I was lucky enough to attend classes by Susan Eggers and Hank Levy in UW's professional master's program back in 2002. Not only amazing researchers but also great teachers.
I just signed up for the $29/mo plan. I appreciate that I immediately received the June and July newsletters. In the July one, there is a good idea that is very relevant to my wife's business (she owns a chain of hair salons). Thanks for making this, it's really cool!
In my view Florida would be better served by deregulating their electricity markets (as 16 other states/territories have done) and allow 3rd party suppliers to compete for business. Then consumers who want solar (or other forms of green power) can buy it directly without having to put panels on their roof that will obsolete in a few years.
Hi HN--remember us? We were one of the finalists in the ApplyHN runoff back in April, a couple weeks after we first came up with the idea for Utiliz. Now we're live (launched last week) and have been busy signing up our first wave of customers. The consumer-facing site you see is backed by our internal admin site, a workflow/mechanical turk/queue management system that help us manage our suppliers, plans, customers and enrollments. We're in a boring industry but using exciting tech: the sites are written in Go and backed by RethinkDB. We use the amazing Caddy server for automatic TLS & reverse proxy, Chargebee & Stripe for subscription management, LiveAgent for chat/help desk and its integration with Twilio for our call center. Our architecture is the opposite of microservices, an approach I like to call BAB ("big ass binary") - everything including code for both sites, all css, js, images etc are all bundled into our Go binary, making deployments and rollbacks a breeze. Everything runs on Vultr. We're currently saving our customers between 15-30% on their electricity generation depending on their location and usage. Are you an HNer in Connecticut or New York who pays more than $100/mo for electricity? We can save you money. Use code HACKERNEWS to save 15% on your first year subscription through 9/30.
Lately I've just been throwing everything behind Caddy (caddyserver.com) in reverse proxy mode. This is all you need in your Caddyfile to get automatic TLS. It's genius.
Wow, this might actually be good enough / full-featured enough to let me stop copying around my huge HAproxy configuration boilerplate and Ansible roles for every project I spin up. Very cool!
Hi chatmasta, Kevin from Utiliz here. How did your business do? Splitting savings is always a hard pricing model to sell. Our unique angle is that we don't just switch customers to the best plan once, we remain their agent, track the market daily and switch them whenever a new opportunity comes up. We do that in return for a low, transparent, annual fee from our customers instead of taking a hidden spread on the rate. In deregulated states one can almost always find short term 3-6 month rates lower than the incumbent's rate, often as much as 20-30% cheaper, so our service can pay for itself in as little as one month. Brokers who can bring large aggregated loads can negotiate better than retail rates, even with their supplier commission. Because we will be a zero-commission broker for the suppliers (we're paid by our own customers), as we scale we'll be able to negotiate even lower rates for our customers. Not sure how long ago you were looking at this space but many suppliers now have some mechanism to help with automation of bulk switching and for those that don't we are building the tech.
It was a small shop run by two guys, mostly drawing from their first and second degree connections. But they had hundreds of customers and were making in the mid five figures per month IIRC. Take that with a huge grain of salt.
People were more than happy to pay a percentage of their savings, but that might have been due to personal relationships with the founders and the fact that these people were pretty rich already.
And yes, the ongoing relationship you mention helps. That gives an answer to "why wouldn't I just do this myself and keep 100% of the savings?"
Chatmasta, you are 100% correct. There may be times where the best rate we can find is publicly available but the service aspect will retain customers in this case, especially as we are charging a reasonable flat fee. However as we are a broker we have access to private rates and as our book grows so will our ability to negotiate discounts thus making us more sticky. A core part of the beta is a 'how much did I save' feature which will make cancelling a tough choice. Thanks for your comments!
Great question. The answer is ‘it depends’. For example right now in CT the incumbent rate is 9.55 cents per kilowatt hour with Eversource. But you can get 5.99 c/kWh with Public Power for 8 months if you pay $39 enrollment, or 5.98 c/kWh with Sunwave for 6 months with no enrollment fee but a $50 cancellation fee. These are just a couple examples, there are dozens of offerings. As you noticed, the market is confusing, almost by design! But it definitely pays to shop around. Given average household electricity use of around 750 kWh/month we project we will save customers around $100-$300 per year.
We are planning to offer our service for between $30-$50/year, and will offer a money back guarantee if we don't save the customer at least as much as our fee over the incumbent supplier. The idea is to make it no-risk for people to try us. But the value proposition isn’t just saving money, it’s saving time. We handle everything so the customer doesn’t have to spend the time and mental effort to track the market and manually switch suppliers.
The reason we can do this is we are automating the whole switching process; hence it will not cost us much to switch a customer, we'll be able to switch many customers at the same time, and we'll be able to switch customers as frequently as needed to take advantage of short term rates. As we gain a large customer base, we'll also have leverage to negotiate better rates with suppliers, saving customers even more.
Ironically the costs of door to door and telemarketing is part of what creates the opportunity here. NYC may be the exception but outside of the City it's just too cost prohibitive for traditional brokers to do. They focus on the bigger wins (manufacturing and commercial). We will leverage internet / social (facebook ads, promoted tweets, adwords etc.) to reach the individual households. Also we will offer a referral program which will encourage customers to get their friends to sign up. Finally physical events (home shows, street fairs etc.) will help educate potential customers and those who do not use the internet as much.
By the way New York is next on our list after Connecticut (my co-founder Tom is from NY), so if you’re interested please register at utiliz.co!
About the co-founders: Kevin (me) and Tom met in 2010 while working at Bridgewater (a large hedge fund) as a senior developer and technology manager respectively. As well as becoming close friends we often discussed startup ideas and committed to finding the right opportunity. We believe utiliz is it. It solves a personal pain point for us and we think there are many people like us. Kevin is writing the software and Tom is handling the business side, though there is a lot of crossover. Kevin previously founded and sold two successful brick and mortar companies.
