnering with utilities to streamline the path from energy audit to installation. It's one thing to know your home isn't energy efficient. It's another thing if you can't do anything about it. He's trying to help solve that problem. So on now to Matt and Grant's conversation about Zero Homes and the tools that they have to help you.
Matt Ferrell: So, Grant, thanks for taking the time to talk to me today. I'm really excited to talk to you about Zero Homes and what you're doing. It's really interesting. But before we jump into that, could you kind of introduce yourself who you are and what Zero Homes does?
Grant Gunnison: Yeah, totally. Yeah. Grant Gunnison, Founder CEO of Zero Homes. We're a home improvement marketplace very focused on helping homeowners electrify their homes across the country. You know, personal mission of ours is to help solve the climate crisis through electrifying single family homes, but primarily just helping homeowners, you know, have cold beer and warm showers and doing so cost effectively. So solving a different problem, I think for them than, you know, the climate problem directly per se.
Matt Ferrell: Right. To kind of walk through a little bit about how Zero Homes works. It's a, it's a mobile app that a homeowner could then use to basically scan their house and kind of do a home audit on their own without a contractor coming in.
Grant Gunnison: Yeah, that's right. So we've pioneered a technology platform and a process so that homeowners can get quotes without having contractors come over to, you know, do the typical in home sales visits. So, you know, we're in several states around the country today, but very simply, in about 15 or 20 minutes, you can effectively digitize your home. We use that as a model to then design solutions and quilt solutions for. And then we will match you with a contractor to deliver that work directly. So saves people time, money, and a lot of the heartache associated with figuring out like, what is the right thing to do to solve my problem. It's often pretty challenging to actually figure that out in a high quality way.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, I get a lot of comments from people who follow me asking for like, I want to get geothermal in my house, but who do I talk to? I'm having trouble finding somebody. So it sounds like you're kind of finding that sweet spot of helping people figure out what their home can do and getting them in touch with contractors with appropriate quotes and things like that.
Grant Gunnison: Totally. I mean, the customer journey, homeowner journey typically is, uh, oh, I have a problem. Shoot. Who can help me solve that problem. Maybe I have a friend who can connect me because I heard that they had previously solved this problem. Otherwise, I'm going to go look at the box. If it's, you know, maybe an HVAC problem, hopefully there's a sticker on there that says 1-800- call me, you know, on it. Or I'm going to go to Google and go, well, I think I need a plumber. Or I think I need XYZ contractor. So XYZ contractor near me. Hopefully I can find someone that's high quality. And. And then I'm in this game of, like, who can get here as fast as possible to help me figure out what the right solution is. Right? And the first problem is just, you know, the homeowners are looking for a human to then help them figure out what to do. Often homeowners, especially new homeowners, they can't even articulate the problem. And so they're like, oh, you know, please help me find an intelligent person to then help me figure out what I need to do. And then I can worry about what it's going to cost. Timelines, you know, all those other things. But, you know, we're trying to make that first step as easy as possible. And just saying, hey, like, you don't have to go, like, source someone, find someone, wait two days for them to come over. Like, you can actually just whip out your phone, take some photos, take a video of your house, and then jump on a video call with someone and we'll help you figure out what to do. And, you know, we're a little bit more available and we can respond a little bit faster because we don't have to travel to your house.
Matt Ferrell: Let's take a step back for a second. Because you went to MIT, you worked at NASA. You're like the joke of, like, you don't have to be a rocket engineer to understand how to do this. You kind of are like, you've got the engineering background and experience, and now you're doing contracting work. And I know in your background, your father, I believe, was a contractor and had a business. You were at MIT, and I believe he passed away while you were at school. And so you left for a couple of years to kind of help run the business.
And then you went back to school, got your master's degree. I'm curious about that journey because it's like, you're an engineer at MIT. You go to help with the contracting business, but then you went back to get your degree and worked at NASA. So why the bouncing back and forth? Like, what drew you to go. It seems like you've come full circle. Basically.
Grant Gunnison: You could just say it. Often people have said, dude, do you have a screw loose?
Matt Ferrell: I didn't want to put that way.
Grant Gunnison: I know, but look, I get it a little. Like, it's just puzzling. Yeah. What's going on here? Yeah, you know, look, I grew up in a, in a contracting business. You know, as early as like fourth grade, my dad had me on job sites, teach me how to use my hands, you know, and I think it was important for him to, you know, expose me to a lot of things also just, you know, teach me how to have a lot of agency and understanding that. Look, once you have solved enough problems, you can kind of just. You have the confidence to then just jump in and kind of solve whatever comes your way. And I think he did an amazing job of helping me understand that, you know, nothing's actually that hard. You just gotta, you know, put the work in and did that in various capacities. But, you know, having a sort of parallel track of upbringing of doing a lot of extracurriculars outside of the classroom was really helpful. And so I got to acquire a bunch of awesome skills kind of in my upbringing. One of those as a tactical domain space was building stuff. Building stuff with wood, doing additions. We would go down once a year to go build houses in Mexico for a needy family and erect a house from a slab of concrete to a finished home in 48 hours. I mean, there's lots of examples of these types of things that I was just very fortunate to be able to, you know, be a part of that. Didn't, didn't realize that until, you know, I was in my mid-20s going, wait, you haven't gone to build homes once a year? Like, what the heck? Didn't realize how normal, abnormal some of that was. But, but anyways, all to say, you know, yes, you kind of gave my, my life story in a nutshell there quickly, which is, you know, I did my undergrad at MIT, studied electronics and computer science, jumped into grad school to do actually cordless magnetic transformers through the first semester of that.
Yeah, my dad did pass away and, you know, we had a smallish family business, about 20 people did a few million dollars in revenue. And, you know, he. He was the business in a lot of ways. Right. And so I said, look, I don't need another degree, but my sister's in high school, my mom can't run this business. Like, let me go see if I can, you know, go. Go help the family. So, yeah, I spent almost two years doing that wild experience. We could spend an hour just talking about the first 90 days probably of. Of that, you know, and. And I got to learn a ton. I got to learn a ton about how hard it is to be an owner operator. The challenges just structurally with contracting businesses and the competition that, you know, is in that space. And maybe the last and most important thing is just how, how bad the customer journey is and how bad a lifestyle you have as a contractor trying to deliver any amount of help to people, right. Like, it's a hard life. So to. To sort of make it a long story short, we closed the business down. My mom and I were kind of like jointly running it, and that was just not good for our relationship. And I decided, look, I much rather have a mom and go start a new business than probably not have a relationship with my mom and also maybe not have a business, right? Like, you can always start another business. So anyways, we shut that down, and then a buddy of mine called me and said, hey, we got a need for someone that knows electronics and software doing this cool Lasercom project. Would you want to come back to Boston and do that? And, you know, I was going through a big soul searching, you know, several months after closing the business, and said, you know, what wouldn't be the worst thing to actually just jump in, jump back into my old life. And so I did.
And I spent three and a half years building space systems, you know, a lot of electronics design, firmware, software, and I got to work on a very cool project with a lot of really, really smart people building, you know, maybe in the most reductionist way, like the fanciest laser pointer you could build. Right. You know, and I was very fortunate to be able to work on a very ambitious project in a grad school setting. And then after I graduated, was full time on the project for almost a year and, you know, got to scoop up, I think, a few, you know, fancy, you know, logos on a resume as part of that and got to work with a lot of really smart people. So, you know, I think in a lot of ways that was a lot of luck. It was an intentional decision to go back to school and say, you know what? I don't think I want to jump back into building another, like SMB, really. I want to do something a little bit more cutting edge than that. But the sort of interesting thing that you pointed out is like, wait a minute, then you went back, so what the heck, right? And so it's like, okay, that might throw you for a loop. What I think I found in working on space systems for three and a half years was a lot of the fun. The actual hard engineering work was great, but it was clouded by all the bureaucracy of actually doing something in space. You know, there are multiple three letter agencies we had to work with to get approvals for all sorts of things. You know, beyond just the core engineering component, there's, you know, seven or so other agencies we had to work with to get something into space. And I just found myself doing a lot of project management and I went, wait a minute, I'm not having very much fun here. Also, this isn't social enough for me. You know, when I was doing running my family's business, I was in homes talking to people every day.
And I realized, you know what, I like people. I don't want to just be at a bench doing, you know, engineering work all day. And I don't really love the project management of all this and how slow and nitpicking every requirement is. And so about halfway through that, my eyes started to wander and I found myself pretty quickly looking at some of the, you know, the grand challenges, I would call it. I became much more aware of the climate challenge and I went, wow, that's probably going to be the defining challenge of our time. Like right at the point at which we're really going to start feeling the ramifications of this and it's going to go from, you know, not that noticeable to like really bad in the next 20 years. So that's interesting. What can we do about that? And lo and behold, I find out that I spent a ton of time understanding one of the core challenges in the single family home space, going, wait a minute, a fifth of all of the emissions come from single family homes? And you start to break down that problem. Unfortunately, what it really means is we have to go back and fix all the old clunkers, which is the ugliest, like hardest expensive problem that's incredibly distributed. And you go, wow, that's a mess. Oh no, you know, this is not, oh, let's just go build new great big buildings. I looked at that space for a while and I went, actually, that's really not going to solve this issue. So, okay, I know a lot about what it takes to go do projects in existing homes. Can I leverage my technology background to go actually build something in there that might scale to solve the macro problem, which is the climate problem in single family homes. And so that's sort of how I came to that space going, hey, okay, there's some interesting things here.
I think I actually have a background in understanding the, the, you know, tactical day to day challenges that the contractors are going to have. Well, what does that mean for us at like a macroscopic scale? And the last nugget I'll give you, here, I'll give you back, give you back the mic, which is. One of the guys in my lab was also not just doing Lasercom, but we were doing Earth imaging work and he was doing a lot of machine learning and pulling features out of photos. We had a number of long conversations about what that technology could do and its capabilities. And I realized that the sensors and smartphones were basically the same quality now of the things we were putting in these small satellites. And I went, well, shoot, if I could leverage homeowners to take some photos and a video, could I also get them to just send me the information I need so I could send them back a quote and solve one of like the biggest pain points in that previous business? And I went, well, I mean, why don't we give that a shot? Right? Because if you could do that, the biggest time waster and one of the most expensive activities that's happening in these retrofit projects is all that discovery work that we just started at the top of the episode talking about. That's really painful. It's like the biggest unknown component for homeowners and a huge cost center for contractors. And so anyways, that was really how I put all the puzzle pieces together going, you know what I think, you know, I got enough information in the contracting world to be dangerous. I actually think I know what the technology could look like to solve this problem. Let's just actually go see if we can make that happen.
And that was, you know, now three and a half years ago is, is kind of where that, that brought me to, you know, happy to tell you more about how we've gotten to where we are today and kind of the journey through that, but that's really how the whole thing got started.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, I love, I love that the whole idea of electrifying all homes is a, I don't want to say it's insurmountable. It's a massive endeavor that we have to do.
Grant Gunnison: Very ambitious.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah. For myself, it's like I had an old house that was built in the 1950s and I had been doing upgrades to it, but my wife and I wanted a bigger house. We ended up building new. And one of the reasons I leaned to building new was I knew exactly what was going into it. I wanted to make sure it was super energy efficient, airtight. I wanted geothermal. I wanted, like, I knew exactly what I wanted. And starting from scratch felt easier than retrofitting an old house.
Grant Gunnison: And it sounds ridiculous, right, when you say that out loud, right? You're like, wait, I know, I know.
Matt Ferrell: It shouldn't be that way. So it's like, I love the engineering mindset that you have for trying to find a solution for that problem. Because the moving the needle is not building a new house. Moving the needle is retrofitting the millions of homes that are already out there on natural gas and other technologies that need to be moved out.
Grant Gunnison: I was really boggled by a stat that was said to me kind of very early, right around the time I was doing all this discovery work. It's like in 2050, 80% of single family homes that will exist have already been built. You're like, oh, okay. Well, actually, so really what that means is 80% of the problem that we need to solve is the old buildings, right? Like, you just can't build yourself out of it. Unlike in the vehicle space where cars have a, you know, 10, 15, maybe 20 year lifespan, homes have a 250 year lifespan or sometimes even longer. And so, well, unfortunately, that just means, well, we gotta go deal with the old clunkers. And the truth is nobody wants to do it. Yourself included. I'll poke the bear a little bit there.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Me included. I'm definitely part of that problem. But to get to the actual technologies, I love the idea that you had that light bulb moment of machine learning, a little bit of AI kind of stuff for taking images and trying to leverage that to make it so much easier for the consumer. How effective is that? Because I know I've done home energy audits on previous homes. It's a mixed bag, the kind of results you get out of those home energy audits. So I'm curious, how can you ensure that you're getting good quality results out of a system like that?
Grant Gunnison: Yeah, so we've done a few things to sort of communicate the accuracy and whatnot. One was we worked with the DOE to go compare in home in person energy audits to our digital assessments. They validated our process. We were able to consistently deliver accurate information without sending a person to the home. Now, there are some exclusions, right? We're not going to ask homeowners to like pull a dead front off of a panel. It's not safe. Right. There might be some information that we need to get out of there occasionally. Okay. So we have a process that will send someone to the house to do that. Pretty low percentage of overall homes and there's a handful of other items that we might need to do that for. But the super majority of homes, we're getting everything that we need just with point and shoot images and video. And then we also ask folks to authorize us to pull their energy bills and then we can calibrate our models of their home to that. Right. And so we build really a full digital twin of the building with just photos, video and their energy bills. And an outcome of that is, you know, much better customer experience. The contractors don't have to go to site to scope out the work, build quotes, purchase equipment, you know, deal with a bunch of the other cost centers in their, in their businesses. So they get to focus on revenue generating work, which is really what they want. That's really what they want. They just put up with all these other things because, well, you kind of have to, to run a business. And then we can lower costs because of that. Right. It, it's a lot less expensive to help someone understand what it is that we need to do in their house virtually or using, you know, software to actually do a lot of the processing for us. And most importantly, you can help anyone in the country do that. Right.
And that's actually one of the most critical features of this thing is that we can eliminate over time this issue of, oh, I have a problem, shoot, who can help me if I'm in a rural area as an example? That answer might be nobody. Right? I mean, literally. And that's a huge issue. So we're making high quality information very accessible to folks and then enabling contractors to go, you know, run a profitable business delivering those solutions. And you know, that that's a really important mechanism that just doesn't exist in, you know, the construction industry, retrofit industry today.
Matt Ferrell: Are you able to get kind of like a, you built the digital twin. Are you able to get kind of like a, a good quality, almost like a manual J out of it so that a HVAC contractor could actually do a very good analysis and estimate?
Grant Gunnison: Yeah, not, not an almost manual J. We got certified to produce accurate manual Js. So we got DOE's approval to capture high quality information. We also went to Akka to get our software validated for that. So we're really the only system today or platform and business that can, that can do both of those things. Right. And so the quality bar that we are needing Is sort of unmatched. Maybe to say it more directly, it is unmatched.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, yeah.
Grant Gunnison: But it's not just about that. Right. It's not just about giving a quote to someone. It's also about enabling a contractor in the field and that a separate data quality bar that you need to meet. If you're going to have someone show for the first time, set unseen to a project, you better know damn well what the scope of work is going to be. So they're not showing up and go, oh, wait a minute, we got to walk off the job today because we don't have what we need. That's a huge challenge. Right. And would really muck up this entire process. So there's one, you know, quality bar we need to meet just to help a homeowner and then a separate one to set the contractors up for success. And today we're meeting both of those. Right. And so it's a really. Well, it took a lot, I guess I'll just say, to be able to get there.
Matt Ferrell: I'll say as a homeowner, this is. And somebody. I talk about these kind of topics all the time on my channel. This is definitely filling a need that. A huge need. So it's like I'm very excited about what you're doing. But on the flip side, the contractor side. Just a little quick story. I was just at recently at a geothermal HVAC conference and several of the talks that came up, common thread kept coming through. There was kind of like this frustration with there's not enough contractors that know how to do geothermal or there are contractors out there that think they know how to do geothermal and they do a bad job, which gives the industry a bad name. And then on top of that, there's just a lot of demand but not enough people to do the work. And there's the old school. The old school guys that were, are very resistant to change and very resistant to learning new things. This, what you're doing is incredibly new. Incredibly. Nobody's done it before. So are you seeing any resistance in the contractor space from people kind of signing on or wanting to use your platform?
Grant Gunnison: Yeah. No. And let's talk about, let's talk about why, because this is a really important point. There's this mantra, you know, that you, that you just mentioned there of contractors are old school, you know, old trick, you know, old pony, same tricks. Like these guys are not that resistant to doing the types of work that we're asking them to do. What they are resistant to is losing Money, doing it. And Right. And people constantly poke them going, hey, like, learn some new tricks, man. Like, what the hell? You know? And they're looking at that like going, well, I don't know, the risk reward profile is terrible. So, you know, give me a better value proposition and I'll show you progress. And people go, well, let me just silently walk away because they can't. And I personally have a huge rub with this because there's a lot of academics in this space that are going, oh, these damn contractors.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah.
Grant Gunnison: And it's like, well, wait a minute, how about damn you, figure out how to make it easier and better and more profitable for them, and then they'll come flocking to you. And they're unwilling to look at themselves going, hey, wait a minute, I'm actually not delivering the right value proposition and all just to say the right value proposition is show them the money. It's really simple. And at the end of the day, they're almost no organizations in this space that are trying to put dollars into contractors pockets. They're mostly, if not exclusively, trying to pull dollars out of their pockets. And that is the wrong methodology in my opinion, which is why we've structured our offering the way that we have, which is we don't go to contractors going, hey, here's a bunch of information. Can you please quote this? Can you spend a bunch of time, you know, for free, you know, maybe earning work? We just say, hey, here's a fully scoped out job. We'll pay you $7,000 to go do this next week. Would you like to do that? And they're like, yeah, that sounds great. Heck yeah. I got slots in my calendar. Wait, can I have another one two weeks from now? And then. And then two more a couple more weeks from now. And it's actually really simple. It's like they want to go out and do good work. They know how to do this work. It's not different, really. It's slightly different than installing AC. So great. Let's like work through a couple of those things and let's set you up for success. And all of a sudden they're like, wait a minute, I love this. Right. They don't have to go do sales and marketing, which is really tangentially, you know, applicable to being a good trades person. Right, right. They don't have to order equipment and do all of the other things that are required for excellent execution.
In fact, they can just show up and do the thing that they know how to do well and make money doing that. And that doesn't fall on deaf ears, right. It does put a huge burden on us to be excellent at design, excellent at execution, to set them up for success. But we, that's what we need to do as a business is be that enabling layer. And, you know, for what it's worth, it's really hard, right? Like we're building a novel piece of software or, you know, running a novel style of business. And, you know, it's a, it's a lot of hard things you have to be really good at in order to set people up for success. And so it's no surprise to me that also there aren't a lot of people that have the appetite to go build a business like this. Right. And so I would say in a lot of ways, like, we are really a first of a kind company trying to go innovate in this space and do what needs to be done so that, you know, people can actually get the work done that needs to get done.
Matt Ferrell: Do you think your background for, you know, dropping out of school for a couple years to help the family business and you're growing up, do you think that gave you this insight of you're not just tackling a problem from a consumer perspective, you're also tackling it from the contractor's perspective, trying to make them more profitable and making it better for consumers as well?
Grant Gunnison: I think it gave me the appropriate level of empathy.
Matt Ferrell: Okay, there you go. Right.
Grant Gunnison: And that, like I've sat at a desk in an office literally watching my email stream in through. Hey, would you like this new CRM? Or hey, I can help you with leads. Or hey, I can help you with a new erp. Or hey, hey, hey, I would like to pull money out of your pockets, please let me pull money out of your pockets. And you put your shield up so much, you're just like, oh my God, just whatever you do, don't talk to me. But that actually like stalls progress, right? There are cool and amazing tools out there that would help contractors, but there's so little operating leverage in their business. They're so incredibly busy, they don't have time to go vet the new latest and greatest thing. They also have relatively low margin businesses, so they can't go afford to take risks on a bunch of new things. And they also have generally pretty small balance sheets because most of the contracting businesses do, you know, somewhere between 1 and $5 million a year, which, you know, leaves an EBITDA of a couple hundred grand a year. Right. They don't have like millions of dollars on their balance sheets to go, hey, we're going to take this big risk. Maybe it'll pay off, maybe it won't. It's like they're incredibly averse to risk because of the financial situation there. And so I understand that deeply because I was that guy, right. I had to close a business down because of a lot of those challenges. Right. So, you know, I think in a lot of ways have had to figure out a way to create a solution for the homeowner, which I also, like, deeply understand, because I've worked with hundreds and hundreds of homeowners at the kitchen table, working through these challenges and understanding what it is that they really need in order to move forward on a project. But then also deeply understand what contractors really want. And it's less complexity, it's more profits, and that's it.
And like SaaS software is not going to do that for them. Right. And so we just need to remove those cost centers, make their lives easier and help them make more money. And that's a pretty. It's actually a really hard value proposition to deliver. Right. If you think about the type of business architecture you have to create in order to enable that for them, there aren't very many options.
Matt Ferrell: Right.
Grant Gunnison: And then somehow also have a business that makes money. And so, you know, that. Anyways, that's a very long winded way of answering yes to your question. You know, feeling the emotional pain that those folks have, have every day has enabled me, I think, to, you know, craft a business architecture and offering that they're actually pretty happy to work with.
Matt Ferrell: I know there's going to be people that will listen to this, that will go, this sounds like the perfect thing. I want to use it, but they may not be able to today. I'm curious, where are you in operation right now? Where would can people actually use your service today? Yeah.
Grant Gunnison: So we're in almost the entire state of Colorado, the greater Chicago area, few different metros, and some rural areas of Minnesota will be expanding kind of statewide over the next year, and then Bay Area in California, and we're looking at another half a dozen areas around the country. So we will continue to be expanding. So if, you know, anyone listening to this wants to work with us, homeowners or contractors, reach out. If now is not the right time for us, that's a bummer, unfortunately. But in the near future, we'll be expanding our footprint pretty dramatically and would love to have the opportunity to work with you.
Matt Ferrell: Are you doing this independently or are you partnering with anybody, like partnering with utilities or other companies to kind of do the rollout.
Grant Gunnison: Yeah, so we, we don't really go direct to consumer. I think this is another important component of our, of our business is that we don't want to compete with contractors. We want to be complimentary. Right. And so. Okay, well, what does that mean? It means that we're going to go work with utilities, cities, and, you know, there are even some private companies as well that are going to actually put homeowners into our pipelines. So we're not marketing through the same channels that a bunch of contractors are. I mean, those traditional channels are, you know, tv, radio, billboards, print, Google Ads, et cetera, et cetera. We don't do any of that, again, because we want to be an enabling layer, not competitive with those folks. And so we've sort of specifically both gone to partner with those utilities and cities and whatnot, so that we aren't competing with those folks, but also then to help those partners accomplish their goals. And I think, you know, at the very top of the episode, we were talking about energy audits and you're like, well, you know, is this just as accurate as sending a person at the house? The answer, of course, is yes. And that has enabled us to then work with, you know, those types of partners to actually upskill an offering that they are delivering today. Broadly speaking, those folks are helping homeowners get the education they want and need to then start addressing some of the problems that they have. The challenge is that offering ends not with a quote. It ends with, hey, you should go talk to XYZ contractor. A homeowner throws their hands up, you know, and goes, oh my God. Okay, great. Now I understand. Fantastic. I need to do XYZ thing in my house and I need to spend 20 more hours figuring out who can help me. What's it going to cost, the timeline, their financing. And that's where projects go to die.
Right? Because a homeowner's got soccer practice and friends and a family and, you know, the list is infinitely long of other things that are much higher priority in their lives. Right. And so we've basically said, look, we'll give, we'll build a product that can help educate homeowners, but that process will end with a guaranteed quote on how to actually solve their problem. Turns out that's much more attractive to homeowners, as you might expect, than to just get, you know, a seven page PDF printout of great. You should do these two or three things. And then here's a list of contractors knock your socks Off. And so that's, that's been, I think, really, really great for our partners. It's really helped them get the things that they want, which are more, more installs in homes. It's really helped homeowners cut through the muck of all of this work that they would have to do. And then ultimately we just turn around and, you know, help those local contractors get high quality jobs to install.
Matt Ferrell: You basically just described my experience using the Mass Save program here in Massachusetts.
Grant Gunnison: Sure.
Matt Ferrell: It's like came to the home energy audit was great and they basically just gave you a sheet of paper saying, here are the things that we think you should fix and here's a list of contractors, good luck, and walked out the door. It's like, okay, guess I have to now spend the next several days figuring out who to contact, who to call, what to do next. Your service would have been so much better than just being left at the door there with that sheet of paper. What other parts of the home services industry do you think are ripe for a similar transformation as to what you're doing with this?
Grant Gunnison: Yeah, well, so we can do everything inside of the home. You know, I think maybe by analogy, a lot of what happened in the solar space about a decade ago, there are some companies that leverage satellite data to build design platforms so they could sell solar remotely. Right. Some of that's now like spreading into battery. You can not totally do that in the same modality. Yet we are effectively making everything inside of the home possible in a similar modality. So, I mean, the focus for us is heat pumps from an impact perspective. Also from a business perspective, you know, it's a, it's a nicer ticket than an EV charger at 2,000 bucks. Heat pumps cost $15,000 or so. And so, you know, very focused there. But you know, we also do water heaters and electrical upgrades and dryers and ranges and weatherization. And we've done some windows and you know, it can, it can expand quite broadly. And you know, we also have enough information eventually we might do floors and doors and paint and all sorts of things. I mean, it could get, it could really expand. We have all that information. You know, of course you got to stay focused. So like, keep it simple stupid. As much complexity as we're taking on, we're trying to not, not get too broad in the products that we, that we offer. But you know, eventually maybe we do have product lines for all sorts of different things in homes beyond the like, core energy products that we're helping people with today.
Matt Ferrell: It sounds like you have a very long roadmap ahead of you, a place to grow into as you evolve, which is pretty cool.
Grant Gunnison: Certainly, you know, we'll see. The home services industry or home improvement industry is massive. Right. And there's a huge amount of opportunity there. You know, again, it, if you take on too many things, you'll accomplish nothing. So you gotta be really focused on why you're doing what you're doing. But we'll see. You know, I think we're finding a lot of success and, you know, if we continue to find a lot of success, then we may be able to broaden the product portfolio.
Matt Ferrell: Well, if everything goes right for what you're trying to do right now, if everything goes right, how do you see the home electrification process looking like in 2030? You know what I mean? Fast forward six, seven years, what's it going to look like?
Grant Gunnison: Totally? Well, that far out is even maybe hard to imagine a little bit, but maybe. Let me give you what the next 12 months could look like. You know, homeowners in a dozen states will be able to, you know, go to our website, be able to spend time answering a couple questions there and then taking some photos and video. And in about 15, 20 minutes, they'll be able to log on with someone from Zero. And in less than 30 minutes, they'll be able to go through a couple of different designs and options on how they would like to solve a problem. They'll get real time pricing in that discussion. So you can answer the question, like, well, what if I want this gizmo? Or like, what if I want better filtration? Or what if I want, you know, this kind of thermostat? And like all of that can come in real time pricing. So you can go through options quickly and then you'll be able to select a contractor that you'd like to partner with to have that installed. So, you know, there'll be two or three or four options and you can, you know, homeowners will be able to select between speed and price and review qualities, etc. But, and then you get a calendar, you go, well, which day would you like this installed? You know, it's like, wow, okay, like in one total hour of your time, you can work through the entire process and actually just get an install date of when you'd like it installed. Oh, you know, there'll also be financing in that process as well. So if you need to reduce what are, in a lot of cases, some pretty substantial cash outlays to do some of these projects, of course, we'll that are available as well.
Matt Ferrell: So one of my last questions I always like to ask is, what one piece of advice would you give an aspiring engineer or innovator that wants to kind of do something similar or go into a sustainable tech sector in general? What one piece of advice would you give them?
Grant Gunnison: It's not about the technology, especially in this space. There's a huge amount of the industry dynamics, the people dynamics are very complex. And ultimately it's all about value propositions. You know, solve your customer's need, and sometimes it's really not obvious so much what that is, and then back into the technology. Right. I think I see a lot of the reverse often of going, wait, we invented this really cool thing. Where can we use that? And, you know, sometimes you find a home for it. But I would say often that's not the case. So I don't know, start with the people. Um, work backwards would be my advice.
Matt Ferrell: That's great advice. Is there anything we haven't touched on that you'd want to touch on?
Grant Gunnison: You were asking a lot of good questions, Matt.
Matt Ferrell: Oh, thank you.
Grant Gunnison: That's great. I think for us, honestly, just really exciting time. We're, you know, expanding by states and serving a lot of homeowners and building a lot of really new cool experiences for folks. And so, you know, I think we're just getting to have more fun than we have ever had. And maybe that's, you know, just for me, the sentiment of, hey, the thing works, maybe, you know, we'll have the opportunity to be in dozens of states shortly and actually maybe have a chance of actually going to solve that super ambitious problem. And that just fires me up because, you know, it's super. It is. It's extremely ambitious. The chance of us actually succeeding is very low. And, you know, where we sit today, it seems like we have a pretty clear opportunity to really go after that. And that's pretty rare. And so I'm just feeling extremely lucky to have been able to find a thing that customers love and contractors are willing to work with. And despite all the crazy headlines of the day, I think we have a shot at actually making it happen.
Matt Ferrell: I said it already. I'm pretty excited for what you guys are doing. There's. I refer to it as like a facepalm technology or a Face Palm product. Like, when you hear about it, like, why haven't we been doing this already? It feels like this is something that should have been around for years at this point. So I'm really excited to see where you guys go.
Grant Gunnison: Well, I appreciate that. I think there are a lot of good reasons for why it hasn't and lucky that we're living in a time that it can exist these days. So. But yeah, feeling grateful for sure.
Matt Ferrell: I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.
Grant Gunnison: Yeah, thanks Matt. Yeah, fantastic. And anytime. Happy to jump on whenever you'd like.
Sean Ferrell: Thank you to Grant for sitting down with Matt to have that conversation. Viewers, listeners, what did you think about that? What do you think about the technology that Zero Homes is trying to roll out? And what do you think about your own assessment of your home? Do you think that you are a person who is in need of this kind of assessment? Or do you have an experience where like Matt, maybe you've recently built a home and you've already landed in that place where you're like, I know that my home is doing a good job of being energy efficient. Let us know in the comments. Don't forget jumping into the comments, liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends. Those are all very helpful and easy ways for you to support this podcast. We thank you for your time and your comments and if you want to more directly support us, you can go to StillTBD.fm or click the join button on YouTube. Both of those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts and then we get down to the heavy heavy business of talking about our heavy, heavy heads as the heavy, heavy weather and heavy, heavy vaccines are doing their heavy, heavy jobs. Thank you so much everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. Talk to you next time.