GreeNEWit has the perfect founding team for tech. Josh is the finance guy, Jason is the marketing guy, and Matej is the product development guy. All three of them are dedicated to the endeavor, all three of them educate themselves on housing sustainability and get building performance certified, all three of them are involved in professional groups per their respective fields, but all three of them are also willing to gamble personal indebtedness and their financial futures on a business that not only exists in a competitive environment – but also relies on government subsidized development programs that could easily be voted out within the span of one year. I’m a big fan of bootstrap startups, I completely agree with Josh in that respect. However, I’m also a fan of using other people’s money instead of my own. Especially when I have to take out, and juggle, multiple credit cards. Sure investing yourself into the endeavor is a must, but not at exorbitantly high credit card rates – and especially not at the risk of your foreseeable financial future. Has it worked for people in the past, of course, Gigi Butler did it with Gigi’s cupcakes. However, she owned a house cleaning business and was able to manage her debt that way. Josh just has parents that are willing to let him still live with them. Given the trajectory Josh, Jason, and Matej took the business – they should have sought outside investment much sooner. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but enough to mitigate personal risk. All startups require a certain sprinkling of luck, but in my opinion, GreeNEWit got a bucketful and are lucky to be where they are at the end of the case. With that said, given GreeNEWit’s highly philanthropic expenses and history – I think their best bet for funding would be a crowdsource campaign as they’re a few big contracts away from leaving bootstrap behind and they’ve been lucky enough to make it this far.
Perspective: CEO
Josh, Jason, and Matej seem like they had a hard time figuring out which niche to occupy, QHEC, Energy Star Audits, Commercial Services, Utility Rebate Analysis, Energy Adviser Training – instead of just picking one or a couple they decided to do them all. This stretched them thin and kept them from growing to the point where they could expand out into these niches from a position of strength.
Personally I would have sought a small loan from an angel or a bank, creating a remote work system, and built out GreeNEWit as a SaaS company. I would pour money that would have been spent on property plant and equipment into software development and optimization for the gREATESST platform. I would have pivoted to licensing that platform to GreeNEWit’s present day competition and I would have explored optimizing a version of the platform for municipal use and government contracts. In the words of Warren Buffet, “the difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” That is to say, overburdening yourself, your team, or your company with multiple different workflows that require individuals to have multiple different efficiencies and abilities isn’t a long-term recipe for success. Jacks of all trades are masters of none and Jeff Bezos didn’t start Amazon selling every product known to man – he sold books because he knows he needed a beachhead strategy. SaaS would have been the perfect beachhead strategy for GreeNEWit.
Fortuz
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