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Homely was a startup I co-founded with Seb Junemann in 2012 — and which we sadly wound up about eighteen months later. The aim was to encourage more people to invest in their home's energy efficiency, through installing insulation, new windows, more efficient heating systems and so on.
Seb and I started Homely when we put together a pitch for Bethnal Green Ventures (BGV), an incubator programme for startups that use technology to solve social problems, who were advertising for applicants in 2012 and offering pre-seed investment for equity. We were delighted (and surprised) to be selected.
It's a tough sell, encouraging homeowners to make their homes more energy efficient. Energy bills might be expensive, but when most people calculate the payback on installing energy-efficient measures — and factor in the hassle and disruption — they decide it's not worth it. The major barriers are awareness, motivation & affordability.
At the time, the policy context was changing. Grants for homeowners were being dissolved, and the Green Deal was shortly to be launched. Our assessment of the Green Deal was that it would likely be a partial answer to the problem, perhaps solving the problem of affordability, but doing little to raise awareness or motivate people.
Through Homely, we intended to conceive and prototype ways of solving the accompanying problems of motivation and awareness.
We were probably one of the earliest-stage startups on BGV's programme in 2012 (honestly, we were probably at too early a stage to get the most out of it), and spent a lot of the time identifying potential business models, testing business hypotheses through meeting with potential customers and developing minimum viable products.
We settled on Homely being an intermediary service between homeowners and small to medium-sized energy-efficiency installation companies. We thought that we could do a better job of advertising the benefits of energy efficiency to homeowners in a compelling way than those companies were equipped to do.
Homely's revenue would come by putting homeowners in contact with an appropriate company in their local area, providing a high quality, validated lead generation service to such companies, which struggled to find customers on their own.
While we were developing the business and recruiting commercial customers, we were also conceiving of and testing ways of motivating more people to make theit home more efficient, from thermal-imaging parties run with local charities to letterbox-sized DIY kits we could post out, to simple advice delivered by the web.
Of these ideas, our website was most developed. We drew on the idea from behavioural science that the messenger's identity affects whether advice will be acted upon. So for each visitor to our website, we provided case studies of efficient homes as similar as posible to their own, estimating their home type from their postcode and Zoopla's API.
In conjunction with Mastodon C, an alumnus of the same BGV cohort as Homely, we also developed the Cosy Index, a ranking of the UK's local authorities according to the efficiency of their housing stock. The Cosy Index was kindly funded by Innovate UK, under their Open Data Innovation voucher scheme.
There were several reasons behind Homely's end, but simply put, we ran out of cash! Unlike other business models in which you deliver a project and get paid more or less immediately, a lead generation company requires a large volume of smaller payments, which for us required higher web-traffic and better conversion rates than we had.
After various calculations and chatting with some expert advisors, we decided that the domestic energy efficiency market was unlikely to yield the kind of returns that investors would look for in an investment proposition, and decided to wind Homely down.
The Green Deal was not a successful policy.
It was complicated to explain, was bad value to many potential homeowners (who could have received more favourable interest rates with a personal loan) and was accompanied by the worst-funded and least imaginative ad campaign I've seen. It was marred from the beginning by news stories of low take-up.
The Green Deal has now been canned, but without developing a replacement first, sending more and more energy efficiency companies into bankruptcy, while UK homes (or those in England at least) continue to require twice the amount of energy to heat them as are needed by those in Sweden.