How Aurora Solar found product-market fit

SFG 13: Chris Hopper on bootstrapping climate tech

‍

In this episode of the Startup Field Guide podcast, Sandhya Hegde chats with Chris Hopper — CEO and co-founder of Aurora Solar — about the company's path to product-market fit. Aurora Solar is a solar design platform that has accelerated small business growth in the solar energy industry. Through it, vendors and homeowners have instant access to crucial data about home solar projects.

‍

Be sure to check out more Startup Field Guide Podcast episodes on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube. Hosted by Unusual Ventures General Partner Sandhya Hegde (former EVP at Amplitude), the SFG podcast uncovers how the top unicorn founders of today really found product-market fit.

‍

If you are interested in learning more about the topics we discuss in this episode, please check out our resources on GTM for early stage founders, fundraising, and customer discovery.

‍

‍TL;DR

‍

• The founding insight: Chris and his co-founder wanted to figure out how to sustainably electrify off-grid communities in developing countries where there's more than a billion people worldwide without access to electricity.
• Finding early customers: The need for solar was so great, that people were coming to them through word of mouth. 
• Core user persona: Anyone using AutoCAD all day or SketchUp, even Excel, to create a roof model and run calculations were the right customers. 
• Iterating to product-market fit: Speaking directly with customers, letting them know they had a direct line to the founders and going to trade shows were the real AHA moments that helped Aurora Solar find product-market fit. 
• Advice to early stage founders : 1) Work on something you care about, that is what will fundamentally keep you going when the business experiences ups and downs; 2) enjoy the process and have fun along the way; and 3) it might feel like it’s not the right time to start a company, but great companies can be built in any environment. 

‍

‍

Episode transcript

‍

Sandhya Hegde:

Our guest today is the CEO and co-founder of Aurora Solar and my dear friend, Chris Hopper. Aurora is a solar design platform started in 2013 by GSB classmates Chris and Adeyemo, and that has now powered the design and delivery of over 10 million solar projects. Aurora was last valued at $4 billion and has over 7,000 customers of varying sizes. So I'm so excited to learn more about your climate tech journey and thank you so much for joining us, Chris. 

Chris Hopper: 

Of course. Thank you for having me, Sandhya.

Origins of Aurora Solar: Solving for scalability and efficiency in the solar industry

Sandhya Hegde: 

So now I remember way back, I think in 2012, even before you guys started Aurora Solar, you were both individually interested in doing something in solar. You had already been a part of starting BBOX, the home solar company in Africa that I happened to be an investor in. And Adeyemo was already fooling around with financial instruments for climate. You were both individually interested. I'm curious, so how did you actually kind of come together and arrive on your insight around building design software for the industry? 

Chris Hopper: 

Good question. I mean, it's hard to say when exactly it started because one thing leads to another. So starting at the very beginning, I studied electrical engineering for undergrad, and during that time, I was really interested in how I might apply my skills and do something to better the world in some way, shape or form. It felt kind of useless to just build AM radios in a lab. I'm an engineer, I should do something. So that was my motivation for entering the off-grid solar space. So I spent two years with some friends trying to figure out how do we sustainably electrify off-grid communities in developing countries where there's more than a billion people worldwide without access to electricity, which is kind of a mind blowing fact. And so did that for a couple of years and then started, or helped start, BeBox back in 2010. But then my life took me a different route. I came to California, to Stanford for business school, where we met. And also I met Adeyemo,  Sam, my co-founder. And yeah, the two of us just first and foremost became friends. We just met socially, hung out, started talking about life after business school, what we might do individually and through conversation. I shared with him the work I'd done in Rwanda in the off grid space, installing very small scale solar installations. And Sam Adeyemo, having grown up in Kenya, said, hey, you don't have to go off grid for energy to be an issue, even in the city, even in Nairobi, where I grew up. That's a big problem. People have power cuts. They spend a lot on their bills, they run diesel generators. But hey, we have a lot of sun, right? Wouldn't solar make sense there? That makes sense on a high level. And so we basically hatched the idea of starting a solar installation business at a time focused on emerging markets. That was the original business idea. And so we put together a pilot project to show ourselves we can do this, show our investors, show clients that we can do this. Let's piece together a pilot. We found a school in Nairobi, in Kenya, that wanted to go solar. We raised a loan. We obviously designed a system. We hired local engineers, and then flew down there to install the system during sort of our summer internship, if you will, between our two years of business school. And so that was the original idea or business that we wanted to start. And then what started happening is other people started reaching out to us because the system worked out. It was sort of the quintessential solar success story. No more power cuts because we put batteries in place. They saved on their bill every month because they produced some of their own energy and well, no more diesel generators. So it was a great success. And other people heard about it, they're like, hey, does solar make sense for me? I also want to save on my bill. I also have power cuts. Should my building go solar? How much would it cost? How much would I save? And we're like, well, we don't know. It depends, right? This is sort of the central question of solar that you have to answer over and over again. You have to determine whether a building is a fit for solar and what to do, how to design it, how to finance it over and over again. And so we quickly realized if we wanted to scale this as a business, we needed software to help us do that and to make data driven decisions in the process. And that's how we came across the idea of what is now Aurora. 

How Aurora Solar found early customers

Sandhya Hegde: 

What was the first customer you had in mind for the software? It sounded like initially the customer was yourself. You had gone through this process of trying to design one project, and when you thought about, okay, who are the other people out there that meet the same criteria, have the same problem, how did you think about who was going to be kind of your first desperate customer looking for what you are going to offer them already? 

Chris Hopper: 

Yeah, so like you said, the very first customer, if you will, was us. We built this for ourselves, quite literally. So, because initially we didn't intend to start a solar software business, right? We just built a small web app for internal purposes, and that kept growing. And at some point, I don't know when that was, probably a couple of months after late 2012, maybe early 2013, we kind of took a step back, and we're like, hold on, this keeps growing. Why are we reinventing the wheel? Clearly, people are installing solar not just in emerging markets, but in the US. Also, there must be something that we could just buy off the shelf, right, that people use. And so we looked around, and we were quite surprised that there wasn't a great solution. That was another, I guess, a second AHA moment. We're like, wow, this is strange, right? This is not how we expected the industry to look. And we thought not how we thought it would look. There were some early sort of SaaS startups that were just starting, but nothing even remotely close to what we thought there should be. And so it was sort of a gradual evolution. It wasn't like a wake up, let's build software. It was sort of a start an installation business, build software for ourselves, do that for a while, and like, oh, let's look around and like, oh, wait a second, there's nothing. Then we actually got introduced to an early advisor through the GSB network who had spent a couple of years in, six years in, solar prior larger solar companies, and so started chatting with him about our idea. And he's like, oh yes, I've been saying this internally for such a long time. We need to build something. And so he joined us early on and guided our development. So we had sort of almost a customer in house in a way, through this advisor. He'd seen it from the perspective of scaling this type of organization. And then we also obviously reached out to, quote unquote, real customers or prospective customers. And it was literally as simple as going through the phone book or googling local solar installers and picking up the phone and saying, hey, we're working on something that could be of interest to you. Can we swing by and show you and get your feedback? And yeah, we did that a bunch in the early days. This is before we had anything just to sell or we're just building our own thing.

Conquering the solar installation market 

Sandhya Hegde: 

Right, I have so many questions. What did the shape of the industry look like at that time? Like, how much of the solar installation market was few of the big public companies versus kind of the long tail of mom and pop family businesses, solar installers? What was the shape of the market at the time? And I'm curious whether you reached out just to the small local installers or did you kind of interview across the spectrum kind of big companies, small companies to understand, okay, how are you solving this problem right now? 

Chris Hopper: 

Yeah, good question. The industry at a time was actually very concentrated, at least in part. There was, about 40% was SolarCity at the time, which now got acquired by Tesla. It's Tesla solar. And then there was a couple larger ones, and then there was sort of a long tail, so it's fairly concentrated. That was always a question we would get in the early days, like, hey, is this the market where it's just going to be two, three, five customers? We never believed that — just of the way we understood the dynamics of Solar — we didn't think that it's a very local business, so it's not something that lends itself to — there's some benefits to scale, for sure — but not something that we thought would be very, ultimately, just two or a limited number of players. In terms of the outreach, I can't say we were particularly structured about it. It's not like we had like, here's the map of the market, let's make sure we sample from all this. We took whatever opportunities we got through the network, so people were interested. And honestly, those nuances didn't matter as much at the time anyway. There's definitely a way to position and structure a product for enterprise, say, versus SMB. And there's obviously implications on many fronts for that. But when it comes to the core design part, that was really the core of where we create value and add value. It's kind of the same whether it's a big company or small company, they do the same thing for each project, right? Which is, they want to create a roof model. They want to figure out how many panels fit; they want to calculate irradiance; how much sun you get wear; how much energy it's going to produce; how much savings it's going to generate; all these calculations, and those are fundamentally the same. And then, yes, then there's a second question, okay, how do I now wrap that in a go-to-market motion and sort of general process and permissions that target different segments, but that's sort of, at least for our kind of product, sort of step two. Step one, that was necessary. The first step was nail the core workflow. And so there was just about talking to folks on the ground, folks who live in AutoCAD all day, and SketchUp, they would use or Excel, they had this tool soup that they pieced together. And we just to a lot of these folks, interestingly too.

Sandhya Hegde: 

SketchUp, huh?

Chris Hopper: 

Yeah, SketchUp, I mean, that was also a bit of an insight because we realized here's the issue. In Solar, you want to create ideally, a 3D representation of the home, right? The question is, how do you do that? Right? You can do that with AutoCAD, but that's quite complicated. And some people can do it, but many are not skilled enough. And certainly at the velocity you want to create these, it comes prohibitive. And so then SketchUp is like one step down, it's a little bit simpler. And so we took that even one step further because SketchUp is still a fairly general modeling software. And we just said, okay, we just build great roof modeling software, on top of which you can put Solar. And so that was a big part of our value-add. So how do we take the thing they're trying to do but really streamline it and make it hyper efficient for their use case?

Yeah, and then one interesting thing, too, that happened is as you start talking to people, you build sort of the mental map of the world as these data points trickle in, you see, okay, this type of person worries about this, or the company in this geography cares about this and not about that. The sales reps care about this, the engineer cares about that, the owner cares about that. And so you start building the sort of mental map of the world as you have more of these conversations. So that was also very useful and why it's important to obviously not just talk to one person, but multiple.

Sandhya Hegde: 

What would you say was the big AHA moment for your customer? Was it, oh my God, I'm going to save so much time, I can get to the output I wanted way faster? Or was it, oh, I can create something I will be proud of, and I couldn't even do it with SketchUp. Like, what was the big AHA moment for your early adopters? 

Chris Hopper: 

I say there was a couple, but one central one that really drove us in the early days in particular, and where I think we had a big part to play in shifting the industry towards a better place, was when we started in Solar, it was still very common to do site visits very early in the funnel. So if a homeowner was interested in going Solar, there'd be an installer. A sales rep or whatever would get in a truck, would drive out for an hour or two, then the person would be home. They drive back to the office and reschedule drive back out, and they'd climb on the roof. They take shade readings on the roof. I've literally met people who fell off the roof doing that. So it's not a safe thing either. Anyway, then they'd drive back to the office, they plug into the computer, and then they get some shade values that they sort of ballpark into their production estimates. So it was not an accurate process and a very expensive one. Right? Because if you do that early in the funnel, you do that work five times, six times, eight times, you get paid once. 

Sandhya Hegde: 

Right. 

Chris Hopper: 

And so what we did is we said, “Hey, you don't have to drive out to the site. We believe that we can give you the same level of accuracy from your office. We can represent the system, create a 3D model based on different data sources, imagery, LiDAR data and weather data and so forth, calculate the irradiance in a much more granular detail. You can actually quote that from your office, saving the site visit, which is almost $1,000 per install. So it's a significant savings for installers.” So that was a big one where we literally had customers come up to us and say, “Hey, because of you guys, we don't have to roll trucks anymore. We did the math, we tested it and we changed the way we do our business.” And so that was a big unlock for them first and foremost and then, therefore, for us.

Sandhya Hegde: 

Yeah, that would be huge in terms of how much risk it takes away from their ability to reach out to more prospects and make more proposals. That sounds incredibly valuable.

Aurora Solar’s early go-to market strategy 

Sandhya Hegde: 

How did you go about once you had figured out what was the core product this customer wanted? What was your early go to market strategy? And one of the things we investors obsess a lot about, maybe too much in the early days is, okay, if your customers have a certain ACV, right, like they will pay you, I don't know, $1,000 a month or something like that, then you have to have more inbound and a more low touch sales model. You can't take six weeks to sell these customers because the LTV CAC won't add up in the end. What was kind of your early path to say scoring like your first hundred small customers? What worked well? How quickly did you get there? 

Chris Hopper: 

I don't know if we took a textbook approach to that. We just spoke with people and people liked what we did and they referred us to other people and we do a lot of trade shows, actually, local trade shows that we did — just man a booth and talk to folks for three days and collect the business cards and hit them up after. That was a lot of our initial, even before that we did sort of road shows. So we did, I remember one time we did a three week roadshow. We flew to Texas, Las Vegas,  — for a trade show — then Southern California, then to New England area and we just hit up different installers and demoed and sold them that way. So it was almost a traveling salesman kind of thing, me and my co-founder doing that and one of our early advisors. So that's how we sold in the early days and so then it became, we did a lot of online demos, acquired a little bit of web traffic and converted a bit of keywords and then converted. It was not particularly sophisticated. It was just a sign up here, book a demo. It was all through a demo because we cherished the customer conversation. So it was not a self-onboarding — it was not a very efficient process from a cost perspective because we had a human there talking, doing 5-10 demos a day sort of thing, and we're charging $160 or $260 a month, so maybe $2,000 a year. And many small companies, so many customers only bought one license. So it was not an optimized model by any stretch and we then obviously got more refined as we grew and matured. But it didn't matter as much because the product was resonating and we kept focusing on that. So, yeah, in the early days, that's what matters more than optimizing. I'd say the go-to-market motion, that's something you can do after. If you first optimize a go-to-market motion but don't have a product, it sort of doesn't work that way around. 

Sandhya Hegde: 

Right, makes sense.

How Aurora Solar's product strategy evolved through customer feedback

Sandhya Hegde: 

And what were some of the early customer feedback that helped you get more conviction around your product strategy? Any surprises? Anything that made you kind of change what you were building, how you were positioning it? Because I noticed at some point you also went from just kind of design software to know this will help you design, build, deploy, all of it. Did that come from early customer feedback? 

Chris Hopper: 

Yeah, it depends on which phase of the business. The early days, the conversations were, usually, went something like, we'd go, we'd demo. And they'd be like, oh guys, we love what you're doing. It's awesome. But I really can't use it day to day for XYZ reasons. Shoot. But fair enough because the things made sense. And so sometimes I was like, I need to use this equipment or I need this kind of functionality. For example, initially we didn't have a layout engine, so placing panels sort of thing, well, that makes sense. We guess we have to build that. So then we went back and we would go and we'd build that, and then we'd come back and then we're the same people a couple of months after and they'd be like, oh, that's fantastic. Love that you built that. But also we need a B and C. Dang it. And so that was sort of the loop. We go back and build that and at some point people start buying. And it's actually amazing how open people are when someone comes to them and is earnest in caring about what they do and solving their problems. And so that's how we built the first product. But I would say it was eco measure vision and customer feedback. So we also came with an opinion. It wasn't just like, we have no opinion, give us feedback. It was like, here's a vision. How we think Solar should be designed. Not just today, but like in 5-10 years. We think these are all the benefits and then we put it to the test and then we got feedback around it and that's how we honed it. Later it got more refined, so then some of the more organizational factors came in. So, for example, I remember being at the trade show, this was one of my AHA moments where I demoed the whole software and I could tell the guy was liking it at the end. He's like, Chris, I love this. Fantastic. Love what you guys have built, but can you please take away this feature? That feature, that feature. I was like, what do you mean? I just spent the last couple of years, I literally wrote the feature, I coded myself. I'm like, why should I take it away? He's like, listen, I have 20 sales reps or something like that. And I don't want them to do these same things in a software. I don't want them to. For example, the ability to you can model trees in a software which cast shade so you can represent the impact of shade on your system. He's like, I don't want them to be able to change tree heights. They virtually cut back the tree because if they cut back the tree, it shows more energy production, which makes it more likely that they get commission on their sale. But then I have to clean up on the back end of it because we're going to have problems with the customer. Like, wow, okay, that makes sense, right? It was sort of the insight that is not just about the product itself, but how does it fit — map to the organization and the incentives in the organization, the needs of the organization. That was maybe two years in or so. It was sort of a big AHA moment because it showed to me a whole new dimension of value that was actually very strong and that we then spent a lot of time thinking about how do we make this and especially for larger organizations, that's what matters. How does it look from the perspective of that buyer and how does this product fit into their workflows and the needs of their org.

Sandhya Hegde:
How do you almost productize trust and governance as a part of this thing so that it's really easy for the sales team to work, but it's also really easy for the deployment team to trust that the customer will have a good experience. It's really fascinating and I guess the fact that you were talking to not just the sales reps who would use the software, but also the designers, the owner of the business, like that 360 perspective. I think this is kind of the unique thing in if you're building what we describe as vertical software, right? When you're building software specifically for one industry, you need to understand every stakeholder's point of view to get the collaboration and workflow right, as opposed to just maybe if you had focused on the sales rep alone, you would have built something that maybe the owners didn't fully trust. So really helpful insight, maybe switching gears a little bit to fundraising.

Sandhya Hegde: 

I know even though you started the company in 2013 and you've had so much success in the past couple of years, in the early days it was more of a windy road. And given the environment we are in right now, I would expect that that's going to be the experience for most founders right, that are starting companies this year or started last year. So what was it like kind of between 2013 and when you raised your Series A Round in 2019, that six year window, what was it that helped you get the company to a fundable place. What were your Series A investors looking for in terms of evidence that you had found product market fit? 

Chris Hopper: 

Yeah, maybe quick background on that because we're somewhat of an unusual company, right. As you said, in 2019, we raised our A round. We're now on Series D. So we've went down the venture path quite successfully the last couple of years. But the early years were very different. So we started — our pilot project was in 2012; we incorporated company,  software company, in 2013; we raised a small seed round, like $925K in 2014, but we basically bootstrapped from 2014 (2013 - 2014) through 2019. 

And so that was, I would say in equal parts, because we could in the sense that, look, the product resonated and we would just kept selling. So we went to maybe a million in ARR within the first year or so, and then we just kept growing and sell a couple of deals, hire an engineer, sell a couple of deals, hire an engineer, build more product…and that was sort of the loop and it was a grind, right? It took five years to get to scale. At that point, we're at 50 people or so, discharge 50 people, and basically organically, we managed all business in the cash flow document. Every engineer was line item. We're like how much cash we get in, how much comes out. But also it was not easy to raise money for what we're doing. And that's maybe where it connects to where we are today, or the environment we're today. Although in our case, it was a bit more idiosyncratic. It was possible to raise money at the time in ‘13, very possible, just not for solar. 

Because we came right after a boom and bust in clean tech, sort of ‘08 - ‘11. That was still very much in recent memory. People like, “Eh this clean tech thing,” folks lost a lot of money and it was an uphill conversation, honestly, with most investors. It was like, okay, what if solar has to work? How big even is the industry? TAM questions. What even does an installer do? Why do they need software? How critical is yours? How's it different? There's so many questions you need to go into that it was just difficult and impossible, really, to raise money. We found some great angels who believed in us and some seed funds pair out of Palo Alto — they've been fantastic for us — who believed in us early in the early days, but on the whole, the market was not there. And it was frustrating because we're like, well, it's not about that. It's about where clean tech is going. The future is going to be powered by solar energy. There's massive transformation happening in energy, and solar is a big theme in that. And so the way to resolve that tension for us was to, you know, say okay, we'll just do our thing. We believed in this and we built product and it resonated with the market. And that's what kept us going. Like, yeah, it wasn't a rocket ship in terms of its growth, but we're like, wow, we have a business and the business keeps growing and the customers love it and they say it changed their business and we kept it lean and kept growing. And so we just had that sort of fundamental belief in our business. There was never a question whether this would be a business. In my mind, it was a bit of question on timing. How long will it take for the world to wake up again to renewables, and is this going to happen in two years or ten? That's somewhat out of your control, but no doubt that there would be a business, and that in the long run, it has the potential to be a very big business as well, because we need to make that shift to renewables and there needs to be a software layer in it.

‍

The tipping point for Aurora Solar

Sandhya Hegde: 

What changed in 2019? Was it just that now you as a business having bootstrapped all these years, had enough scale and momentum, was there also change in the regulatory environment and the climate outside? Was there a tipping point for Aurora Solar in the last three years? 

Chris Hopper: 

Yeah, there's a quote by Hemingway when he's asked, I think, how he went broke. He said, first slowly and then suddenly, and kind of the arc of the company feels the same way. Even the Series A wasn't all that straightforward because the world hadn't fully caught up yet. Actually, I also realized I didn't answer your previous question. What did investors look for in a Series A and product market fit and so forth? We were actually a bit unusual in that sense because our Series A was maybe more like a B in terms of its scale. 50 people, cash flow positive. We had product market fit because customers were buying it. We were growing. What we didn't have was sort of venture type growth. We were growing maybe 30 ish 40% year over year. But it turns out it also matters how you capitalize a business. And so there's a lot of power in that that we managed to unlock with the resources we raised in the Series A. But like I said, it wasn't an easy race either, because the world hadn't fully woken up. And while we had a business and people were really intrigued, and particularly it was very unusual to see a Silicon Valley company that was bootstrapped like we had. So that got a lot of attention, but people didn't quite often, many people didn't get over the growth rate. That wasn't what they would normally expect. But we found people who did believe in us. Right. And it came, in our case, mostly from the, I would say, belief in us as founders and what we're doing, but also belief in the markets. So we found investors who understood what we were doing much more fundamentally than the folks who said no. For the folks that said no, it's still very much that uphill conversation for the folks that said, ‘Yes,’ our series A lead energize. It was sort of a love at first sight kind of, kind of thing. I remember we're on a call and we're like going to a deck, let's tell you about solar. And they're like, fast forward, we get it. 

Sandhya Hegde: (Laughing) Shall we start at slide 19?

Chris Hopper: 

(Chuckling) Yeah, exactly. Let's get to the good stuff. And we're like, wow, we don't have to talk about why this is going to be big. No, we get it. Let's talk about the business. And so that's the other thing is you don't have to get 100 yeses. They don't actually do anything for you. You just have to get one from the right person. Right. That's the tough thing about fundraising because there's a lot of no's. I don't know how many no's we've gotten over the years, but we've found the right partners along the way and I'm very grateful for that. 

Sandhya Hegde: 

Awesome. Yeah, no, this is definitely advice I give to a lot of founders doing investor outreach is: look for people who are already talking about the space you are working in, as opposed to trying to do kind of a cold outreach to everyone running a VC fund. There's so many funds out there, so many different specializations. Like find people who already believe in your market hypothesis and you only need a couple of those you don't need, to your point — 100 yeses. In fact, it's much more time efficient to just go to the people who are already writing about your space saying they want to invest in it, as opposed to trying to convince someone who's never thought about your space, trying to change their mind. It's actually a bad use of your time and their time. So yeah, 100% agree with that having been on both sides of that table.

‍

Understanding policy influence on climate tech

Sandhya Hegde: 

I'm curious, especially given you're in climate tech, how much time or effort do you spend either in the early days or now in terms of understanding regulatory tailwinds? Is there something that policymakers are working on that will either help or hurt you? Did you get involved or stay on top of it in any special way? 

Chris Hopper: 

Honestly, not really. I mean, obviously we followed along because these things matter to us. A, from a market perspective, and B, very specific sort of product requirements. There's a certain tax credit or a certain utility rates changes that way, then that's something that our clients care about and therefore we need to represent in the software. So in that sense, yes. But look, in the early days we're just like five guys at a desk with five laptops sort of thing. What are we going to do? Shift policy? So we didn't. Now we're doing much more of it because we're now a much larger organization we're speaking for more of the industry because a lot of our installers, sole professionals, run on us. So we're speaking up more, supporting, for example, in analysis, supporting industry organizations to understand what could be certain effects of policy changes. So in that sense, we're doing more, but we've never made the business contingent on any sort of policy. We always thought ultimately, long run; the world will catch up. And we always thought there's sort of hidden upside in what we're doing because this just made sense and it made sense to support it from the policy perspective, but frankly, it was bumpy along the road. In the industry, they call it the solar coaster. If you've been in it long enough, there's ups and downs. Now we have a lot of tailwinds, but we've also had headwinds. But on a long enough timescale we knew this would point up and to the right and so that's what we bet on. We never made it contingent on policy. Even if we could influence something, it's so unpredictable, didn't seem like a sound way to run a business. So we just said, hey, let's do our own thing and we'll take any tailwinds that come along.

Sandhya Hegde: 

Makes sense.

Moving upmarket: Aurora Solar’s journey from SMB to enterprise clients

Sandhya Hegde: 

And did you kind of start thinking more about enterprise customers? And is that a big part of Aurora's future? Is it about going up market, bigger customers, new geographies? What does that look like? 

Chris Hopper: 

It was around the Series A. Not necessarily that it coincided, it was just more continental. It wasn't that Series A led to it per se, but around the same time, a year before we sold our first enterprise customer, we were in conversation about other ones. I've gotten a lot of pull too from the enterprise in terms of feature requests like, hey, can you oh, we need, you know, we need SSO. Can you do SSO? Sure. We need API. Here's the request for the API, we need permissioning. That was an early version, was on permissioning, it was not a problem until we talked to enterprise customers. And it's like one of the biggest features in terms of value it drove, contract value, was one of the easiest to ever build. I think it took one sprint. The difference between per user, between a regular team member, we call it, and a limited team member. And the only difference is a limited team member at the time, only limited team member can only see their own projects. They can't see the rest of the organization’s, which if you have 50 sales reps in one account, you definitely don't want them to touch each other's projects. It makes a lot of sense, but in the early days didn't matter because it's all SMB and it's like, it's like 2, 5, 10 people in the organization. There's a lot of trust and not a problem. But again, if you think about it from a larger org’s perspective and so we layered in more and more of those and went more upmarket. And so that's definitely a big part of our business now and there's a lot of value to be created there in addition to the core design functionality that we provide. 

Sandhya Hegde: 

Makes sense. Yeah. I remember we had this while we were at Amplitude, going through the same journey of going up market. We had this kind of dedicated pod around SSO and permissioning that was, to your point, probably the most valuable work to do from a revenue perspective, but also like the least interesting work to do from an engineering perspective. And it's funny how in B2B software that's almost always like overlap in those two attributes.

Advice for seed stage founders

Sandhya Hegde: 

So maybe wrapping up, what would be your advice for seed stage founders starting out in 2022 in this environment where, pretty much hard for almost any first time founder to raise money all over again? What would be your advice having experienced a fairly unique version of the startup journey where you were bootstrapped a lot, felt slow at first and then took off once you capitalized the business?

Chris Hopper: 

Yeah, so I try to drive lessons from our journey. I think one of the key ones is, work on something you care about. This whole journey is so unpredictable. It's a lot of work and effort and can be long, right? Certainly if it's successful and there'll be ups and downs, plenty of them along the way, and the environment is not always going to be in your favor. Last two years, it was a very different, sort of easy in many dimensions, but in this environment, I think it's much easier if you work on something you care about. So that's what carried us is we're like, this is something worth doing, this is something that should exist and then, yeah. Obviously we want to build a big business in the process and we want to raise money one day, but it wasn't about raising money; it wasn't about a valuation headline; it wasn't about being in TechCrunch. It was like, no, this is going to push the world in the right direction; that's what fundamentally kept us going. Also, you got to enjoy the process, you know, with all those ups and downs — that's for some people, it's not for others — and so knowing that upfront is also important. For me, it's always been just fun building a company, right? And that's what carries you through all those bumps on the road, along the road. The final thing is, if I think back to us, I remember sometimes being a bit bummed. It was like, why can't we raise money? And some of our classmates went out and raised large rounds like, Jesus, how much and how and we're asking for a couple of $100k and we couldn't get that. And so it might feel like that's not a good time to start a company, but in retrospect, it was a perfect time for us to start this company because by the time the world had woken up again, it was too late. We'd spent five, six years building this company. People are now waking up, “Oh, there's something happening in climate.” I'm like, “Well, great, welcome and there's more to do!” But to start a solar design software company, you had to really start it years before and so it's funny how that works sometimes. It might feel like it's not the right time, but you'd be surprised. In 5-10 years, we'll look back and we'll see many great companies built during that time. I think great companies can be built in any environment, and in particular in this one, it sort of improves signal to noise, but it's something you've got to believe in, in the end, and have fun along the way. 

Sandhya Hegde: 

Yeah, I think being in the trenches without any hype allows you to really focus on your customer. How many installer conversations do you think you had in those first five years, like 1000? 

Chris Hopper: 

I don't even know. I mean, at trade shows alone, it'd be probably 100 conversations at once and then Sam too so two founders. That's all that matters, right? Customers — making them happy and delivering value to them. And then good things will come from there. 

Sandhya Hegde: 

Well, what an inspiring story and you guys are just getting started. I'm definitely rooting for you. Thank you so much for being on this show. It was lovely learning more about Aurora Solar. 

‍